[When I wrote a Thanksgiving
post on Macklemore, I realized I had never written a full series
AmericanStudying rap, one of the most distinctly American, and most complex and
contested, musical genres. Well, that changes this week. I’d love to hear your
own Rap Readings in comments! And I have to highlight here the work of Dr. Regina Bradley, AKA Red Clay Scholar, the best current
scholar of all things rap and hip hop.]
On the private and public sides to persona, art, and the confessional.
I’ve written multiple posts arguing that Sylvia Plath was more than just the author of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” the controversial, soul-baring autobiographical
poems for which she is best known, and I stand by those arguments. But the
truth, as I wrote in this post on Plath’s and Mark Doty’s confessional poetry, is that even in those most overtly autobiographical
poems of Plath’s it’s very difficult to parse out the relationship between text
and identity, to say whether the speaker is Sylvia Plath or “Sylvia Plath,”
poet or persona, historical figure or literary creation. “Dying/Is an art, like
everything else,” Plath writes in “Lady Lazarus”—and if so, can we say
that her literary suicide, foreshadowed and even enacted in poems like that
one, is the equivalent of her actual one? Where does the line between persona
and person fall, and do texts like these accentuate or blur it?
Such questions have only become more prevalent in our multi- and social
media saturated moment, where we hear about artists and their identities and
biographies as much (if not indeed in many cases far more) as we hear from them
in their published works, and no contemporary artist exemplifies that fact and
the ambiguities it can produce more than Eminem. Any artist who releases three
albums, in four years, named after three different persona—The Slim Shady LP (1999), The Marshall
Mathers LP (2000), and The Eminem Show (2002)—is obviously well aware of, engaged with, and constantly pushing
the boundaries of identity and performance. And as a result, it is incredibly
difficult, both across the arc of Eminem’s career to date and in any one song
or performance, to identify from which persona we’re hearing—much less when and
whether we’re getting a more genuine or more constructed or fictional
perspective and voice.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My Closet” (2002). The
song’s verses seem to be among the most confessional of his career, addressing
his absentee father, his (allegedly) abusive mother, his evolving relationships
to them, his wife, and his young daughter, and many other aspects of his life
and identity. But since the song is included on The Eminem Show album, and since Eminem explicitly concludes the
second verse with the line “It’s my life, I’d like to welcome y’all to the
Eminem Show,” it’s possible to read the verses’ extreme emotions as exaggerated
or constructed, part of the particularly combative Eminem persona—a possibility
reinforced by the song’s chorus, in which the speaker (Eminem? Marshall? Both?
Neither?) apologizes to the same mother whom he has so viciously attacked in
the second and third verses. In any case, Eminem, like Plath before him, proves
in this complex song, as in many of his best ones, that
confession is an art like everything else—and one he does exceptionally well.
Next rap reading
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other rap artists, songs, or analyses you’d share?
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