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There is this picture, this iconographic picture, which tells a lot about what people were making for an image of Eminem at the time this picture was taken.
Eminem, that is undoubtedly the
greatest rapper alive
and the picture of Eminem that shows him standing on a stage in blue dungarees, chainsaw in hand, ice hockey mask on his face, a self-portrayal as a serial killer hybrid, a mixture of Jason Voorhees ( "Friday the 13th"), Chucky the killer doll and Leatherface ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), all pop-cultural personifications of recurring and indelible evil.
The fact that we have to speak again about this picture from 2001 now, in 2021, is due, on the one hand, to a book that was recently published and, on the other hand, to the question that this book raises, a question that affects our understanding of the Art and its social boundaries has to do, a question that you asked yourself in 2001, 20 years ago, but what the heck, there are questions that you can't ask yourself often enough, so
here we go again.
Serial killer hybrid: Eminem at a concert in Manchester 2001
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
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In fact, you could say that this Eminem thing and this book that was just being written about Eminem wouldn't be a big deal.
It appears in the so-called KiWi music library, a music book series in which more or less talented authors (Anja Rützel, Thees Uhlmann) write books about more or less interesting musicians (Take That, Die Toten Hosen), musicians of whom they will at some point and in the latest work in this series, Antonia Baum, who is one of the most talented authors in the country, is now writing about Eminem, the
greatest rapper alive,
and actually, yes, that should be the basic requirement for really great art .
It kind of is.
But only in places.
Because at its core, this book doesn't deal with Eminem that much, at its core the book describes the inner struggle that the author fights with herself, it deals with her quarrel with a music that has accompanied her for a large part of her life and it also deals with the openly expressed question of where the limits of art actually lie.
It is not the first time that Baum's present self grapples with its supposed musical sins of youth.
Inhuman, homophobic, glorifying violence, misogynous?
In Die Zeit, too, she once wrote that it was now time for her to distance herself from her childhood sweetheart German rap, one would have looked too naively at all the misogynistic texts, too much had been allowed to go through for far too long, and that is exactly what she is now accusing Eminem of, that his texts are inhuman, homophobic, glorifying violence, misogynous, and no longer justifiable for an enlightened feminist in this form.
Regardless of how Baum resolves this supposed discrepancy for himself in the course of the book, it is precisely the initial question that is raised here that is interesting.
Can you have a problem with Eminem because he raps misogynistic, violence-glorifying things?
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Because, think back to the picture, 2001, Eminem, how he portrays himself as a serial killer hybrid, is not a serial killer hybrid, he is a fictional character, created by Marshall Mathers, who uses it to depict topics such as violence, Dramatically exaggerate sex and drug use.
This Eminem is the instinct-driven, cross-border side of the artist, the personification of Freud's id, he does and says things that Mathers would not do or say, raps about how he murdered his wife or raped his mother or sometimes in one School runs amok.
But he doesn't do that as Marshall Mathers, he does that as Eminem, mind you, and you just have to imagine that someone says he has a real problem with Joaquin Phoenix because Joaquin Phoenix plays the Joker in the movie "Joker" and as the Joker does things that Joaquin Phoenix most likely wouldn't do.
Nor would it occur to anyone, in order to become a bit more classic, to accuse Lars Eidinger of being an unscrupulous asshole because he was shown at the Berlin Schaubühne in Shakespeare's Richard III.
the unscrupulous asshole Richard III.
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The authenticity debate in rap
There are various reasons why such a debate is repeated, especially in hip-hop, and the main reason is of course the question of authenticity, which has always arisen more in rap than in other art and cultural forms (one takes once off the medium of photography).
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The expectation of the genre is that the lyrical portrayals are authentic, that the gap between the lyrical self and the private person is very small or, in the best case, nonexistent, of course also because the protagonists of the genre themselves value authenticity as the highest value sell yourself.
Which of course is nonsense.
Since the 2010s at the latest, Imagerap has been an accepted form of existence both in terms of breadth and niche.
The success of US superstar Rick Ross, who portrayed himself as a globally networked drug dealer and gang boss for years, was not diminished when it emerged that he had worked as a prison guard before his rap career.
The masses continued to buy his CDs and stream his songs, in which, despite the reality, he maintained the illusion that within all of Miami, oh well, within the entire United States, he had built a widespread criminal empire whose
godfather
he was.
The listeners who have been socialized with hip-hop have long since understood that this is all an auditory action film, that what is raped does not really happen, that it is about exaggeration, exaggeration about entertainment.
But not understanding that is much more of a problem for people who only look at hip-hop very superficially, which Antonia Baum doesn't do at all.
She knows what she is talking about, she knows the codes of the genre, understands how it works.
No, Baum rather belongs to a new generation of authors and / or music journalists who do something completely different, who quite consciously demand that the normative-moral standards that are set for society must also be reflected in art at the same time .
The inviolable consensus of our culture
And here is a huge problem.
It might sound like a paradox, but Marshall Mathers is not Eminem and Marshall Mathers has limited justification for what Eminem says.
Eminem is a fictional character and works in a different framework, a framework for which different criteria apply than for Marshall Mathers, the private person.
This basic principle is the inviolable consensus of our culture.
An Eminem can put himself in the role of a violent criminal in a song, but if Mathers were to ponder in his circle of friends about running amok soon, a therapeutic conversation would certainly be appropriate.
This statement is not just about upholding artistic freedom, of course, that too, but it is about much more, it is about the core of art that is being attacked here.
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Baum is of course intelligent enough to already know these objections, so she anticipates them, describes them as a conflict “young vs old, woke twitter people versus old white men” who want to hold onto their privilege of being an artist as an artist To be able to “worship” while simply being able to ignore the political implications of possibly dubious texts.
Culture has to be an imposition
But the question of whether one should separate the artist from his work in art criticism is not a fashion question, it is not a question of one's own political classification, it is an essential question that defines the core of our understanding of art and society, and not should simply be dismissed, because the answers, writes Baum himself, are complex.
One more reason to have this debate.
The function of the artist should not be to adapt to the social mainstream, but to question it, to expose it again and again in its double standards and its hypocrisy.
Culture must not be a confirmation, it must be a challenge, an imposition.
It has to trigger debates and controversies, and that is what it does by not sticking to the rules, but by saying the unspeakable, by breaking rules, by showing misogyny, illustrating, without being misogynous at the same time.
It is not about provocation for the sake of provocation, it is about provocation for the sake of discourse.
And of course Eminem triggers a discourse when he raps from the perspective of a gunman, at a time when the US was having a serious problem with increasing school rampages.
It depicts a perspective that can almost exclusively be depicted in art, but is necessary to make our reality a little more tangible.
Rock 'n' roll was also a tremendous provocation
The debate about the limits of art is not new.
A look back at recent pop culture is enough to see what traces it left behind, for example to the 1970s, when the somewhat harder (hard rock, metal) and the somewhat gentler forms of play (glam) of rock 'n' Roll became a provocation for society and the church because they questioned entrenched sexual role models (David Bowie), because they preached escapist hedonism (Kiss) or because they simply packed the lack of perspective of the working class into heavy, dragging hymns (Black Sabbath).
In the 1980s there was a new wave of splatter films, which even by today's standards represented a brutal transgression of all viewing habits, and yet the zombie films by George A. Romero are now recognized by every halfway intelligent critic for what they are, an exaggerated, yes, drastic discussion of our western consumer society soaked in liters of fake blood.
In the 1990s there was the killer game debate, which would be unthinkable these days when you consider how even the last "Doom" part was honored as a celebration of frenetic baller dullness in every major feature section.
In the noughties, Marilyn Manson and later rap music was discovered as an enemy.
And today?
Today, it is no longer so much about the individual media product itself, no longer about a film or music genre, today it is about the holistic view of art that is up for grabs.
The space of art is lost to art
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Art is no longer granted the space of art, the artist is no longer accepted as an avatar, he is drawn into the political and social present, he is expected more and more to meet the basic social consensus, the prevailing opinion of the mainstream processed in his art instead of contradicting it.
Today art is no longer defined according to the standards of art, but according to the current social sensitivities.
This is not only dangerous, but a core problem that resonates in many debates without being explicitly discussed.
The whole thing becomes particularly absurd when you consider that it was a progressive left that once campaigned for the values of artistic freedom (also in hip-hop!), Only to want to abolish them again today, when they are set as the standard .
The entire discourse that is being conducted today about the term
cancel culture
is given such a false list because the basis of this discourse must be the question of the status of art.
Of course art must be allowed to be criticized, it demands that, because if art is not polemic, then it is not art, then it is decoration.
Art has to trigger contradictions, art has to get people to get excited, it is only vital when it goes viral, everything else is pop or framed Ikea mass-produced goods and in this respect every irrelevant Twitter shitstorm is a good sign as long as it is in his anger he aims at art and not at the person who makes it.
Eminem just "an old white man with a gadget"?
But why is this framework, in which art can still be art, less and less recognized?
This is probably also due to the fact that our digitized society is increasingly breaking the boundaries between reality and fiction, between artists and private individuals themselves through constant social media activity.
It is currently becoming more and more confusing where private opinion ends and artistic freedom begins - if a Xavier Naidoo as a private person spreads that there are satanic power elites who drink children's blood, it is a problem that a Dan Brown from such narratives was quite popular at the time Thriller is no problem, because Dan Brown didn't really believe in the conspiracies that he fictionalized in his art.
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Nevertheless, Brown's work would be perceived very differently today than it was twenty years ago.
And yes, from this point of view, one could of course also say that Antonia Baum does not even speak of Antonia Baum in the Eminem book, that by definition she is just a lyrical self, that precisely this implicit question about the limits of art as part of their art.
In any case, it would be desirable that Baum would succeed in the feat of incidentally initiating a debate about our understanding of art, a debate that is finally conducted properly, differentiated, with a sense of proportion, instead of just on the 140-character Twitter - Intoxication or somehow not at all.
Baum herself does this in her book in a very differentiated way.
And Eminem?
He was just an old, white man, she writes symbolically in her Eminem book, the last gadget of which is still being able to rap quickly, which of course is only half the story.
Eminem has now reached the later phase of his work cycle, in which he consistently references himself and thus turns against the existing zeitgeist, which in addition to light melodies (and slow rap) also calls for progression and further development in general.
This refusal is, if you will, an artistic statement.
If you still want to accept Eminem as a fictional character.
Antonia Baum: "Eminem", KiWi Music Library (128 pages)