who?
september fifteenth | one post meridiem
My tears go cold, I'm wondering why...
I finally downloaded Dido's "Thank You", the song Dre and Eminem sampled on "Stan", and I'm just as disappointed as I expected to be. Wisely, they only sampled the first verse, which cuts a beautiful minor key figure around images of waking, tears, rain, absence. But from there it rises to an "uplifting", major section, complete with "soulful" choir and sub-McLachlan warbling, that drags and drags until it mercifully extinguishes itself before the four minute mark. It's all so folksy and "nurturing" it treads that thin line between being either a template or a parody of "chick music", and is every bit as insulting to womens' intelligence as it is "threatening" to male masculinity.
So the use to which it's put in "Stan" improves it immeasurably, not only by repeating the only good section as the refrain, but by backgrounding it, which changes Dido's role, and thus the emotional impact her part has. A single female voice, anonymous, robbed of autonomy or artistic intent, commenting on the action becomes a diva, an affecting figure sans solicitation; a siren in a Pierrot's ruff. The demure stance implies oppression, domination, manipulation, not only in the context of the work, but in the memory of the diva's social role as well: Casablanca records turning Donna Summer into the Deep Throat of Disco, the ABBA men robbing the ABBA women blind, etc. It's lamentable -- of course it is -- but the adjective seeds the noun, and what good is a lament with a happy ending?
It also opens up interesting avenues of meaning in the song. I read an article recently (whose link is eluding me at the moment) which argued that Stan's treatment of his girlfriend is excessive -- why does she have to die too, it asked. The answer is easy: she has to die so Stan can act out the (imagined) scenerio in "97 Bonnie and Clyde". But her role -- oppressed, dominated, manipulated -- recalls Dido's, and if the two are superimposed, they bring out an otherwise unacknowledged poignancy. What if Dido isn't illustrating Stan's situation, but the girl's? What if the sadness is hers (there's every reason it could be; manic depressives are like birds of a feather, non?), what if "the picture on my wall / [which] reminds me that it's not so bad, it's not so bad" isn't Marshall Mathers's peroxide sneer, but someone else, someone unmentioned, someone on the outside, looking down on the pregnant girlfriend, who promises escape from Stan and Slim's fucked up world? It could be another man; this would fit the pattern, since infidelity is ostensibly the reason Kim has to die again and again; but if we want to play with symmetries, as art so often does, it could be a woman -- not necessarily a sexual partner, but an emissary from that noncompetitive, empowered, nurturing fantasy sistahood Dido is trying to celebrate: a haven without men, in the same way that what Stan is proposing in his letters is a haven without women.
This latter point is important because I think it's the crux of Em's much maligned homophobia. Not that he's "actually gay", or anything like that, but I think Marshall is smart enough to see that the only place his misogynistic worldview can end up is in relationships that exclude women altogether, where the only option left for fulfilling basic human needs like affection and romantic companionship is a male wife. I think this idea is genuinely horrifying to him, and he confronts it in the song by projecting the possibility outwards onto a zealous fan, an active agent who fortunately sublimates himself and his girlfriend in a river before he can reach Marshall's fame-guarded bubble and turn the fear into reality.
So we have two halves to the story, two agents attempting to flee each other into unisex refuges, one illustrated, the other implied. In the latter the personage the girl wants to flee to is absent, but is Marshall really all that present in the former? The sympathetic touches in his portrait of Stan are heartbreaking: the smiling embarassment over his sloppy handwriting, the grudging admissions of emotional pain and familial abandonment and abuse, the angry declaration of self-mutilation. But when the final verse comes, he comes across as oblivious: the references to cutting in his songs are "just clowning"; "how fucked up is you?" he asks, heartlessly. Any acknowledgement of shared pain is dismissed with a passing recommendation for some counseling and an injunction to just "relax a little". Marshall confounds our expectations (and would've confounded Stan's as well, had he lived). The solutions he offers to Stan's problems contradict everything that's expressed in the songs Stan identifies so strongly with: he should treat his girlfriend better, he should stay faithful to her, he should reach out to someone -- a counsellor, no less -- for help in the fucked world Slim invites to sit and spin on his middle finger. The action Stan takes in the end -- an action Slim had fantasized about doing himself -- makes Marshall physically ill. What's happened to Slim Shady? Is this -- suddenly, unexpectedly -- the real Marshall Mathers we're seeing?
There are two answers to this. Slim is Marshall's escape route, the hired porter he loaded up with all his anger, depression, jealousy, homicidal fantasies and sheer emotional and moral exhaustion, then rode to stardom. Slim is Marshall's daemon, and he's lucky to have him -- Stan is the perfect example of what happens when we try to hang our lives on someone else's creation. But he's still too close, too undefined, and Marshall has to deny the similarities in order to maintain the separation. This is the threshold at which he abandons his sympathy for Stan, and the tragedy is in the implication that it's only through those debased fantasies that we can connect with each other, that only our worst tendencies are capable of inspiring, or at least acknowledging, sympathy. It's a realization Dido can't or won't make, and it's a point Marshall doesn't want to dwell on; Slim returns on the next song, and doesn't disappear again for the rest of the album, eponymous title or not.
In fact, maybe it's this mislabeling that's the key to the whole thing. Marshall might as well be absent, might as well disappear, since any ability he still has to connect with others is wrapped up in Slim. Eminem's greatest contribution so far has been to explore the role clinical depression plays in the alienation, hostility, and posturing which has been so thoroughly documented, exaggerated, and crystallized in hip hop. Slim is at once an avenue for empathy and a legitimizing front: "I'm finally allowed in my girlfriend's house." But when your worst tendencies, the malformed parts of yourself you'd prefer to expel, become everything others want to see and acknowledge in you, then what is there left to feel? Marshall becomes the ice king, the blank autist in isolation. Slim is at least a presence, an object of loathing and desire, someone for whom it's worth caring about, someone for whom it's worth screaming at for breaking a bond:
You've ruined it now:
Think about it
I hope you can't sleep
And you dream about it
And when you dream
I hope you can't sleep
And you scream about it
I hope your conscience eats at you
And you can't breathe without it