Thursday, October 28, 2004

Impressive

Partisan Politics

Eminem’s new video/single, Mosh is really, really good. In an election season marked by singularly idiotic statements by artists (I’m talking to you, Bruce Springsteen. “We’ve been misled?” What the hell is misling?), Eminem has succeeded in making protest music that neither sucks nor panders.

Instead of recycling all the usual Bush Lied/Halliburton crap bit by bit, Eminem distances himself from pat criticisms of the President by putting those words in the mouths of characters and ties up all the criticisms of the President into one mass, putting the focus more on dissatisfaction in general rather than any one charge. A 9/11 reference opens the video, and takes us through vignettes of regular folks dealing with hard facts of life-- overly vigorous police, not making ends meet, and coming home from Iraq to your wife and kids to find you’re being shipped right back. For himself, Eminem reserves a more unfocused disgust with the way things are going (yes, getting with some pretty weak “F**k Bush” stuff) and by the end of the video he is leading a grim and angry mob into the street to… go vote.

I can’t believe I am writing this. It’s a sign of how bad things have gotten.  But Eminem-- Slim Shady-- has put together the single best populist critique of the post-9/11 Bush Administration, not that that’s saying much. No doubt at least two of my cobloggers will disagree with me about the quality of the critiques of the administration (and hey, Eminem is not exactly the most nuanced guy on the planet… Bush is a “weapon of mass destruction” my ass), but damn. In one shot Eminem succeeds in reducing hyperbole to something that almost resembles argument (or at least a call to arms), and makes voting into a revolutionary, fist-in-the-air act. It’s not that idiotic, pandering “Vote or Die” campaign P-Diddy’s on. It’s not that milkylicking limo-liberal “Vote for Change” thing. It’s just “Vote,” and for all the cliche and lack of nuance, it just works. 


Posted by Johno on 10/28/04 at 02:49 PM
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