It's fair to say that modern America did lean towards the New Sincerity and remodernisation from as early as Billy Childish and the Stuckists, and so when Eminem claims to challenge conventional stances taken so thoroughly to their zenith - such as Marcus Smith's dissections of Joyce's Ulysses (Anthony Burgess himself claimed that the devotion was "beyond masturbatory") - we can only agree he is being Pythonesque.
Paula Smith argues that the tension in Relapse is sustained "by the consistent dread the failure of a career might provide", and we can see her candour, but at JC Higgins retorts, "Eminem is concerned not just with creating a mood piece, but exploring Lynchian levels of abstraction that are key to the American Gothic nuances". Eminem's devotion to the World Wildlife Fund brings joie de vivre to an otherwise dans le jardin area of Hip Hop, and from this we can only see his work - as this allows us to - as self-reflexive, postmodern schadenfreude that serves as parataxis between the more prosaic, Huxlian themes.
Dave Brown
(Pitchfork Media)
Bibliography
Smith, Marcus. Eminem and the Lost Chalice of (Post)Modernism. Vintage, 2009.
Burgess, Anthony. A Life Trapped in R. Kelly's Closet. Massachussets, 1998.
Smith, Paula. The New Sincerity in Eminem's 'Relapse'. Faber, 2009.
Higgins, JC. The Gothic in Relation to Tits... and Beyond! Faber, 2006.
3 comments:
unless it was a joke. if it was a joke, it was actually very very funny. and says a lot about how low my opinion of pitchfork actually is.
a derrida reference in a 50 cent review. i shitteth you not.
^_^ it was joek
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