Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting
- 2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art
- 3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics
- 4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work
- 5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire
- 6 Music and Text in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw
- 7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie
- 8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music
- 9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting
- Index
3 - Eminem: Difficult Dialogics
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting
- 2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art
- 3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics
- 4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work
- 5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire
- 6 Music and Text in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw
- 7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie
- 8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music
- 9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting
- Index
Summary
Difficult Others and Cultural Pluralism
Bitch I'ma kill you! Like a murder weapon, I'ma conceal you
in a closet with mildew, sheets, pillows and film you
My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge
That'll stab you in the head
whether you're a fag or lez
Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest
Pants or dress – hate fags? The answer's ‘yes’
Slim Shady does not give a fuck what you think.
The outpourings of white rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) have not met with universal acclaim. Women's groups, gay activists, and US politicians have been loudest within the refrain of unnumbered individuals deploring the degeneracy displayed by his malign lines. My epigraphs, quotations from The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), offer clear enough signs of what the trouble is: the usual intractable tropes of hardcore hip-hop: violence, misogyny, homophobia, and foul language. Such vernacular extremes might breach the decorum of an academic symposium, but, however sensationally, the incongruous juxtaposition performs precisely one of the principal points I plan to explore: the question of how we liberals are to deal with words and music (or for that matter any cultural form) that we identify as Other – especially when, as is likely in this case, that Otherness is radically problematical.
Of course these days the Other has almost become a platitude of the new historical, the new musicological attitude; and pluralism has found recognition as a facet of that condition called postmodernism. We're waking up to a world where any set of truth claims, or aesthetic claims, has to be understood as relative to any other. But relative in what sense – and on whose terms? How are we to construe the relationship between the plural coordinates of the postmodern map? One starting point might be an idea advanced by Gary Tomlinson in his article ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz’, which he calls a ‘parallactic conception’:
Parallax is a metaphor for … a way of knowing in which all vantage points yield a real knowledge, partial and different from that offered by any other vantage point, but in which no point yields insight more privileged than that gained by any other … [T]he deepest knowledge will result from the dialogue that involves the largest number of differing vantage points.
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- Words and Music , pp. 73 - 102Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005