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Can there be such a thing as too much virtuosity? Certainly every time that Floyd Mayweather, Jr., among the greatest defensive boxers in the history of the sport, delivers another of his slippery slickster wins, you get that feeling. And then there’s the sort of sterile virtuosity that seems to exist for its own sake, the Yngwie Malmsteen sort of virtuosity that’s detached from any greater purpose. Perhaps we critics are the most wary of virtuosity, for it renders us unnecessary—there’s no need to explain or to tease forth virtues that are self-evident.
Along with most of America, in the last several days I caught up with the latest works from two ‘90s-vintage virtuosi. The first is Gravity, by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, which at present is the number one box office attraction in America; the second is “Rap God,” officially the third single from Eminem’s forthcoming album The Marshall Mathers LP 2, an album that even in the post-analog media world will scan a couple million units at Wal-Mart.
Per “Rap God,” Eminem has been making “a living and a killing off it/ Ever since Bill Clinton was still in office”—The Slim Shady LP came out way back in 1999. At the time I was wary of the expanding hype bubble that was timed to pop with the release of the crossover Caucasian’s first record, and the world premiere of the cartoonish video for “My Name Is” did nothing to alleviate my wariness (though the video did consistently crack my father up). This was the high, heady heyday of DMX, he of the authoritative junkyard guard dog bark, and the apoplectic Silkk the Shocker. What was this aggravating, over-enunciated yip-yapping, like a small dog looking for attention? There is no American accent as grating as the adenoidal honk of the Great Lakes region, and here was this Blink-182 castoff with a peroxide mop not just owning it, but playing it up.
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But there were couplets in “My Name Is” with an undeniable earworm quality (“I’m not ready to leave, it’s too scary to die/ I’ll have to be carried inside the cemetery and buried alive”) that, when I let my guard down, would sneak up on me. Through winter of 2000, “Forgot About Dre” further weakened any remaining resistance. In the months after this, when The Marshall Mathers LP had dropped with seismic impact, I was working loading trucks for UPS. It was particularly grueling, nonstop work, conducted in sweltering trailers. A few memories stand out: The management periodically bringing in Sno-Cone machines on Fridays as a “treat,” trying to placate us as though we were a bunch of 2nd graders. (The Sno-Cones were delicious.) One of our supervisors, known only as “Bowman,” coming into work one day and announcing: “My ass is sore; I was up all night pounding pussy.”
Bowman was a big fan of Three Doors Down’s “Kryptonite,” then cresting in popularity, though it continues to haunt FM radio to this day. I was bumping Cat Power’s “The Covers Record” whenever I peeled out of the parking lot in my maroon Mercury Topaz. But down in those stygian trailers, wholly preoccupied with building tight tiers of cardboard according to UPS protocol, the same voice kept nattering away in my head. Shamefaced, I finally caved, had my friend dub me a copy of his kid sister’s MM LP, and it was off to the races.
Paying attention to Eminem for as long as I have, for better and worse, you learn a few cardinal rules. The first is to be very wary of the first single—in some cases, to be wary of the singles, period. With the release of The Marshall Mathers LP 2 still three weeks off, we’ve already got three. “Berzerk,” produced by Rick Rubin, is a self-consciously “throwback” number with leviathan stadium rock guitars and samples from Billy Squier and License to Ill. “Survival,” the second, popped up on the soundtrack of the video game Call of Duty: Ghosts; it has well-honed verbal calisthenics on the verses, and the by-now inevitable nu metal-inflected cliché singalong hook—here provided by someone called Liz Rodrigues from Canadian outfit the New Royales. And now there is “Rap God,” spit over an unobtrusive, klaxon-urgent beat by DVLP, which lacks a big dunderheaded chorus, and happens to be very, very great.
If “Berzerk” or “Survival” have gotten any radio penetration on New York’s Hot 97 or Power 105, I haven’t tracked it; “Rap God” seems like a better bet, though at six minutes long it’s practically hip-hop’s “L.A. Woman.” My friend Jake Perlin once said of Rouben Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde that it contains every single technique available to the movies, and you could say that the same applies to “Rap God” and hip-hop; the track is like a catalog of rhetorical devices, styles, and shifts in cadence, including an afterburner flick into double-time rapping.
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A panoply of voices speak in “Rap God,” among them the slow-witted aspirant to the throne whose dismissal of Em’s broad appeal is a transparent cover for his own jealousy (“DUHH I don’t know how to make songs like that/ I don’t know what words to use…”) and a tearful Ray J. And then there’s a one-sided round of playing the dozens that begins “Little gay looking boy/ So gay I can barely say it with a straight face looking boy…” with abuse piling on from there. The scuttlebutt, based on an immediately preceding line (“’til I walk a flock of flames”) is that this extended riff on Hotstylz 2008 single “Lookin’ Boy” is Em’s response to slighting comments made by Waka Flocka Flame. Likewise, “Rap God,” despite having been recorded in 2012, has been taken as a response to Kendrick Lamar’s power-grab verse on Big Sean’s “Control” this summer.
I suspect that Em, a recluse who lives largely in his own head, is only concerned in the abstract with his contemporaries, and a clue to reading the “Lookin’ boy” lines comes in the third verse: “I bully myself cause I make me do what I put my mind to.” Anyone who has seen the soft, sullen young Marshall Mathers knows that this is a kid would’ve heard “little gay looking boy” a lot growing up, and as much as anything he’s goading himself along with the sound of remembered insults. Did I mention Jekyll and Hyde? Eminem’s persona is pure schizo, both Superhero (“This looks like a job for me…”) and Supervillian, playground bully and victim.
Where mainstream bid “Berzerk” attributed the venerable rap chant “Bawitdaba” to Kid Rock instead of Busy Bee or Sugar Hill Gang, “Rap God” is scrupulous, even scholarly, about placing itself in hip-hop history. There are references not only to household names like N.W.A., but to JJ Fad, Pharoahe Monch and, most unexpectedly, Lakim Shabazz. Outside of the world of hip-hop, Eminem’s favorite point of reference—from a namecheck on “Without Me” to the Jailhouse Rock number in the “We Made You” video—is to one Elvis Aaron Presley. And like the increasingly-isolated King of latter days, Eminem’s genius now comes in splashes rather than gushes, though one gets the sense that The Marshall Mathers LP is meant to be his 2013 Comeback Special.
The “sequel” to a landmark album is far from unheard-of in hip-hop—“Forgot About Dre,” for example, was the leadoff to The Chronic 2001. It’s a way to try to recapture mojo in what is, even moreso than rock n’ roll, a young, hungry, broke man’s game. In the case of Em, whose appeal is inextricable from his sense of grievance, it’s also a matter of working an old wound back open. The house on the cover of The MM LP 2 is the same that appeared on the sleeve of its predecessor: 19946 Dresden St. in Detroit, two-bedrooms and 767 square feet—which can now be yours!—a Northern Gothic landmark where Eminem once lived with the most talked-about mother in pop culture since Mrs. Bates.
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As another problematic genius once sang, “I would rather not go back to the old house.” (I do hope that everyone’s already set aside their $30 for Morrissey’s forthcoming Autobiography.) Em presumably has to go back, either for money or art or a combination of the two. The thing that fires Em up creatively is precisely what prevents him from maturing—this unwillingness to let go of the halcyon days when the Artist as a Young Man “used to get beat up, peed on, be on free lunch and changed school every three months. “As time goes by,” Em told SPIN in 2010, speaking of his visits to that house, “you might get content and forget things”—the clear implication being that nothing could be worse than moving on, leaving behind that deep well of salable aggro. Eminem is a wordsmith of unparalleled ability and agility (“So you be Thor and I’ll be Odin, you rodent, I’m omnipotent”!). He is also our great case of arrested adolescence, still fag-bashin’ and woman-hatin’, decorating his “Berzerk” video with images of backyard wrestling and after-school parking lot fights, even though he turned 41 yesterday. This seems to me preferable to putting the hustle on the Chelsea crowd.
At the top of “Rap God,” Em addresses those who conflate innate faculty with technical facility: “They said I rap like a robot… for me to rap like a computer it must be in my genes.” Critics of Cuarón’s Gravity have likewise approached it as a work that was programmed rather than directed. One of two churlish “takedowns” at The Awl strikes a typical note: “watching someone else play a video game is boring. That is exactly what watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is like.”
This is a familiar gripe—I believe I said something to the same effect after watching Mark A.Z. Dippé’s Spawn in 1997—and could be applied to practically every other multiplex release in the digital era. It’s more profitable to explore how, exactly, Gravity interfaces with the weightlessness endemic to contemporary CG 3D cinema, and J. Hoberman, writing in the New York Review of Books, does exactly that. Hoberman calls Cuarón’s film “a truly popular big-budget Hollywood movie with a rich aesthetic pay-off,” and praises its “physical sense of the void”—its permanence, its endlessness. On the side of the apostates, the best thing I’ve read is Adam Nayman’s CinemaScope write-up, whose kicker digs at the film’s perceived techie inhumanity: Cuarón’s “song of two humans is Autotuned all the way.”
Me, I’m a fan. Gravity is good old-fashioned spectacle, staged on a scale that invalidates the dreaded “spoiler.” I knew going into the theater that George Clooney was going to die, and that his death was a matter of self-sacrifice so that another might live, a gesture not unlike that undertaken by Tim Robbins in Brian De Palma’s maddeningly half-great 2000 Mission to Mars. And yet this mattered not a jot—this is what cinema has that television can’t annex. It’s not that something happens, but how it happens.
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The Space Shuttle Explorer has been strafed by a storm of debris thrown off by a missile strike on a Russian satellite, and Clooney’s Lt. Matt Kowalski is one of the Explorer’s two surviving crew members. When he goes, he goes peacefully, listening to lazy pedal steel guitar and gazing in wonderment at the sunrise over the Ganges—one of the pleasures of the movie is watching the globe rotate in the background of the character’s westward drift, from the Nile Delta to Sicily by night to the final splashdown off the green coast what I took to be Chile.
Kowalski’s departure leaves novice astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock, as the lone castaway, faced with the task of leap-frogging between international space stations if she’s to have any chance of planting her feet on terra firma again. The movie’s form is that of a long freefall with only very temporary respites, hands outstretched all the way in hopes of catching hold of something. Watching Bullock turning end over end over end, I thought of Alice down the rabbit hole. Cuarón exploits the particular terror of weightlessness for all it’s worth—the terror of having some physical control, but a compromised, frustrated physical control. I may be the only viewer who thought not of 2001, but of certain set pieces by Argento—the flailing in a room full of baling wire in Suspiria and, most particularly, trying to swim away from an obscene corpse that only keeps bobbing closer in Inferno.
Aside from its apparently suspect science, Gravity has taken shots for the loquacity of the screenplay, though this is justified in the context of the story—keeping a running monologue up over radio increases the chances of making ‘SOS’ contact with mission control—as well as being a pretty literalizing of the old saw “talking yourself down.” Concerning as it does a person drawing on resourcefulness and faith to negotiate a crisis, Gravity skirts rather closer to the corn fields than some viewers will be comfortable with, not least in what Nayman calls its “New Agey” spirituality. My enthusiasm isn’t untempered—the soundtrack was unendurable—though I find most of the flat-out pans have rather more to say about their author’s crippling cool complex than the movie itself. I was struck by this piece from the website of Filmmaker Magazine, which re-imagines Gravity as “a movie about exploring death, rather than another movie about overcoming it.” Here is an overt statement of an assumption that lies behind much criticism, and not only of Gravity. Failure, surrender, and death are sophisticated; triumph, survival, and life are not.
For rather obvious reasons, popular art in the main is survival art—as Em rhymes in “Rap God”: “I wanna make sure somewhere in this chicken scratch I scribble and doodle/ Enough rhymes to maybe to try and help get some people through tough times.” One aspect of Em’s persona that may account for his enduring popularity is that he has always foregrounded the way in which, headphones acting a bulwark against a hostile environment, hip-hop served him a self-esteem builder and a lifeline, and he’s extended this understanding to his practice, knowing how his music can serve the same purpose for his audience.
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While Em’s popularity will accordingly enjoy an AC/DC-like shelf-life, his cultural apotheosis was 2002’s 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson and scripted by Scott Silver, whose next produced screenplay was a biopic of Lowell, Massachusetts’ “Irish” Mickey Ward, 2010’s The Fighter. Fittingly enough, the video for the 8 Mile soundtrack’s big single, “Lose Yourself,” has Em practicing his footwork like a pugilist in the gym, while in the film’s climactic face-offs with the rivals of the Free World gang, one can’t but think of Rocky. It’s all disconcertingly Great White Hope—but let’s not forget that Em was voted “Greatest Rapper of All Time” twice in a VIBE reader’s poll, and if ambient sound walking through Clinton Hill means anything, the streets have love for Marshall Mathers.
Em’s “Eye of the Tiger,” “Lose Yourself” was an anthem whose popularity, measured in units sold, exceeded that of any of his previous songs—and, in handing Em a new formula for success, it was the worst thing that possibly could’ve happened for him creatively. Every couple of years since we’ve been subjected to a fresh set of buttrock power-chords and a soaring, inspirational chorus: “Sing for the Moment,” “Not Afraid,” “Won’t Back Down,” and yes, “Survival.” Thus does inspiration become formula, and urgency become facile cheerleading. Who do you prefer, the Nas of Illmatic, or the guy who made “I Can”?
“Snap back to reality, Oh there goes gravity,” Em spat on “Lose Yourself,” narrating the choke of his screen alter-ego “B-Rabbit,” before proceeding to hype B-Rabbit up for comeback. In its fixation on the cult of success, “Lose Yourself” is as all-American as John Updike: Run, B-Rabbit, Run! And, oh, there goes Gravity, offering much the same narrative of slipup, setback, tragedy, doubt, resolution and, ultimately, redemption. However, unlike the Em of “Rap God,” perpetuating his own up-by-the-bootstraps myth, Gravity emphasizes the role of blind luck in survival—for as each fresh shower of debris comes hurtling through the atmosphere, Dr. Ryan can only hope to pass through unscathed. When the first wave hits and she discovers the corpse of a fellow engineer who’s had his face punched clean out, you get a sense of “There but for the grace of God…”
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Or rather, there but for the grace of superstardom—she’s Sandra Bullock, after all, and he was only “Paul Sharma.” Her face is an investment! On the way to see Gravity, I’d listened to “Rap God” a half-dozen times, and towards the end of the movie I started thinking: Doesn’t Eminem, with his dimple chin, his taut face with eyes stretched back until he appears to have developed epicanthic folds, bear a slight resemblance to the present-day Bullock? Of course you have to get work done to get work. The biggest female box-office draw in America, 49 year-old Bullock wants to keep going in an industry that doesn’t permit actresses to age; while Em’s stock-in-trade is adolescent rambunctiousness—the key to rap immortality, he tells us, is “simply rage and youthful exuberance”—and so he must remain Slim Shady, a Dorian Gray working at Burger King, spitting in your onion rings.
It makes perfect sense that a culture that defies and despises failure should also deny age—right? Well, it’s never that simple. It should be noted that among the only diegetic music in Gravity is the Country & Western music (I identified Hank Williams, Jr.) that Kowalski has piped into his suit. It’s one of the particular ironies that this, which is curiously favored as the “authentic” American music among many contenders, is also the most enamored of failure.
So which side of the Janus-faced coin of American life do you prefer? Survival or defeat? Rocky or Fat City? Yeah or nay? This week, at least, the ayes have it. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over! There’s still a lot of football left to play! “I’ll have to be carried inside the cemetery and buried alive!”
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.