Eminem Artist of the decade plaque?

[nofi]

what i meant by mainstream music was when you could hear canned heat, cream, iron butterfly, mitch ryder, james brown, spirit, sly, donovan, yardbirds etc. on top 40 am radio. that almost looks like a college format but it was top 40 radio at the time. i listen to npr most of the time these days.

[uwe]

None of your criticism applies to Eminem, gentlemen. He is not manufactured at all, but an ugly white kid from a trailer park that worked at his reputation in a domain of black music from scratch. He defied clichées - no scantily clad women in his dark videos, no gangsta-bullshit, most likely because as the odd kid Marshall never managed to get admitted to a gang. At the height of his success, he basically called it quits and decommercialised his music. He's certainly no example for what is despicable in modern pop culture.

[Barklessdog]

None of your criticism applies to Eminem, gentlemen. He is not manufactured at all, but an ugly white kid from a trailer park that worked at his reputation in a domain of black music from scratch. He defied clichées - no scantily clad women in his dark videos, no gangsta-bullshit, most likely because as the odd kid Marshall never managed to get admitted to a gang. At the height of his success, he basically called it quits and decommercialised his music. He's certainly no example for what is despicable in modern pop culture.

Sad when you suggesting looking up to M&M. What about the Beasty Boys?

[uwe]

The Beastie Boys are good fun, overage college boys doing their smart-alec interpretation of rap, and I appreciate the humor, but I always found that Eminem is to white man's rap what Robert Johnson would be to blues. Eminem is the real item and people connected with that.

I never heard anything from the Beastie Boys with the emotional intensity this stuff has:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5WvQrfDPQY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS7qqbkBAL0&feature=related

Eminem's lyrical content in his songs puts most rock vocalists to shame.

[Pilgrim]

Dislike of hip-hop and its thug culture spans the generations. The devil has better taste than to like it. Give him some credit.

I watched SNL last night and unfortunately didn't mute Jay-Z when he came on. Just a guy chanting rapid-fire in an almost monotone voice and you could not understand a word he was saying. And he's a "star."    But he knows how to strike a pose.

I keep trying to find something to like in rap, so I watched much of it.  I just can't find any musical merit in it...nor could I understand what he was saying.  That renders it as having about the same content value as 35 loud conversations going on simultaneously in a small restaurant.

[uwe]

That argument is akin to your dad saying that the MC5 "sound just like noise". I understand Eminem quite well if I focus on the lyrics, and I'm not a native speaker, much less did I grow up in 8 Mile.

I can't believe I'm putting up a stand here for Hip Hop, in my CD collection counting several thousand, I don't have more than a handful Hip Hop/Rap CDs. I never progressed much beyond The Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five ("don't-push-me-'cause-I'm-close-to-the-eeeeeedge")  and Kurtis Blow. I came to Eminem via my then 12 year old son and once I started listening a bit I was intrigued. Not enough to actually enjoy listening to him musically (the music of Hip Hop is too static for me), but enough to appreciate that it is well-executed, that he has an interesting way of rhyming and placing words, has credibility and a message lightyears beyond what others in the genre manage to project.

Besides, his mom is Kim Basinger. Which must make Alec Baldwin his father.   

[Dave W]

I don't think I implied that he's not genuine. He's no Vanilla Ice. He's a violence-prone drug-addicted thug in real life. No doubt that gives him credibility among his thug peers. It doesn't make his music good.

[Highlander]

It could be said that a certain rap version of a well known Aerosmith song did not hurt Tyler and Perry's careers...