"There’s some dissonance hearing you — in the space of a couple tracks — go from trying to be good-faith woke about race and politics to being rough about women."

"Do those poles just coexist more peacefully for you than they do for me?" — a question for Eminem (at NY Magazine). His answer:

They do, and how you think those things go together depends on what kind of fan of my music you are. Sometimes I’m trying to appease people who think, Man, I miss when Eminem was raw. But I’m not killing Kim on songs anymore.... I’ve grown and sometimes I want to reflect that — but when I’m writing, a line will pop in my head that’s so fucking ridiculous that it’s funny, and depending on the punch lines I need and the rhyme schemes in the song maybe I’ll use it. Those are the things I’m thinking about with some lyrics, almost before the actual meaning. There’s a song on the new album, “Nowhere Fast,” and I say, “I must have got you / In somewhat of a debacle / Because some stuff that’s awful / Really don’t mean nothing. There’s a lot of shit I say in jest / That is tough to swallow.” You know, there’s a book called Truly Tasteless Jokes; it’s all fucked up shit; it makes me laugh — and that kind of stuff is where my brain goes. I’m not saying I’ve never gone too far, but people shouldn’t be looking to me for political correctness.

The interview goes on to blab about how Eminem hates Trump, but mostly in the context of Eminem wanting Trump to talk back to him after he did that 4-minute freestyle rap about Trump.



Eminem lets us know that he's got lines that he's saving up for when Trump responds to him. Maybe it could rival the Cornel West/Ta-Nehisi Coates tweet-fight, but it looks like Trump is savvy enough to procure E's silence by acting like he doesn't hear a thing. The most interesting line about Trump is: "He’s made it acceptable for the white man to feel oppressed. I’m just calling bullshit bullshit: I actually don’t know if I can see why people who relate to me feel like they can relate to him."

Anyway, who cares that Eminem (or any big celebrity) doesn't like Trump? It's the norm, and frankly it is political correctness, in that it's going along with what the elite have signaled they expect you to do.

But I'm more interested to find out that "Truly Tasteless Jokes" — a book from 1982 — is Eminem's urtext. From the book's Wikipedia page:

[The book is arranged] into "timeless categories" including Helen Keller ("How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? Reading the waffle iron"), dead baby, Jewish, WASP, black, Polish, homosexual, and handicapped....

Historian Barbara Tuchman spoke of the "breakdown of decency and of standards of taste" in these "terribly tasteless, disgusting books," while professor John Hope Franklin said the books' success was "a sad testament to the taste of this country."... Critic Edward Rothstein... wrote, "...the telling of a joke brings into the light of society that which is hidden; it creates a marriage between the respectable and the unacceptable. Tasteless jokes...  result not in marriage, nor even in an affair, but in a reconnoiter somewhere in the shadows.... The tastelessness of these jokes - many of which have been told for generations - is their main point: Prejudice is mocked, distended to a ludicrous degree. The target of these outrageous and gross quips is the very pieties of society that apply such labels. They make us laugh at the pretense that such prejudices do not exist and at the respectable assertion that we are really all the same."