Encore

So Eminem doesn't interest you because?

because, like all mass media music, i believe its invented .... although I will say he rhymes well and his songs are catchy ... I just don't get into band/artist suffering myths much any more ... Vanilla Ice had the same thing going for him back in the day .. consumers have short memories (IM conversation)

But I think of bringing Encore into the classroom specifically against this view. The critics want to say: hey guy, grow up; we are tired of your plight. Yet the album graphics are far too self conscious to be taken literally. I don't think this is art of suffering so much as it is art about the shit-vomit that arises while suffering the expectation of suffering. This is social satire, the ventriloquized (torutured) artist at its most emphatic, dramatic, reductive, helpless, inarticulate lashing out. It sings of pee pee and of farting and nobody really finds it funny: it apologizes for racial slurs: it repeats and repeats and repeats. It is arrogant, playful, ridiculous. It is self parody. It is entirely staged, front to back: the performer elicts his encore staging (which we consumers, privileged, see from the back and note: gun gun gun), he bows to the audience who scripts the expectation of the encore--more!--and he, in still life, aims at the crowd. He has written his suicidal/homicidal note on the cd frame (the thing itself is scripted as if a tomb marker), and, as if on film, but clearly not, the series of thumbnails suggest that our stage man opens fire on the audience. There is a bloody mess, but nobody dies. It is like Holbein's Christ: body, death, consequence, blood. Blood. There is no artist stage here but the stage of artistry available to any one of us looking away from mad death as we look on, horrified. Open the cd case, turn the plastic hinge to obtain the encore bonus and find the encore to the encore is our man cock-sucking his gun barrel. I sacrifice myself for you, you pigs. That's the risk involved, isn't it? Where is pleasure? Give us pleasure or we will let you die; show us death or we will let you die; die or we will let you die. Die or make death you pig. I love hyperbole. It is clarifying as nothing else.