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Message to Eminem fans: Leave him alone! by Mikki Halpin Eminem seems to have a complicated relationship with his fans. While his income obviously depends on dedicated listeners, he also seems irritated, if not offended, by their adulation. It is his fans who have made him a contender on TRL, a position that seems to enrage and please him at the same time. And he's often the only hip-hop act in Billboard's top 10, which makes for some curious rivalries. While other rappers throw down to Suge Knight in order to defend their territory, poor Mr. Mathers is reduced to dissing 'N Sync and Christina Aguilera. It's not exactly an East Coast/West Coast battle, and given Em's talent, it's kind of embarrassing. Eminem wrote a whole song about a fan, called "Stan." "Stan" starts off with Em speaking in the voice of Stan, a fictional (or maybe not) obsessive. Stan tries to correspond with his hero, and gets pissed and threatening when he doesn't get a response. Eminem, speaking as himself, apologizes and suggests Stan seek therapy. The song ends awkwardly as the star reads of a fan's death - a death which mimics events in an Eminem song - and he realizes the fan was possibly Stan. OK, armed with my one semester of psychology, this seems weird to me. It always comes back to the mother, right? Does Stan stand in for the young Marshall, wanting attention from his mother that he doesn't get? Eminem reacted to his mother's alleged neglect by dissing her and becoming a violent misogynist - Stan does the same. It's difficult to parse what Em's feelings are for Stan - he ignores him, then pays attention when he is threatened. Just like Eminem's mom did. Let's review. While promoting his first record, Em railed against his mother, claiming she was a prostitute and a drug user. In response, Debbie Mathers filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against her son. (She subsequently withdrew the suit, and then reinstated it; it is currently pending in court.) Again, she ignored him until he threatened her. Now Debbie has struck back in a way Stan never could, releasing a CD single designed to take her maternal beef public. The single, which you can preview and preorder at www.marshallsmom.com, is super-creepy. Mrs. Mathers sings on two songs, "Dear Marshall" and "Set the Record Straight," accompanied by rappers ID-X. (Expect to hear about them in an Eminem song soon.) Her placating tones and vague reassurances echo the ones Em makes to Stan in his own song. Come on, is there anything more patronizing to say than "I'm sorry you feel that way." And does anyone mean it when they say that? Perhaps any mother/child relationship becomes creepy under such scrutiny, but how can we explain the creepy people who write Eminem fan fiction? Now, I have a little soft spot for fan fiction. After all, I'm a huge fan. When I was a young nerdly little thing and first got on the Internet, I used to read fan fiction on Usenet. (Usenet, for those of you who don't know, was a pre-Web discussion area. Sort of. And it still exists. Sort of). I was horrified and obsessed by fan fiction, which was generally just what the name implies: fiction stories about some part of popular culture, written by fans. This stuff went way beyond me and my friends acting out Charlie's Angels scenarios. Since this was Usenet, most of the fan fiction was science fiction related. And, of course, most of that was Star Trek. And, you guessed it, there was lotsa porn. In fact, the porn angle took over most fan fiction and it began to be known as slash fiction - a story's title (or in the header on the newsgroup posting) would list basically all the characters who get it on in that story. So a "Kirk/Spock" fanfic story would involve the two high-ranking officers having a little bit more than a conference call, if you know what I mean. Eminem fan fiction has a bit of that. There's a few stories written from the POV of a groupie he hooks up with, and a really explicit one in which Em has hot sex with his childhood friend Proof. Lots of the stories are violent: in some the writer is being beaten up by Eminem; in others he is taking the abuse. But my nominee for the weirdest Eminem fan has got to be the woman who wrote a story in which Eminem saves her from an abusive boyfriend Hello, how twisted is that? The fact is, some thoughts should remain on the inside. Why can't fans just be normal, and buy the records and put the posters up on their walls and keep their fantasies to themselves? Eminem has enough problems. |
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