Will the Real Ben Lerner Please Stand Up: Marshall Mathers, aka, Eminem performs at Tramps in 1999. It’s more or less the same friction one finds in Ben Lerner’s recent work, too - he’s guilty about his whiteness and uncomfortable with the hollowness of bourgeois life (the word “fraudulence” shows up lot in his novels), but thanks to his sense of humor and technical skill, he finds ways of making guilt and hollowness entertaining. Mathers knows that he’s been the beneficiary of unearned privilege (“Look at my sales! Let’s do the math: if I was Black, I would’ve sold half”), and he knows that he’s a performer of such talent anybody can enjoy what he writes (“Maybe it’s beautiful music I made for you to just cherish”), and it’s the friction between these two truths that makes his rap persona compelling more often than not.
![the eminem show poster the eminem show poster](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.2416242953.2160/poster,504x498,f8f8f8-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg)
“It was almost addictive,” Mathers told Anderson Cooper in 2011 - a bold choice of words coming from someone who’d overdosed on Vicodin four years prior, but if you listen to enough of his music you see what he’s getting at. Why you never really saw the Velvet Underground - even if you think you did Jackson Arn October 14, 2021Įmbarrassing yet miraculous, appropriative yet universal: this sounds an awful lot like Mathers recalling what it was like to be the only white man practicing a predominantly Black art form in basement clubs in the 80s. But I might as well be referring to Ben Lerner, alter ego Adam Gordon born 1979 in Topeka, Kansas recipient of a Macarthur Genius Grant finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award one of the few novelists whose novels reliably appear on bestseller lists and best-of-the-year lists, and maybe the only English-language avant-garde poet alive who comes close to being a household name. I’m referring to Marshall Mathers, AKA Eminem, alter ego Slim Shady born 1972 in Saint Joseph, Missouri but raised mostly in Detroit winner of 15 Grammys, 17 Billboard Music Awards, and an Oscar bestselling rapper of all time suspenseful with a pencil ever since Prince turned himself into a symbol (i.e., since 1993). Somehow, by burrowing so deep into himself, he rose to the top, so that even before he hit 40 he had more awards and prestige than he knew what to do with. Each new work was at least partly about the success of the previous ones, and if you kept buying them, you couldn’t help learning things about his private life - his parents, his children, his beefs. His subject was always himself, or maybe an exaggerated version of it. Love him or hate him, he clearly had a way with words, and he could be very funny, especially if your sense of humor was on the nasty side. More precisely, rap inspired him to find a way to make sense of his life: to take secret embarrassments and frustrations and turn them into something other people could enjoy.
![the eminem show poster the eminem show poster](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/95/7a/15/957a152cffa8017028a048cfe3321e97.jpg)
If he hadn’t learned to rap - quite the “if,” considering he was a white, midwestern teenager at the time - we might not be talking about him decades later.