Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Music: Pop: Eminem features Rihanna in "(I) Love the way you lie"

 Eminem the white angry ghetto troubador -- oops!,  rapper (I keep wanting to spell it "wrapper") -- is a crosscultural freak, and that nicknaming is done in respect and best wishes for his continued artmaking.

As he aged, he faltered -- I always find myself thinking in these cases that she or he has been in a state of exhaustion.  
 
Then, then I conclude as I look at the album cover,  he had some kind of "Recovery."  In the semiotics of the album and on the frontpage of the YouTube video here, the "o" in "Recovery" is rendered partly red or contrastively bordered red-to-w+it -- that's "white" without the extra final "e," and the letter "i" replaced with "+" to translate the Owlbirdbet into a more orthodox spelling. Obviously, this exploration of alphabets and spelling alternatives is a pet project, even an idosyncracy.  But:  the w+t cross on the red field; so, included is the concept of a border between the two colours, w+t and red!  That's the thing.

Has Eminem gone thru a recovery, a recovery from a here/hear-acknowledged fall?  How does that find a place in his music, the lyrics of his rapping.
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The song on the YouTube non-video (it's actually an audio with an unanimated screen on the digital page), those voices attracted me because the song features, alongside Eminem, the beautiful young songstress who got slapped around by her boyfriend, another famous young black singer.  That brutality against her exploded and crackled in the press, the celebrity-watching press not least of all.

Since then Riahanna has had a bit of time to catch her breath, herself recover from her humiliation at the hand of a brutal scary male.  Here she sings with a w+t boi, I love the way you lie.  But on the headline of the cover, without the personal pronoun at the start, the sentence ambiguates.  It's thawt coud go in the direckshun of indicating a preztl-shaped irony of command (almost):   Love the way you lie!

That brings the two voices in the song into a mutualo implication in each other's ambiguity of meaning.  It doesn't have to be logically consistent, because it is honest in articulating the tension to be found in a no-opening-personal-pronoun sentence that coud be one of command, so to speak.

Eminem has a lot to say -- er, rap! -- in the song, but most of it I coudn't "get."   I sure did get the mood, altho I have no idea whether the ratio of nawty words to total is now h+er or lower or no change.  I'd guess the latter.  But in the artistry of this duet, Rihanna is allowed to frame the discussion and this distances the directness of Eminem's monologue.  But in boxes, again framed by Riahanna's premise and refrains, in these sound-boxes the w+t rap artist of the Detroit mostly-black housing projects  still pours forth machine-gun rapid words thumping out anger, accusation, disdain, and a poetry of verbal expression.

I'm listening for small details, cues regarding which even the artist may be unaware.  Has he passed thru a (spiriutual) formation event that leaves its trace in the music of one of the world's best known artists, singers, performers?

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