A couple decades of economic upheaval, worker poverty and labor wars?
Your ignorance of Eminem’s success reminds me of this Colbert interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PniJM5IwXfE&feature=youtu.be&t=27m17s
Not only that, but “Ice Ice Baby” (which was apparently the first hip-hop song to make #1 on the US pop chart) led to a plagiarism lawsuit from Queen and Bowie, for sampling the bass riff of “Under Pressure” without credit or payment of royalties. Vanilla Ice settled out of court, but it cost him quite a bit of money, and he had to share the songwriting credits.
Everyone needs a livelihood, and most people need a vocation. But we’ve gotten this bizarre notion that those are the same thing, when there’s no reason they should be. Increasing automation is eventually going to make that clear to us.
From robots, of course. It might not actually be in the form of money, but that’s the ultimate answer. We need money for food. If all of the people involved in making food are replaced by robots, then we’ll get food from the robots. We need money for shelter. If all of the people involved in making houses are replaced by robots, then we’ll get shelter from the robots. Likewise for any other product or service we need or want. Money is just a way to get people to do things, but robots don’t need money to get them to do things.
Yup! I keep meaning to start a 2000AD thread around here.
I am sorta guessing at the context here a little, but I think for someone who has “dreams” (of being a star, being successful in an entertainment field, athlete or what have you) pretty much ANY kind of working class (or middle class or any “working for the man” gig) job sucks, even if it isn’t THAT bad. Even if your dreams are just having a really good job in a more “professional career” working a factory sucks.
And on a somewhat related note (due to the comments), I know and am related to several people who work in robotics and I personally work at a place with robots (one of the ones where robots are “taking over and replacing humans”) and it’s almost comical, at this point at least, how many people are needed to work on the robots and fix their mistakes. And the people who work on the robots, many of them at least, are not particularly skilled. Relying on robots causes a lot of issues when the robots make mistakes and have no ability to clean up after themselves or reset themselves, and for a place ostensibly about technology a lot of tech is outdated and simple issues (and suggestions) ignored.
On the other hand, Eminem would have been better off than a lot of people with dreams. His passion, rapping, is something that he can do anywhere, any time, even while he’s operating his press or whatever. Not so if he were, say, a painter.
It likely wasn’t as bad as Patti Smith’s job at Piss Factory.
That bad compared to what? Being Eminem?
It wasn’t that the job itself was terrible. Rabbit (Eminem) had much higher aspirations (i.e. to be a world class rapper). The environment outside of the job was pretty bad as well. His Mom had all sorts of alcohol and money issues. They lived in a run-down and violent section of Detroit. There were all sorts of racial issues.
This interview is glowing evidence of Colbert’s genius
Even if you are in a professional career, having a job with no career path or opportunity for advancement or even just doing boring stuff day in and day out sucks.
Also while the job in the factory might not be terrible as far as jobs go, it would never afford him the opportunity to move out of the crappy neighborhood he lived in.
Man, I hope that Eminem raps better than he interviews. I’d have expected a professional entertainer (of any sort) to give a more animated interview than that.