And the hair-splitting rationalizations made by his defenders are kinda fun to read. Let’s see, in his songs he sings about violence toward real-life women, and in real life he acts violently toward them. But of course these two can’t be connected in any way, because Eminem said once he was “just playing a character”. Pardon me while I mosey over to the corner and guffaw. It helps to cover up the way he’s laughing up his sleeve.
You’d asked earlier “Legal limits? What, pray tell, are the legal limits of artistic content?” and said “An artist has no other responsibility than to create art. The masses may do with it what they will.” This would seem to indicate that you don’t believe there should be any legal limits, and that artists have no responsibility to others when they create. So tell me why the Khmer Rouge weren’t the greatest performance artists of all time.
Now, W. is way more dangerous than Eminem. Eminem doesn’t have his finger on the button.
Let’s review the facts and review what, in fact, my position is.
[ul]
[li]Eminem says he is playing “characters.” Short of real evidence to the contrary, we ought to believe him.[/li][li]Prior criminal records are, except under very special circumstances, inadmissible in criminal legal proceedings. This point will be crucial later.[/li][li]Eminem harassed his estranged wife with whom he was having serious marital problems before his musical career began.[/li][/ul]
What do we have here? We have a white-trash punk propelled to stardom and living large. He is evidently on the outs with his wife and has behaved like a real cad.
There is no clear and necessary relationship between his music and his life.
I am not arguing that such a relationship is impossible or even unlikely. I am arguing that there is simply no proof whatsoever to support this supposition; consequently, it should be dropped.
Violence against one woman with whom he has had a stormy relationship (at best) does not equate to misogyny.
The specious similarity between his music and his life can be explained by numerous other factors: his sudden fame, his jealousy over his wife’s alleged infidelity, his relationship to his domineering mother…Who knows?
It is prejudicial to assume that an individual guilty of one crime is more likely to be guilty of another. Hence prior criminal record is inadmissible as evidence in almost any criminal trial. Likewise it is prejudicial to assume that Eminem is utterly guilty of the charges you level at him because he harassed his wife for any one of the above unprovable reasons.
You need to learn to reply on the level of logos.
I asked Lamia what the legal limits were because I was curious what s/he would say. FTR, I fully agree with the limits imposed by libel and slander.
I also stand by what I said below. Obeying the minimal legal standards of content is the artist’s responsibility to himself, not to others. Nowhere do I say that there should be “no legal limits.” Reading is fundamental.
As for the Khmer Rouge…The universe is really just a little smear of mud on the back of an abalone shell. So tell me why this is untrue.
I have no logical obligation to refute absurd, unsupported statements. The burden of proof is on you.
What counts as “real evidence”? We’d find his fingerprints on the character? Even if we found out that he’d pushed someone down a flight of stairs, Mathers could always claim that he was just portraying a character who happened to do some of the same things Mathers did, and we should ignore the other things the character does because Mathers would never do them.
IANAL and this is not a court. We’re judging character, not guilt. Eminem has given plenty of evidence (IMHO) of low character. Luckily, that’s not a crime.
Uh, yeah. I guess Eminem is a shining example of arete.
Legal limits (as opposed to moral or ethical limits) are by their nature societal. As such, obeying legal standards is a responsibility one has to others, not to one’s self. To claim otherwise is to claim freedom from legal limits.
Then don’t make them. Artists either have a responsibility to society or they don’t. If they do what is it and why (and how does Eminem fit in?), if not, you’re stuck with the Khmer Rouger question.
This is going nowhere. Your refusal or inability to grasp even the most basic logic of my argument is frustrating.
When Eminem rapes his wife and extracts her private parts with a knife, then perhaps I will concede the point. Perhaps you should consider why you think a domestic dispute is necessarily related to universal misogyny.
This sentence is fundamentally incoherent.
If Eminem pushes someone down the stairs, he should be dealt with in the appropriate legal fashion. What does this have anything to do with his music?
You are evidently not a lawyer as such concepts as evidence consistently elude you.
We certainly are judging character: my judgments are based on his conduct, yours are based on supposition. Since you are refusing to understand the problems with your generalizations on this thread, should I assume that you are a fundamentally unintelligent person in general?
Just because Eminem screws up his love life big time, does that mean he is guilty of all of the evil sentiment in his music? You don’t have to be a lawyer to recognize the problem with these assumptions.
Reply based on what I said, not what you think I might have meant, or what you suppose my opinion to be. It’s a life skill. Logos. I would be happy to talk at length about arete in another thread, but it is not appropriate here.
This is illogical. Legal limits in fact are social. Failure to observe them results in punishment and ostracism. If you don’t want to be thrown in the slammer for slander, you owe it to yourself to behave responsibly. What does this have to do with “freedom from legal limits”?
I didn’t make any absurd, unsupported statements.
Eminem argues that his songs are based on personae. Other than some scuffling with his wife, you have not shown with any certainty that he is lying. Therefore it is absurd and unsupported not to believe him.
Artists do not have a responsibility to society. Some may think they do, but evidently these responsibilities are self-imposed. As long as he doesn’t break any laws, he can be as bad as he wants to be. Just like anyone else.
Again, the Khmer Rouge question is so absurd as to be humorous. If it weren’t for the genocide thing. Reconcile this.
Pol Pot committed egregious crimes against humanity.
Pol Pot never claimed to be a performance artist using a medium which reflects but does not equal reality.
Eminem has tussled with his wife, who from all appearances, has about the same moral fiber as he does.
Eminem has always claimed to be an artist, whose songs are not real.
Umm, not really. Sting sang a song about a teacher being very tempted by a student that obviously had the hots for him. If you listen to the song you’ll see that it stops short of ever saying one way or another whether the affair was consummated. I don’t mean to say that he ever was truly suspected of having an affair with a student, but I was thinking of an interview on MTV (way back when I used to like that channel) where he was asked about that song particularly. He said that as a teacher there were a couple, maybe he said a few (I don’t remember exactly, but have the impression that it was more than just one) girls had crushes on him that made him very uncomfortable at times when he was a teacher. I don’t recall whether he said he was tempted by any of them in return, though.
In retrospect, I should definitely not have said “autobiographical,” because that implies that it’s a factual account of what happened. Semi-autobiographical would have been much better.
OK, to get the point straight: I say that Eminem is a creep and evidence of that can be found in his music. You say that Eminem might be a creep, but using his music to substantiate that is illogical. Correct?
I’ll go slowly then, and you can ask Spiritus for help with the big words. We have Actor A, Character C, and set of actions S that form the “core persona” of C. Let (x~S) denote that x has performed one (or more) of the actions in S. Let (x=S) denote that x has performed all the actions in S. Let (app x S) denote that it’s likely that x approves of doing things in S. Let ! be logical negation, & be logical AND, and -> be logical implication.
We then have:[list=1]li -> !(app A S) * -> !(app A S)* -> (app A S)[/list=1] We agree on 1 and 2. The question is whether 3 is valid. I claim it is, sometimes. In particular, Eminem is upfront and unapologetic about both (C=S) and (A~S), so it’s reasonable to believe (A=S).[/li]
Let’s look at a rock star, we’ll call him Pat. Pat sings songs about his alter-ego “Marz Barz” who hates Jews and wants to round them all up and kill them (thanks for the example, The Fat Man). Pat also is known to hang around at Klan rallies, and owns a (rather pricey) first edition copy of Mein Kampf. Could it be that Pat’s anti-Semitic?
Or a couple weeks after your new roommate comes in, you start seeing “Mr. FuzzyWhiskers must kill Maeglin” scrawled all over the walls. Your new rommate claims this is just prep for his next acting job as a deranged serial killer. Being a supporter of the arts, you think nothing of it. Then you find out his last 8 roommates have been hospitalized after falling great heights out of windows. How nice is Mr. FuzzyWhiskers now?
And you are, IMHO, artificially categorizing his musical performances as not his conduct.
When I say a “legal limit” (a law) I mean a responsibility an individual has toward society. They are the same thing. Under that usage, anybody that claims they have no responsibility to society is claiming they have no legal limits. In that sense, the Khmer Rouge (acting as artists) could not be said to have done anything wrong (at least, nothing illegal). If you are using the terms differently, please clarify.
Yes. Especially since he has explicitly argued such.
Your logic is your problem, not your vocabulary.
You are still falling over the same stumbling block despite your useful symbolic notation.
The crux.
Eminem has harassed his wife.
Ergo it is likely that he approves of worse offenses.
In your own words:
And you have absolutely no justification to claim this is true without an in depth personal knowledge of the person at hand. Eminem has been quite clear that he does portray characters, hence I do not understand why you feel he is unapologetic. He may be unapologetic about beating his wife and about exercising his free speech, but these do not imply that he is lax about everything.
Because he has committed a lesser crime does not in any way reveal that he would tolerate or even approve of a greater one. This is the elephant in the room that you are conveniently ignoring.
Absolutely. Either Pat is collecting data for new material or he is anti-Semitic. The failure in this analogy is that Pat’s life and his art appear to be much, much more similar. Without knowing him one way or the other I would be hesitant to level charges of anti-Semitism at him, but I believe that the odds would be pretty good that such charges would be right.
This example has the same flaw.
If you ask any artist he would certainly agree with me. Is Carrie from the eponymous book by Stephen King somehow representative of the author’s conduct?
Words and deeds. Big difference.
My definition is considerably narrower. A legal limit is a limit imposed by statute. Bottom line.
I can claim anything I want, but if I break the law, I will still be bound by statutory law.
This is sophistic malarky. I think I have made my terms quite clear.
Show me that there is a much closer relationship between Eminem’s behavior and his art and perhaps you will have a point. I am still waiting for you to relate a domestic dispute, which can be explained by a myriad of factors unrelated to Eminem’s art, and the dreadful violence and misogyny portrayed therein.
I don’t know if he means rape or stautory rape with that comment. Either way though, it’s not very pleasant.
He also states
These quotes and more can be found at Stingchronicity (Bolding was mine)
Go back and refer to the bolding. Hmmm, Sting was exploiting his fans, singing about something he had a slight understanding of (being a teacher) but not something he had a complete understanding of (raping a student).Wow, sound like anybody else in this discussion? Do you think the same could be applied to Eminem? And various other artists as well?
I’m not sure I would say Sting was exploiting his fans. I read him to say that he’s exploiting the fact that the fans are in a certain group-- in other words he was playing to that certain demographic. Either way, on the linked page he did certainly cop to liking some of those young girls, so it’s apparently autobiographical of his fantasy life if nothing else.
Which just proves my point. Sting can write songs about raping school girls that may or may not be “autobiographical to his fantasies” and it’s all well and good, because hey, it’s Sting. He’s not white trailer trash. He is smart enough to be a teacher.
But if Eminem writes songs that are probably geared toward a certain demographic that may or may not be “autobiographical to his fantasies” than he is a rotton horrible, racist, misogynist, piece of trailer-trash who shouldn’t be allowed to even think these things, much less perform them?
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t fly. You can’t prove that Gordon Sumner is a child-molester/staulker/murderer anymore than you can prove that Marshal Mathers is a rapist who beats his wife on a regular basis based solely on lyrical content.
Here we go again…exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post.
Please reproduce a single post in this thread in which a poster has impled that Eminem “shouldn’t be allowed to even think these things, much less perform them?”
What several people, myself included, have done is to express concern about the effect of Eminem’s so-called “art.” That is something we should be, and indeed are, “allowed” to do.
This has no connection whatsoever with the censorship concerns you’re attempting to raise.
Also, it was correctly explained earlier that we can’t help but take an artist’s own real-life personality, or at least what we’re able to discern of it, into consideration when judging his or her “art.”
If I see a “real-life” interview of a mid-70s metal band in which the answers consist mainly of incoherant grunts or incredibly lame rock ‘n’ roll clichés, it tends to reinforce my already-held view of the stupidity of their music – while at the same time confirming my judgment that the individuals who produced it are real idiots.
If I see exactly the same thing portrayed with dead-on accuracy in “Spinal Tap,” I figure that the people who wrote the scene, portrayed the characters and obviously have the smarts to get a movie made are coming from an entirely different place.
Though many seem to want to believe that Eminem is simply portraying characters or in some way holding a mirror up to society, he presents precious little evidence of this in real life.
**
Sting’s quote mentioning rape is clearly referencing Nabokov, and there is nothing in the lyrics mentioning anything other than temptation. Sting does admit being tempted by some of the girls, but that’s a far cry from fantasizing about raping them.
**
I think you have me confused with someone else if you think that I argued anything at all like this. All I said was that artists who present a consistent image are far more likely to be perceived as actually being the image than artists whose acts are more diverse. In fact, I even noted that Eminem hasn’t been around long enough to be very diverse, so it’s especially unfair in his case.
OK, you’ve indeed met my challenge to the letter. I asked you to reproduce “a single post in this thread in which a poster has impled that Eminem ‘shouldn’t be allowed to even think these things, much less perform them?’” – and that’s exactly what you did. You produced one post out of 93.
This hardly seems to constitute the trend you described in this way: “But if Eminem writes songs that are probably geared toward a certain demographic that may or may not be ‘autobiographical to his fantasies’ than he is a rotton horrible, racist, misogynist, piece of trailer-trash who shouldn’t be allowed to even think these things, much less perform them?”
Let’s make it clear again: I don’t advocate censorship of any artistic endeavor; nor does it follow that others who have decried Eminem’s schtick are saying he should be stopped from doing what he’s doing.
Short of slander or libel, he has the right to complete freedom of expression. And so do we.
I guess Eminem is a shining example of arete.