The Fucked Up Things Eminem Made Me Do

No one likes to admit it, but rap music has a terrible effect on young people. Think about it this way: have you ever sold drugs? Even if you were just some stoner who unwittingly got your hands on a significant amount of product and managed to peddle it to a pack of rabid frat bros three or four times in college, listening to Clipse and Young Jeezy helped carry you out of reality and made you feel like a kingpin. Music deludes us, and that’s the point.

Yesterday, when reports surfaced about a shooting in a New Jersey mall, it just reminded me how I’d terrorized a shopping center in similar fashion in a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City mission over a decade ago. 13-year-old me, who’d never touched a gun in real life, found myself mime-sniping civilians from the backseat of my dad's car when I was forced to re-enter society after too many hours playing the game. This never concerned me. I've always had enough common sense to not pick up a weapon and recreate horrors I'd seen a video game, but my former propensity for practicing my aim with an imaginary rifle always sticks with me as a testament to how just how massively entertainment influences us.

That’s not to say that we’re unwillingly brainwashed by violence and degradation in the media. We're not, and that’s why there’s pushback when conservative censorship groups allege that movies like Natural Born Killers absolutely inspire viewers to commit unspeakable crimes. There’s a long list of real-life incidents linked to Natural Born Killers, but thousands more have seen the film and expressed no desire to emulate its chaos. In order to stop overbearing moralists from incriminating honest art, we reject the notion that entertainment is manipulative, simply because it hasn’t actually moved us to replicate the actions it displays.

That's inaccurate, and we all know it. The truth is, quality art can glamorize even the most sordid of human behavior, and usually because of that, it’s easier to find twisted theme we relate to. No one understands this better than Eminem. He’s always been acutely aware of his ability to cut to the core of the human id, and has always been willing to use this as his leverage in an increasingly panicked society. Remember how on “The Real Slim Shady” he bragged he’s, “only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room"? Multiple times on the original Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem defers the blame for the debased activities of the youth to negligent parents, and he's right to. But secretly, I think he knows that while parents can be very much present, and positive factors in a young person's life, at for least some period of time, they might not exert the influence of a rap artist.

For the TRL generation, Eminem entered the public consciousness as we hit our formative years, and that stays with you. They like to say that every generation grows up faster, and even though that seems like some paranoid, elderly superstition, it’s probably true. Kids will always be kids, but teenagers weren’t completely desensitized to Internet porn generations ago. They had Elvis swinging his pelvis on TV as a subject of controversy, not Eminem screaming “hate fags, the answer’s yes” in their ears in middle school.

Of course, adolescents from any past era had to witness other unbearable injustices and brutalities: institutionalized racism, legal sexism, genocide, slavery, and so on. But those atrocities were understood in a context of reality. Entertainment’s not supposed to be that. It’s supposed to be escapism and fantasy. You want to believe that your children can sit in front of the television and watch a person sing a song and not have their mind infiltrated and poisoned. Although many, many artists from decades before challenged that notion, peak Eminem was every parent’s worst nightmare on another level.

After the success of The Marshall Mathers LP—still the most daring, obscene, and finest work of his career—Eminem knew the impact that was made. On “Without Me,” the first single from his next album, The Eminem Show, he referenced how his music was “infesting in your kids’ ears and nesting.” But that record was just a culmination of a spirit that was always there. The Marshall Mathers LP opens up with Eminem choking a woman and raping his mother with the disclaimer, “It’s too late, I’m triple platinum and tragedies happened in two states.” That triple platinum album he’s referencing is, of course, his debut, The Slim Shady LP, which, the year prior, began with “Hi, kids, do you like violence?” Eminem’s been consistently hyperaware of the influence of music, and the resulting opposition to it, which gave him an even greater vantage point to toy with those offended and test the boundaries of popular culture.

But even with all of the self-aware nitpicking, reality is inevitable. Eminem isn’t just a controversy-breeding one-trick pony. His thoughts were relatable, even at their darkest, and more honest than anything. That’s why on “Real Slim Shady,” he says, “In every single person there’s a Slim Shady lurking.” That remains to be verified for every single person, but it was true for me. And it wasn’t me being a brainwashed teen blindly following one of my favorite rappers. Eminem just said shit and did shit the way I wanted to do it: no fucks given, no filter, with an air of provocative brilliance. He pushed the undercurrent of human thought, and I identified with it.

The literal outcome of this doesn’t play out like some flawless, romantic depiction of a kid inspired by his favorite rapper. The influence, instead, always plays out clumsily, and is more notable for simply existing. But there's no question that almost overtly, rather than subconsciously, Eminem's music has been there as a bit of a devil on my shoulder and made me do some fucked up things.

In fifth grade, I was so fascinated by Eminem's "the ill type to stab myself with a steel spike/while I’m blowing my brains out just to see what it feels like" lyric on The Slim Shady LP’s “I'm Shady” that I actively sought to experience something similar the best I could. This resulted in me stapling my hand in class out of curiosity "just to see what it feels like.” It didn't even hurt, and I didn't make a scene. Maybe two other students knew what I'd done. It was just a dumb and pathetic thing I did on my own accord because of a song. It all started from there.

I always admired Eminem’s point of view on conflict, on Limp Bizkit diss “Girls” and his “Fubba U Cudda Cudda” freestyle, in particular. His advice to “let them diss you first and respond immediately” on that freestyle, plus his general tendency to get extremely personal and harsh during beef, has informed my approach to similar situations to the point of ruining relationships. “Medicine Ball” from Relapse definitely got me dumped, because when you’re leaving your girlfriend to go intern in New York City and showing no sadness about it, the last thing she wants to hear is you rapping along to lyrics like “perform the home abortion with Dexter then I guess I’ll dig her fetus out with a wire hanger then digest her” on the last night you’ll see her for months.

I’ve idiotically gotten into a few physical altercations in nightclubs and the like, and more than considering how embarrassing an assault charge is, had my actions justified by the passion behind lines like “pistol whipping motherfucking bouncer 6’2”” on The Eminem Show’s “Soldier.” The “as ecstasy’s got me standing next to you, getting sentimental as fuck, spilling guts to you, we just met, but I think I’m in love with you” line from The Marshall Mathers LP’s “Drug Ballad” was reaffirming in the sense that it made me never feel bad about testing the limits of MDMA consumption and ignoring everyone else in a party to blabber to someone on the couch.

Eminem’s not directly responsible for anything I’ve done, but I’ve always been able to turn to his music as confirmation that even my worst actions weren’t actually so abnormal. After a long career of raps that make this kind of impression, that’s what The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is lacking in. Eminem may have once talked about slashing his wrists in jest, or “just clowning” as he puts it, but Stan was moved to do it in real life for a reason. Maybe it’s because we’ve all grown up a bit, but Eminem’s not planting fucked up thoughts in kids’ brains anymore. When you’ve lived through the whirlwind moments when he was capable of that, witnessing him transforming into a 41-year-old man whose only asset is rapping exceedingly well is a bit sad. But that’s OK. Things change.

These days, when Nicki Minaj and J. Cole rap punchlines about school shootings, no one bats an eyelash. Eminem allowed that to happen, and however crass, that’s his legacy and what we’ll remember most vividly, whether we agree with it or not. It’s a weird, but totally authentic, form of progress. Eminem desensitized us to our own extremes, and did it so well that even he himself can’t shock us much anymore. As anticlimactic as that might seem, the lasting impact he has on music and pop culture because of that is his legacy, and nothing he does now can take away from that. Eminem has nothing else to prove and no one else to offend.

Ernest Baker is a writer living in Los Angeles. He's on Twitter - @ernestbaker