auld_lang_syne : AULD LANG SYNE LYRICS
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Auld Lang Syne
by Robert Burns
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne!
Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne!
We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine,
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin’ auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’t in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie’s a hand o’ thine,
And we’ll tak a right guid willie-waught
For auld lang syne!
And surely ye’ll be your pint’ stoup,
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne!
White rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers) from Detroit joins the legion of Insane Clown Posse and Kid Rock, disaffected white kids from the suburbia that (or this, or whatever) unleashed their angry rants at society through a parody of ghetto music's street genre.
The Slim Shady (Universal, 1999) highlights Mathers' carefree and sarcastic attitude (the hit single My Name Is., the follow-up Just Don't Give A F**k), besides his tormented youth (Brain Damage, Rock Bottom), his freudian sense of guilt (Guilty Conscience and his questionable antisocial preaching his perverted fantasies, which frequently involve his own daughter (97' Bonnie & Clyde, in which his baby's mother gets killed and the baby helps him throw the body in the ocean, Bad Meets Evil). Mathers' songs are crafted with a parsimonious choice of instruments and a modicum of syncopated rhythms. Notwithstanding Mathers' macho humour (particularly bitter when addressing pop icons like Spice Girls or Pamela Anderson), a sense of desolation and even loneliness permeates the music, which ultimately reflects the doom and weltanschaung of the urban misfits. And the closing Still Don't Give A recapitulates this tragic leitmotiv in a quasi-classical epic. The album will top the charts for weeks in 2000.
The Marshall Mathers LP (Columbia, 2000) refines that approach. Eminem's salacious fantasies of Britney Spears and other assorted "bitches", "sluts" and "faggots" are crowd-pleasers (if the crowd is morbid enough, as crowds tend to be), but the art is elsewhere: Stan (whose rude male rap alternates with an angelic female lullaby over sounds of a storm and a Neil Young-ian rhythm) and Kim (whose thundering, symphonic score punctuates the screams of two arguing lovers and contrasts with a romantic melody a` la Francoise Hardy) are psychodramas (not only songs) that force hyper-realism into rap music the same way the Doors forced drugs into pop music.
It is not a coincidence that Mathers' tragic peak comes with the post-Morrison Freudian nightmare of Kill You, a rap (paced by brutal pauses) that sweeps away any remaining taboos about sex and violence, a conversation piece in which vulgar language becomes "the" poetic language. To emphasize the melodrama, The Way I Am employs even death bells and a Beethoven-ish piano figure, and its rap is as visceral and desperate as Eminem music can be. When it works, Eminem's pantomime is a force of nature.
On the other hand, The Real Slim Shady is a farcical rigmarole with a vaudeville-esque rhythm, I'm Back is virtually a cabaret number turned rap, Drug Ballad employs a stomping beat, a strummed piano and girl-group backing vocals, Criminal sounds like a mockery of Eminem's own hit My Name Is, and Marshall Mathers is a parody that borrows from Broadway musicals and western soundtracks: Mathers has no respect for his own art. Mathers is a calculating pop phenomenon (songs alternate with brief spoken interludes of people commenting on Eminem's attitude, of he having oral sex with two guys, etc, the ultimate form of self-glorification) that viscerally exposes calculating pop phenomena. The album will sell 15 million copies in two years.
The single Without Me is the only "consummable" song on Eminem's third album, Show (Columbia, 2002), which, for the most part, is busier promoting himself than in creating art.
Compared with the previous output, this is Eminem's "serious", "mature", "adult" album. Like David Bowie and other pop stars before him, he is beginning to worship his own life/art relationship, in a subtle bid to self-craft a personality cult. Alas, it is also the one in which the listener is subjected to an endless, unbearable rosary of his heroic attitudes in a hostile and hypocritical world (Without Me, Squaredance, Soldier, Cleaning Out My Closet, Say Goodbye Hollywood, When The Music Stops).
Angst is ok (White America), but repeated self-immolation is ok only if followed by facts, whereas this album seems much more interested in immortality than in immolation. Nods to Aerosmith (Sing for the Moment) and Pink Floyd ('Till I Collapse) and Dr Dre's contributions (Business, the best hip-hop number, and the duet Say What You Say) are not enough to change the impression of a monolithic uniformity: musically, the album is impeccably produced, but repetitive to boredom. If Eminem ever had a sense of humour, it's gone (except for the closing My Dad's Gone Crazy), and it has not been replaced by an adequate sociopolitical reportage, since Eminem mainly "reports" about himself.
Eminem's artistic collapse continued on Encore (Shady, 2004), on which the provocative angst of the early albums was replaced by a sort of parody of such angst (Rain Man). A few rhymes (Crazy in Love), rhythms (Evil Deeds) and melodies (Yellow Brick Road) are genuinely inspired, but, let's face it, his Freudian self-analysis stinks, his Slim Shady alter-ego is yesterday's news, his self-reflections about his own celebrity are becoming quite annoying. His attempt at politics in Mosh is childish at best. He seems to thrive on controversy, not art. But then, maybe, that's precisely what his career is all about: turning controvery into an art.
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