So, Eminem and Mariah Carey (of all people) have been firing volleys back and forth for the last couple of years. Eminem claims that he dated Mariah, she denies it. Em lampooned her on the single “Superman”, while Mariah fired back with “Clown”. Now, Em’s not only got Mariah back in his crosshairs, he’s going after her husband Nick Cannon, calling him a “prick” and Mariah a “fucking whore”.
Nick fired back on his blog, calling the record trash (no surprise there) and basically calling Eminem a racist, bringing back up the comments “The Source” magazine captured a few years back where he went off on black women.
Corny as the dude is, I’m riding with Nick on this one.
The fact of the matter is that not only has Eminem fallen off, but he continues to prey on easy targets. Remember back in the day when he was dissing people like Christina Aguilera and ‘Nsync (funny now that Justin Timberlake has more street cred than Em does). Now, he’s going off on John Mayer and Jessica Simpson? And carrying on about Mariah Carey? (no pun intended) And this is supposed to be artistry? Let’s not forget the fact that Eminem is now in his mid-thirties (36, to be exact), an age when one would figure the childish rants would stop. When has Eminem ever sounded off on someone that could actually rattle his cage? (his joining in on 50 Cent’s beef with Murder Inc. excepted). This is the musical equivalent of the kid in middle school who bullies everyone smaller than him but won’t go near someone his own size.
I also, like Nick, wonder if it’s cool among Eminem’s black fans (I’m assuming he has some left) that he’s calling a black woman a “whore”, which according to Nick is “way worse than anything Don Imus could have ever said”. Of course, folks are quick to call Mariah bi-racial because she looks white, but as Nick points out, she’s the same racial makeup as Barack Obama (white mother, black father), and as I’m now going to point out, she’s the same racial makeup as the definitively black Alicia Keys. So if we’re gonna go with the party line of “if you’ve got a little bit of black in you…”, then Mariah’s as much a sista as Angie Stone or Janet Jackson. And there would be hell to pay if Eminem went off like that on one of those ladies, right? (something tells me that with the hip-hop community turning a blind eye to obvious racial transgressions-see Fat Joe and DJ Khaled’s continued use of the word “nigger”-, it wouldn’t matter, but I like to dream).
The funny thing is, I’m not even that big a Mariah Carey fan. I just think that Eminem gets over on stuff that should kill his career. He hasn’t made a good record since 2002, and he sells them, by and large, to the same type of angry kids that are only tough from a distance (or through a computer screen), and imagine themselves as “tough” as Eminem imagines himself to be (now that he’s surrounded by the “gangsta” 50 Cent and his crew). How tough would Eminem be confronted one on one? And how many people are going to be disappointed when “Relapse” comes out, they buy it, and find out it’s a stinking piece of shit?
