MY LIFE IN HORROR: AM I TOO LOUD FOR YOU?

And, like, newsflash, motherfuckers: four years ago the US managed to elect a racist to the highest office in the land, and despite then having one of the most hilariously corrupt and inept terms of office in the history of the presidency, as of the time of writing, that motherfucker still isn’t wearing an orange jumpsuit

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


Am I Too Loud For You?


Content note: discussions of violence, including sexual violence, misogyny, homophobia and the use of homophobic slurs.


The first time I heard the name was the year 1999. I was still working in the pub.


It was White Natalie who told me about him. We were talking about music, and I was trying to explain to this early 20’s London girl about metal, and she was trying to tell me about chart dance and hip-hop, and I don’t think we were really communicating at all, to be honest, but we had much time to pass, so we talked.


Or, more accurately, she talked, and I mocked.


“Like the chocolate?”


“No…”


He’s named after a fucking sweet?”


“No! It’s…”


“What’s his first name, peanut?”


“Fuck off! His name’s Marshall…”


“Like the amplifier?”


“I don’t know what that is. No, Marshall Mathers, that’s where the name comes from – m in m, see?”


“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.”


“But he also calls himself Slim Shady…”


“I stand corrected.”


“Piss off!”


And so on. The conversation turned to acts whose names may have seemed less silly to me at the time, but were clearly less memorable at 20 years' distance, and, secure in my metal meathead snobbery that she didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about when it came to quality music, I gave it not a single moments further thought.


Sorry, White Natalie. You were right, and I was wrong. At least about this chap.


Fast forward a year. I’m now working at Guildhall University, earning a grand a month and feeling like a millionaire. Monday night D&D is the highlight of the week; The Ghost has assembled a great bunch of lads, all late twenties/early thirties, and I take over DMing, running an epic classic D&D greatest hits campaign, hitting the party with a Quantum Leap curse so I can take them through Castle Greyhawk, The Temple Of Elemental Evil, and any other campaign I can get my mitts on, continuity be damned. The Ghost has an extensive collection. I have ambitions to take them into Ravenloft eventually. And, as previously mentioned, after the wage poverty drought of The Pub Year, I’m making up for it now by dumping a non-trivial percentage on my disposable income in HMV Oxford Street every month.


And one of the gang – let’s call him Drew – mentions the name again. Drew has music taste a lot wider and a fair bit more Indie focussed than me, but he knows his onions, and he says Eminem is Actually Good, and this time, I listen, but mentally add an asterisk that reads ‘for a rapper’, because yeah, sure, Kid Rock’s cool (and, yes, Eminem’s verse on that album is superb), and Bodycount are awesome, but rapping without guitars? I dunno, man, life is pretty short, you know?


And then, Marilyn Manson happens.


I mean, he’s been happening for some time, for me, as previously mentioned. And, yes, to address the elephant in the room, I am aware of the many credible accusations that allege him to be a gigantically vile asshole, I believe victims and no longer consider myself a fan… but it's the year 2000, and I know about none of this, but I do know Holy Wood, his third-in-a-trilogy album that started with Antichrist Superstar and whose second entry, Mechanical Animals, was at least partly responsible for lifting me out of a pretty deep teenage depression, is coming out that summer, and hoo, boy, the Marilyn Manson BBS service is buzzing with the dripdripdrip of promo images and sound clips and whatnot. And somewhere in that pre-hype moment, Manson makes reference to having completed some collaboration with Eminem ‘that nobody knows about yet’ and sad to say, that did the trick for me.


And look, in my defence, like Anton LeVay before him, Manson had an absolute genius for attaching himself to bigger cultural figures, who, likewise, were titillated by being photographed with the Antichrist Superstar. And the ‘collaboration’ turned out to be no more than a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in Eminem’s The Way I Am video, as Em, in a bar talking about Columbine, says ‘They blame it on Marilyn, And the heroin, But where were the parents at? And look where it’s at’. Chuck in a hilariously pixilated video clip from Mansons’ site where he joined Eminem on stage for the final chorus of the song, followed by an embrace between the two stars, and suddenly I’m very interested in this rapper named after a chocolate.


Drew lends The Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs to The Ghost, he burns me copies with colour photocopies of the cover art, and all of a sudden, Eminem takes up residence in my stereo and my internal cultural landscape.


I quickly gravitated to MMLP. It’s not that SSLP is bad (and these days, settling into mellow middle age, I actually prefer it, in all its wild Tex Avery On Angel Dust Technicolour energy) but the darker edge of Marshal Mathers is obviously going to exert the stronger pull to a twenty-year-old Marilyn Manson fan. And so it goes.


Not that it’s not funny; there’s a thick seam of dark comedy that runs through the whole album. I have a vivid memory of sitting with The Ghost’s daughter, one of my early listens, and I think her first, and the pair of us collapsing into delighted giggles all the way through Kill You. It’s an instructive moment; up until then, the song had always hit me queasy. I couldn’t fully parse it, was the thing. I mean, It was clearly, obviously a joke. Trivially so. It’s also a manifesto for the album, in a lot of ways – ‘oh, you thought The Slim Shady LP went too far? Strap in, kids!’...


And yet.


The anger in the performance is visceral, as are the descriptions of violence. By the end of the first verse, he’s described strangling a prostitute and ‘raping his own mother’, before flinging it back in the face of the audiences and critics who have turned him into a megastar ‘”Oh, now he’s raping his own mother, abusing a whore, snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?” You’re goddamn right bitch, and now it’s too late! I’m triple platinum and tragedies happen in two states!’ and on, and sure, in his sober career he’ll achieve linguistic gymnastics and pacing that put this in the shade, but…


There's still something uncomfortably breathtaking about it, for me. There’s a relentlessness to the delivery, and the start-stop, sparse, almost nursery rhyme beat creates so much space that you can’t help but hear each machine gun syllable as it’s delivered. And I remember just… not knowing what the fuck to make of it. The anger called to me, as it had with Guns N Roses and all the rock and metal bands since. And along with that, the cartoon misogyny did trigger a laugh impulse. Given how I was raised, woman hatred was both alien and a powerful taboo, and so art that was, to me, transgressive in this way (and I do of course now realise that it’s anything but transgressive in the wider world, and that’s a significant part of the problem, but) had an incredible impact.


But it was scary, too. Because on The Slim Shady LP,  the comic leaning is more clearly signposted, from the nasal, childlike vocal delivery down to the cartoonish imagery. Gross things happen on SSLP, for sure, but it’s done with a playful glee, the sound of a kid delighting in saying shit (and, indeed ‘shit’) for the sake of it. And on one level, Kill You (and the MMLP taken as a whole) is just that turned up to eleven… but the act of turning it up to eleven changes the delivery, and created, for me, an uneasy sinister undertone that made/makes me queasy.


What’s really amazing is, right now, I’m listening to the album, and I can still feel that reaction. Normally, I can’t revisit the initial emotional impact of a work once I’ve seen it in a new mode; Like we discussed back in Pulp Fiction, that overdose scene fucked me up the first time… but only the first time. Once I was in on the joke, I’ve only ever been able to enjoy it as one of the greatest comedy scenes in modern cinema; not a complaint, just an observation.


What’s incredible to me about The Marshall Mathers LP is that, even following that listening with The Ghost’s daughter, as her laughter allowed me to see that the shock was the joke, that the po-faced angry delivery was that of a comedy rant and the laughter came tearing out of me, an explosion of relief and joy as, suddenly, I Got It, I can still flip back to that stomach sunk discomfort of those initial solo listens.


One of the interesting things about Eminem, I think, is how he’s simultaneously massively commercially successful and, in many circles, considered a kind of embarrassing artist to admit to liking. I’ve joked a couple of times with the couple of friends I have that I know are fellow fans that it's music you love to listen to on your own, but would be mortified to listen to in company. And that’s true in one sense; I’ve reconnected with Eminem’s more recent output over the last year, and I think a lot of it is absolutely phenomenal, but I honestly cannot imagine sitting and listening to it with my wife or kid. The same shit that makes me grin ear to ear as it blasts through my headphones while I walk the dog or endure an exercise session on the hated cross trainer would make me curl up with embarrassment in the company of many of my nearest and dearest. Hell, that may even be part of the pull, right? Slim as a persona is pure id, pure self-destructive impulse, pure ‘say-the-thing-you-think-but-would-never-say’ smart arsery; dude’s the fucking court jester of pop culture, poking ribald fun at everyone and everything, including himself.


At the same time, it took that communal experience, listening with another, to unlock the comedy reaction, and let me make the mental flip from uneased awe to grinning enjoyment. The permission to laugh at the most awful, heinous shit, because that was the point.


I wasn’t laughing because it wasn’t horrible, but because it was.


And we’re in this strange cultural moment, right now, in 2022. A billion bullshit column inches have been spilled about ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, and almost all of it is fucking awful scaremongering non-issues… but artists, especially artists of A Certain Age (like, to be precise, my age and older) remember perhaps a little too well the moment in the 90’s when the PMRC were trying to shut down Metal and Hip-Hop, or at least make it inaccessible to kids, while in the UK, the ‘video nasties’ scare was outlawing movies out of some preposterous suggestion of moral corruption. And, to be clear, these actually were dark moments for freedom of speech and artistic expression; we were right to be worried and fight back against government encroachments on those freedoms.


The trouble is, the muscle memory of those days runs deep. And so, in 2022, when members of marginalised communities start talking about problematic portrayals, especially in art created by artists not part of the community that they are writing in/commenting on, or YA publishers start employing specialist editors to try and ensure that such issues get identified and fixed prior to publication, a lot of artists my age and older have an almost knee-jerk negative reaction.


It’s not a good or healthy reaction, of course, and a second’s thought would tell you why. Because the difference between a community exercising its freedom of speech to interrogate and criticise art and congressional hearings and confiscation of videotapes by the state is, ah, I can’t even be bothered to complete the sentence, you’ve got the point.


Still, I bring it up because one of the things people my age and older seem to say an awful lot about the art of our youth is ‘oh yeah, but/and you wouldn't be able to get away with that these days’. And Eminem’s often held up as an example; the number of otherwise intelligent reaction video makers who say endless variations on ‘if Eminem was coming up today, he’d be so Cancelled’.


And, like, newsflash, motherfuckers: four years ago the US managed to elect a racist to the highest office in the land, and despite then having one of the most hilariously corrupt and inept terms of office in the history of the presidency, as of the time of writing, that motherfucker still isn’t wearing an orange jumpsuit, and may indeed run again next time, and win again. So get the fuck out of here with your bullshit ‘both sides are just as bad, you couldn’t do that These Days’ cause it’s fucking happening, you can literally do that shit in the white house, and appoint supreme court justices who will do that shit from the bench,  and one side wants to introduce fascism to the US, and the other side wants you to know that Lovecraft was a racist, and those are not equivalent fucking problems.


And in the specific case of Eminem, it’s worth noting that Bill Clinton was slagging him off in speeches in the late 90s, The Feds almost certainly opened a file on him when he started going after Bush on his The Eminem Show and Encore albums, and Trump got so upset by his later work that Em got a visit at his studio from the Secret Service at one point; all actual threats of ‘cancel culture’ that are fucking dangerous coming from government overreach, and, mostly from, surprise surprise, the authoritarian right. The other problem with this argument relating to Eminem is that he’s still going strong, and still putting out cartoonishly offensive songs, with a level of technical ability so high as to have become peerless. Cancelled my “the wokeratti” entire arse.


And, look, yes, absolutely, The Marshal Mathers LP contains a lot of misogyny, and lyrics that describe misogynistic violence. There’s also a lot of homophobia, including numerous uses of ‘f*g’ and variants as an insult, and do I have to say that’s clearly Not Okay? Because it’s clearly Not Okay, and I’m fine saying it, and I have no interest at all in getting into some spurious justification/apologia about whether or not he ‘really means it’ or is ‘just’ saying it for shock value (or even, at the far end, ‘playing a homophobic character’ which I’m sure someone’s tried on as a justification), for the simple reason that, in context, it doesn’t make any difference, because it’s clear we're meant to laugh along with the homophobe, and not at him, and once more, that’s Not Okay, earlier point about taboos notwithstanding.


In fact, let's put a finger right on the squirming hypocrisy of this moment; in the song Criminal, Eminem spends the entire first verse on a homophobic (and, in an ahead-of-his-time-in-a-bad-way moment, transphobic) tirade, claiming gay people don’t like him not because he’s homophobic but because they’re ‘heterophobic’ (and also want to fuck him, obviously). And I want to be clear, here; I do think, like with Kill You, he’s playing it ‘for laughs’ (the introduction to Criminal has Em stating ‘A lot of people think that because I say something in a record, I believe in it, or I’m really gonna do it’), and I will admit that, like with Kill You, I can ‘hear’ it in both modes, the intended comedic and the grossly offensive and disturbing versions.


But here’s the thing; if we’re going to defend this song on the basis that it’s ‘okay’ for him to perform this verse because ‘freedom of speech, he’s playing a character saying slurs’ (which in and of itself, yeah, I buy that’s what’s happening) what are we to make of the moment in the second verse where he edges right up to saying the N word, leaving the tape blank at the crucial moment?


(‘I drink more liquor to fuck you up quicker,
Than you'd wanna fuck me up for sayin' the word …’)




I feel like a real commitment to the bit, you say the word. But of course, he doesn’t. Because, of course, he knows there are some things he ‘can’t’ say.


Except that’s not quite right. He could say it. But he knows that it would be bad. It would have material social consequences. And, presumably, the black artists he had around him made it clear to him that saying that word on a track was a really terrible idea. Or he was bright enough to work it out for himself.


But an entire verse of queer-bashing, using homophobic slurs? Go for your life, mate. And an entire album where women as punchline punchbags? Genius.


And yet. I call myself an Eminem fan. I listen to his music, a lot, especially lately.


And I can point to why. He’s an insanely talented songwriter and performer, and some of what he does lyrically, here and especially later in his career, leaves me breathless with the skill and audacity deployed. If the word genius has any meaning when applied to art, Eminem is a genius hip-hop artist.


That’s not a justification, nor is it an excuse. It’s just a thing that’s also true.


And I can appreciate and enjoy the man’s work without defending the bullshit.


Which brings us neatly to the dark heart of The Marshal Mathers LP, and the reason I can justify talking about one of the biggest Hip Hop albums in the world as part of an essay series ostensibly about horror. Because MMLP contains, for my money, one of the most straight-up brilliant dark non-supernatural short horror stories in all of genre fiction.


It’s time to talk about Kim.


Let’s first observe, with a dark humour worthy of the subject, that this isn’t the first song on which Eminen spins a narrative in which he murders his then-wife, Kim. On The Slim Shady LP, there’s a track called 97’ Bonnie and Clyde, in which Em baby talks to his infant daughter Hayley, and it gradually becomes apparent that:

• He and Kim have separated
• Kim has hooked up with a new man, who has a son
• Eminem has ‘fixed’ this by murdering Kim, her new boyfriend/husband, and her new boyfriend/husbands son, and the bodies of all three are in the trunk of the car he’s driving
• He’s taken Hayley to the pier, where he’s going to dump the bodies before driving off with his daughter into the sunset

And it’s hilarious.


Okay, okay, sure, humour is subjective, my giggle is your yuck, probably should have gotten into that earlier. If you find 97’ Bonny and Clyde horrific and/or disturbing, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong to do so. But I’ve got to say that it absolutely cracks my shit up.


It’s mainly about the deployment of voice, I think. His tone is so soft, loving, cooing at his infant child as she gurgles and giggles, at one point interrupting his flow to ask her if she needs her diaper changing. And that same tone describes momma having ‘spilt ketchup down her shirt’ and how there’s ‘a lovely bed for momma at the bottom of the lake’ and when I type it out this sounds skin-crawlingly creepy, so maybe I am just a hilariously sick and broken person, but eh, we’ve come this far; I find it both funny and brilliant. YMMVWV.


Kim starts the same way. A piano plays a melancholic but childish melody, evoking nursery rhymes, and Em’s talking-to-baby voice cuts in, describing how his daughter has grown so much, telling his sleeping two-year-old how proud he is of her… And then suddenly he’s yelling, angrier than we’ve ever heard: ‘Sit down bitch! You move again I'll beat the shit out of you!’.


In an album not short of shocking moments, this is next level. All the smirking gleefulness is gone, and what's left is pure fury, hatred. It’s the moment in the crime thriller when the mask of the charming stranger slips and we see the killer beneath. As he continues to rant and rave, his voice begins to crack, running through a litany of grievances; she’s left him, moved her new man into their house. A woman sobs as his fury builds, as he screams at her to ‘look at your new husband now!’. It’s not stated explicitly, but the picture is painted; I see him grabbing her head, forcing her to look at the body on the floor, face red and flushed, tears in his eyes, spit flying as he yells. The sound of shattering furniture adds to the scene, as the woman begs him to stop, telling him he’s drunk, and that he’ll never get away with it. The fear in her voice is absolute, abject; as much a prisoner of miserable emotion as he is; two snarling, sobbing animals.


I realise this is probably a redundant statement, but it’s absolutely fucking horrifying.


After a chorus sung in a dead flat monotone that is, if anything, scarier than the yelled verses
(“So long, bitch you did me so wrong, I don't wanna go on, living in this world without you”) the couple are in a car, driving. He’s still yelling, she’s still begging for her life; the row is intercut with moments of road rage, Em unravelling, mind racing, distracted, yelling at other drivers, at the song on the radio, at her; there’s an absolutely gut sinking moment when he shrieks her name, voice crackling and distorting, before asking, in a quiet, childlike, teary voice ‘Why don’t you like me?’. She tries to reply, but he cuts her off, fury building again; ‘You think I’m ugly, don't you? You think I’m ugly! Get the fuck away from me!’.


By this point in my life, I’ve already had my one sustained brush with a human being I genuinely believe was both sociopathic and wished me harm, and while the circumstances were very different (and the outcome, of course, considerably less dramatic) I can tell you that the psychological realism of this moment has me fucking reeling every time. It is viscerally, elementally shocking; and, if we’re going to be honest (and we should, because the wordcount grows long and the hour late), it’s also shocking because while I’ve never physically attacked anyone in my life outside of self defense (my preferred outlet for this kind of pain and despair being self-destruction, a path not without it’s issues but one I find, on the whole, preferable morally), I’ve sure felt angry enough to do so on a few occasions, and this is a pretty accurate description of what the inside of my brain sounded and felt like in those moments of rage.


And, like, here we are, horror fans, and is this not (part of) what we’re here for? Beyond the sick thrill of getting to witness monstrosity unleashed in a ‘safe’ environment, aren’t we also here to be challenged by these moments of even more sickening recognition, as something of the darkness we are encountering in the text finds a resonating frequency with a darkness within ourselves?


I think so. It’s certainly part of what I’m here for, part of why I write horror and dark crime, and it is my sincere wish that at least some of you, sometimes, will wince when you read a tale of mine not just in sympathetic shock, but also uncomfortable recognition. And, to go even deeper, writing can be an act of radical empathy, an attempt to make sense of that which we don’t immediately understand or find relatable; some of my best work, fiction or non-fiction, comes from my reading or seeing something and thinking ‘I can’t imagine how/ why someone would…’ and then just digging in and saying ‘well, let’s find out’.


Kim is absolutely one of the most viscerally disturbing pieces of art I’ve ever encountered. The fact that Eminem is playing both voices in the song, his own murderously jealous self-destruction and his crying, screaming victim heightens that skin crawl, as does the fact that Kim is the name of his real-world then-wife. And again, for the avoidance of any doubt, that’s a very fucked up thing indeed, and morally reprehensible. Do I think he had the right to write and produce the song? I think so, on balance. Morally, should he have done it? Absolutely fuck no, he shouldn’t.


Would I rather he hadn’t, then?


Ah, fuck.


Kim is horrific entirely on its own terms, as a depiction of something that happens with depressing regularity; an angry man murdering his wife. It’s as raw and unvarnished a depiction of this particular mundane, pervasive toxic masculine horror as I can immediately recall, and when you consider it’s happening within the structure of a Hip-Hop song, complete with a need for coherent rhyme scheme, internal rhythm, and all the other structural constraints that implies, I feel like that makes the case for describing this piece as an authentic masterpiece. It’s also a song written by a man about his real-life wife, at a point when their marriage was in turmoil in part because of infidelities and incidences of domestic violence and abuse on both sides.


Here’s where it gets super, super messy. Because the authenticity of Eminem’s rage, both in the lyrics and performance, comes from what sounds and feels like an authentic place. It’s the guts of the power of the piece. At the same time, when it was recorded and released, a real-life actual woman had to deal with her megastar husband putting out a song which depicts him dragging her out into a forest and cutting her throat. And at the risk of repeating the endlessly obvious, that is incredibly fucked up and wrong and hurtful and he shouldn’t have done it.


And Kim is a masterpiece; of hip-hop, of storytelling, of horror, of performance art.


And it may sound like a copout, but what I really want is a world where people aren’t so fucked up that this horror is a part of everyday life. I want a world where jealous husbands murdering their wives is exclusively an occurrence of fiction, as opposed to an annual statistic that makes me want to see the entire species wiped out and go back in time to single-cell organisms and just figure out a  whole different way to get to guitar solos and chips that doesn’t also contain All This. And I do not accept that it’s some irreducible part of our nature to be like this, either. The fuck away from me with that defeatest, hand washing, fash adjacent essentialist bullshit.


Ramsey Campbell says of horror that it is the one genre where it is sometimes permissible to go Too Far. I don’t think there is a reasonable yardstick by which anyone could claim Kim, and by extension, the Marshal Mathers LP as a whole doesn’t go Too Far.


Was there a way a version of this song could exist that hadn’t targeted and traumatised a real-life woman? I feel like the answer has to be yes, but I can’t actually say that for sure, because Eminem’s creative process is utterly inaccessible to me. So much of what he does is excoriating self-exploration, he’s such a prominent character in his own work, that it’s impossible to say he could have accessed the same emotional depth if he hadn’t put her in the song. And if his creative process is such that abstraction wouldn’t have worked, should he simply have not written it, not recorded it, not put it out?


I think, morally, on balance, yes, he shouldn’t have.


Would I be without it?


Reader, judge me if you will, but I would not.


I would not.


KP
19/9/22


PS, My friend, Holly, is about to produce the best piece of sustained critical writing on the work of Eminem the planet has ever seen. Follow her now on Twitter - @fireh9lly - so you’re set for when the awesome starts flowing. You won’t regret it.

Kit Powers My Life in Horror Volume 2 is heading your way find out more about this amazing book here 

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