In the following essay I have presented a dual-analysis of two works.  One, the new Eminem double album Relapse and Two, the classic work of philosopher/historian Leo Strauss.  I hope you enjoy.

Akbar Lightning

Persecution and the Art of Rhyming

by Akbar Lighting

My first real engagement with Eminem’s music happened at a fruit basket company in Manhattan where I took orders over the phone.  One of my colleagues asked me to come over to his desk where he handed me his earphones and told me to listen.  When he pressed play I heard the opening song from Eminem’s then new album The Eminem Show, a song called White America.  My friend smiled as he saw me taken in by this amazing artist and I knew I would be a fan for life.  Such is the power of Eminem’s voice that I was certain, after 20 seconds, beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had encountered a living genius.  Here is the text from the beginning of that song:

I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see, so many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me
who share the same views and the same exact beliefs, it’s like a fuckin’ army marchin’ in back of me
So many lives I touch, so much anger aimed in no particular direction, just sprays and sprays and straight through your radio waves it plays and plays, till it stays stuck in your head for days and days who woulda thought, standing in this mirror bleachin’ my hair, with some peroxide, reachin for a t-shirt to wear that I would catapult to the forefront of rap like this? How could I predict my words would have an impact like this I must’ve struck a chord, with somebody up in the office, cuz Congress keeps telling me I ain’t causin’ nuthin’ but problems and now they’re sayin’ I’m in trouble with the government, I’m lovin’ it, I shoveled shit all my life/and now I’m dumping it on…

White America!

So, when I found out a few weeks ago about Eminem’s new double album Relapse I was eager to hear it.  I downloaded it, burned one of the discs and went for a drive.  Upon first hearing I was a bit disappointed, as my expectations were very high.  It failed somehow to recapture that same feeling I had years ago at that fruit basket company office.  I wanted that feeling, and I wanted Eminem to deliver it to me.

At the same time as I was exploring Eminem’s new work I was reading a book, suggested to me by Logocentric, titled Persecution and the Art of Writing by a philosopher and historian named Leo Strauss.  I was tempted to make a negative judgment of Eminem’s new album.  It’s focus on brutality, violence and vulgarity was dominant and distasteful, but somehow I was reminded of my initial experience with Strauss’ book.  Relapse had none of the clarity and pointed political passion of Eminem’s other work and this double album was not only less musically seductive, its language seemed to lack a coherent narrative, all of which I had come to celebrate in his work.  But for some reason I suspected that my frustration might be misled, for I had in the same week a similar experience with Strauss’ book, my first encounter with this thinker.  When reading the first essay in Persecution and the Art of Writing, I found his train of thought rather uninspired, and I was inclined to dismiss him as a sloppy thinker, truly.  And so, what a surprise it was when I discovered that the initial lack of clarity, the lackluster opening of this work, was a conscious ploy of the work’s structure, and I suspected that I was falling in the same way for an artist’s trick in the Relapse album.  I was bolstered by a set of lines toward the end of an extra song Careful What You Wish For, where Eminem raps ‘Every CD, critics gave it a 3, then 3 years later they’d go back and re rate it, and call it, The Slim Shady LP the greatest…’  He goes on, but the implication is obvious; this was the self-awareness of a master unafraid of bewildering expectations.  The ideological parallel between these two men was too interesting for me to dismiss, so as I worked to finish Strauss’ impressive work I committed to receiving the Relapse album detached from prior prejudices with a conscious decision to view Eminem’s work through a growing Straussian perspective.

As I set to writing a dual investigation of this sort I thought it might be interesting to bury within this text the same kind of hidden meaning that one learns to discern in Strauss, but I confess it does not seem to match my temperament, and because of this I suspect eventually I might argue against such evasion.  Nonetheless, however you feel about such techniques, when you read Persecution and the Art of Writing, and you make the necessary commitment to understanding it, you will be hard pressed to deny the following statement:  that Strauss is a philosopher of the highest order.  All who judge something thus, all those who appoint themselves capable of making such claims do so as a result of an affect that all such works share, and to describe that affect is to do as much as possible to make clear a writer’s agenda.  And the philosopher’s that share this symbolic stage, that I have set to display greatness, are those who are able to take me on a journey that not only stretches my mind, granting me access to a wider breadth of thought, but who take me there concurrent with a reawakening of my sense of wonder and fascination with those questions that give life a sense of purpose.  When I first discovered Plato’s Socrates I was amazed at the clarity and grace with which this ancient philosopher could produce an internal journey in my mind, nurturing a logical strength that effected a new skepticism giving my life vitality and enthusiasm.  This accomplishment owes much to a stylistic device of Plato’s that grants the reader the necessary voyeuristic detachment, a safe place to explore his/her own ignorance by use of the counterpoint character to whom Socrates poses his questions.  This dialogical ‘other’ acts as a reader’s surrogate.  When Socrates is challenged by one of the many fallacy-ridden citizens of Athens, a reader may sit to the side and reap the benefit of Socratic method of subtracting the excess in the mind without any personal investment.  Of the many aspects of Strauss I could choose to focus on there is one that is simple and represents a marked innovation in the art of philosophy, and one subsequently that he shares with Eminem.  When reading Persecution and the Art of Writing one discovers quite by surprise that the practiced skepticism the reader brings to the art of reading has been taken into account by the author and has been used much the way a Chung Fu master uses the inertia of the attacker to disorient and bring the opponent closer.  Strauss uses the reader’s oppositional habits to attach the reader to initial argumentation only to switch dramatically against that argument, thus yanking the rug out from under the reader’s feet.  The reader then is faced with a choice, to retreat to the solid ground of his/her prejudices or surrender to the oceanic voyage of Straussian thought.  In this way Strauss has recreated or resurrected the Platonic dialogue with one exception; the reader now stands in the line of dialogical fire.  This is a more immersive experience, one that is utterly threatening.  Once one adjusts to the swaying motion of Straussian thought, and commits to a short stint at sea, the reader gains access to some of his charted destinations.  In Strauss there are a few polarities that operate as the guiding lights of his book and I would like to discuss them, but before that I want to say this very clearly, that much of the power of Persecution and the Art of Writing derives from a stylistic mastery, a form of devotion to the crafting of language, and here is where a comparison between him and Eminem is most relevant.

With this new perspective I quickly found a footing in the new terrain of the Relapse Album, finding a few running themes that set the stage for the unfolding drama of such research.  I had to accept right away that Relapse was much less overt in its political and personal aims and that it was, on the whole, much more an act of deeper commitment to the ultimate aims of rap music, to use the structure of language, the rhythm inherent in the semantics and grammar to produce something purely musical.  Whereas Bach, who is celebrated for his precision, used tones and notes, Eminem layers the images that words produce with the sounds that construct them to weave a tapestry that, if you are accustomed to Eminem’s work, often ascends into sublime climactic transcendence of rhythm, much like a Beethoven Sonata.  And like Strauss’s work where the subversive mastery is distasteful, and often invisible, to the lazy reader; here too with Eminem, a person unable to listen repetitively, who avoids learning the words in order to follow along, will miss out on the profound consciousness that rests in each word choice, and in missing this will lose a deeper perspective on the flexibility of language, that acts as the meta-narrative of this abstract work.  When you are trying to learn a song, you find yourself leaning on words of habit like ‘to’ or ‘and’ only to find Eminem’s subtle substitutions like ‘anna’ or ‘ta’ or ‘gonna’ allow a set of 20 or 30 lines of text to hinge delicately upon a single beat.

The Eminem Show, his fourth album, was the first album to have widespread popularity and it was full of explicit and masterfully expressed invective against Bush and an America that had lost its sense of humor, and above all its sense of discernment.  This quality, discernment, is the primary value I would link between Eminem and Strauss.  Eminem’s movie 8 Mile was also a movie made for what Strauss would call the ‘vulgar’ public, a very clear morality tale with somewhat conservative virtues, like hard work and perseverance.  Some of the songs from 8 Mile like Lose Yourself and the title song are as inspiring to human striving as anything I’ve ever read or heard, and they were of course written to that end.  Eminem’s follow up to these two efforts was entitled Encore and hinted at the more abstract, nonsensical direction that Relapse would celebrate.  Such is the reward an artist gives to him/herself, after attempting to serve the public, and having succeeded.  And in this way the Relapse album is a tour de force, an exploration of an art without a moral end, and this is one of the themes I wish to discuss.

Here I would like to point out a quote by W. E. H. Lecky that precedes the very first chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing:

“That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable, facts in history.”

Recently in a Globatron post we discussed the ethical constraints of free speech and we used Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist as an example, a movie that depicts very gruesome scenes of sexualized brutality, and I came down against such a thing as an immoral use of artistic craft.  And shortly after this I listened to Eminem’s album where he deals repetitively with brutal murder, rape, child molestation, making artistic flourishes out of such things.  It is a very dark album, to be sure, and this is one reason I sought to dismiss it.  But I want to propose, in spite of my own wishes, that there is something here of value to investigate.  The great history of art is replete with references to the ‘muse’, that mysterious aspect of human imagination from which new ideas emerge.  And our relationship with that muse has, through most of human history, been a love affair, as artists have often felt artistic talent to be a token of divine attribution, a gift from the gods.  But post-modernism and the growing flood of artistic content has possibly muddied our relationship with this muse, and it might be that artists are engaged in a very severe fight over limited existential resources, and so have become like abusive lovers, beating the muse into submission in order to get, in however brutal ways we can, the love/inspiration that we want.  Perhaps, we might explain such extreme acts of brutality this way, as we see in Lars Von Trier, and why we see so much horror in Eminem’s words.  It is important to add here that this album is replete with references to Eminem’s recent sobriety from drugs, and such is the kind of will that one must utilize without the crutch of mind-numbing substances to access the subconscious.  Facing the unknown sober with newly heightened senses requires what equates to a level of interpersonal violence in order to do what once felt natural, and now feels impossible.  If we read persecution in this album we see its source as Eminem himself.  The album starts off with a discussion between him and his doctor about him practicing his sobriety out in the world, and the doctor turns into the devil encouraging him to return to drugs and alcohol.  The battle that every man or woman must engage in to achieve any level of moral mastery is expressed in Relapse using the metaphor of sex and violence to make palpable the pain and struggle equated with such acts of faith, that kind of revelatory choice that declares the self valuable in spite of a knowledge about a universe that appears value-free.

In this way, if we accept the violence in Relapse as a metaphor for creative will, we see this struggle too in Strauss’ work, as we work to unearth his position on the continuums of revelation and reason, religion and philosophy.  To be upfront, by the time I made my way to the end of Strauss’ book I had come to believe he would reveal, in the same way he had on smaller scales, his argument’s aims; I had come to trust that I would get a pay-off.  He was either going to argue for more divinely inspired choice, more revelation, or he was going to make his intention clear for more rational engagement combined with skeptical and disciplined intellectual restraint.  But in the same way I wished the Relapse album was going to reinforce my expectations of Eminem’s art, I was forced after reading Persecution… to address my own expectations about philosophical purpose.  As Eminem explores his freedom of speech to the point of absolute absurd vulgarity, I could argue that he is looking for the limits or boundaries of language; perhaps this is true too of Lars Von Trier.  These artists of the vulgar might be attempting some sort of cathartic shock through which humanity will reawaken its passion for prudence.  And here, we meet the psychological aspect of this investigation, what I might suggest would be the most fruitful plane of interpretation for such men.

Anybody familiar with Eminem knows that he is angry, and that this resentment rests in the degraded state of his childhood, the addictive, neglectful selfishness of his mother combined with a racial structure that worked against him and everyone he knew providing internal identity tensions of which he is aware, and although he has integrated much of this into his identity as an artist, the combination of conflicts is more than the sum of the parts, it is equivalent to an existential weather system, and we would show our own inexperience if we dismissed his work as simplistically therapeutic.  We are called, by the craft, to acknowledge a mature artist presenting aspects of the human condition that are insurmountable, and against which we all must struggle, however vulgar they might be.  This is the universal nature of his work, and in his latest album he has branched into a more esoteric teaching.  And into this we drag our exoteric concerns, as I did and still do.

…your submitting to skill, sitting still I’m admitting I’m beginning to feel…like I don’t think anyone’s real…faced with a dilemma, I can be Dahli Lama..and be calm or bring drama step beyond a Jeffery Dahmer…
Eminem from Must Be The Ganja

If we are to take Strauss’ claims seriously, we would look here at the Relapse album, for Eminem’s highest conclusions on matters of life, as this album appears the least sensible.  As Strauss uses Maimonides and Spinoza to illustrate the ways in which we read, and in reading choose to write, Eminem uses murder and transgressions against public taste to symbolize the dark side of the creative process.  As readers and listeners we are faced with, in artists like Strauss and Eminem, a very difficult choice.  Are we to use their work to relieve our perplexity, or are we to surrender to higher levels of it?  And in this dilemma we stand accused implicitly by the artists, facing our own capacity to persecute, and this I believe is a very legitimate interpretation of Strauss’ work.  If we take the first route and insist upon finding an agenda, then we are forced to investigate the writer’s historical place, and in doing learn a lot about the exoteric meaning of the work, but, according to Strauss, add very little to the esoteric truth of a work.  For, according to his interpretation of Spinoza, the deepest truth of a work ought to be made available by the content within the work alone.  But if that is true, then our desire for historical context would reveal our own impotent level of perception, and in this we stand persecuted by the very work we labored under.

“On the level of the refutation and of the refutation of the refutation, i.e., on the level of ‘human wisdom,’ the disputation between believer and philosopher is not only possible, but without any question the most important fact of the whole past.”

Strauss  (essay within Persecution and the Art of Writing, The Law of Reason in the Kuzari)

It is worth noting that the word ‘persecute’ comes from a Latin root that means ‘to pursue closely’, synonymous with pestering, harassment and following.  We are reminded here of the fame that Eminem consistently criticizes and deconstructs, that microscope through which his fans, persecutors and followers peer trying to ‘really’ understand him.  In the same way we might see Strauss making a deep criticism of followers and in doing so remind us of the relationship between those who make philosophy and religion and those who pursue it.

“Accordingly, what first came to the sight of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers in their reflections on Revelation was not a creed or a set of dogmas, but a social order, if an all-encompassing order, which regulates not merely actions but thoughts or opinions as well.”
Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing Introduction)

We are tempted here to make the mistake of interpreting both Strauss and Eminem as being primarily interested in the kind of social change that is implied by a method of inquiry whereby we disregard our own distaste for contradiction, having exchanged it for a belief in their method as ultimately revelatory of a more complex truth, but a truth nonetheless that still equates to ‘the good.’  And here it would be best, if we want to be thoroughly skeptical of our own motives, to look at an important word that appears in the title, “Art.”  If we were to dismiss that word, we would be unable to discuss what is possibly the most exciting aspect of Strauss, and that is his ability to craft a paragraph that you want to read over and over again, not because you failed to understand it, but because its understanding was so clear and profound that it appeared to the mind as an object of beauty to be reflected upon.  Many times when we discuss philosophy we miss its musical nature, and since the ultimate wisdom of philosophy is the acknowledgment of human limitations, those of us engaged in it must relish in the ‘enjoyment’ of philosophy, and in so doing be aware of the rhythm to which it owes much of its power.  Eminem’s use of percussion and voice add to the pure rhythm of the text, and I argue that Strauss is not innocent of this pleasure.  His rhythm derives from cognitive expectations of reading, and he utilizes these through the syncopated presentation of ideas in order to grant his conclusions musicality.  In this, he allows the text a relationship with the mysterious creative force that is sensed through such cognitions.  It is the sublimity of artistic creation that is on display, but a very particular kind, that of language, and further more, language pointed toward the divine.  This has political ramifications necessitate bipolar understandings of the words persecution, history and art.

Here is a short example:

“Before attempting to answer the question of how to proceed in a particular historical investigation, one must clarify the reasons why the investigation is relevant.  In fact, the reasons which induce one to study a particular historical subject, immediately determine the general character of the procedure.”

(first paragraph of Persecution… Essay 5, How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise)

We see a convergence between these two men that center around a fixation on practice and the means by which it is expressed in language.  Strauss’ pursuit of a truthful relationship with language is one aspect of his esoteric truth, as it relates to the Judaic revelatory relationship with words, and how such reverence is contrasted by necessity against the ‘unquestionable’ role of ‘vice’ in the human pursuit of progress.  Eminem’s Relapse documents the exploration of the outer limits of such irreverence, encoding within it the open questions that represent his existential perspective.  The paradoxical paternalism of both men is rendered by an acknowledgment of subversion that cannot be entirely defended by means of reason.

Persecution and execution, and their multi-faceted definitions, are the explanatory relational terms that link these two works, and are keys to some of doors that one faces within.

Strauss pursues Maimonides and his Guide for the Perplexed in the way I have pursued Eminem.  In Maimonides he sees himself, a human being seeking an answer, a source of power that can be used for ‘the good’ and thus free himself from his own perplexity.  Strauss, if we accept this premise, is both the perplexed and the liberator.  He is the resurrected, although encoded, Maimonides; an historian to the vulgar public, and the carrier of a great tradition to those who have the ability to read ‘between the lines.’ When Strauss makes claims about the death of philosophy, and the emergence of a more historical/traditional relationship with the term, whereby philosophers become Talmudic carriers of a tradition instead of radical innovators, we see here an occupational humility, but this too is a smokescreen, of the same sort used by the scholar of the Kuzari to make criticisms of Judaic law.

The presentation of the Straussian Cave metaphor, as contrasted to Plato’s Cave by the addition of a tunnel, through which quasi-philosophies and superstitions dig deeper into darkness, is a clear contradiction of Strauss’ argument for the rising primacy of historical analysis.  This very clear philosophical innovation whereby we are challenged to see the need for 2 types of liberating methodologies, and the tragedy of that, make clear a more than objective relationship with the terms of inquiry.  The illumination of such a context makes the stakes very high as we enter into a relationship with Spinoza’s theology, one that seeks to clarify the boundaries between reason and revelation, in Strauss’ final essay.  And yet, just at this point, when we are brought to a state of heightened investment in the philosophical pursuit, when we have abandoned our skeptical detachment in the hopes that we have finally encountered an answer, we are left with a puzzle, but one ultimately that reflects back upon ourselves, and this is not only astounding but has the qualities of a gift, as we are both simultaneously reminded of the illusory certainty of our minds and the necessity for it.  This puzzle is a reawakening of seduction.  The idea that historical analysis is the final resting place of the philosopher might be valid in an exoteric way, but the ultimate aims are the same, and for the same old reasons.

To accept this work as a puzzle we must make an assumption about Persecution and the Art of Writing.  We must take it for granted that all the directions given in the interpretation and explanation of Maimonides and Spinoza are also, maybe even more importantly, aimed at the reader’s interpretation of Leo Strauss.  This is clearer when listening to Eminem, due precisely to the obscuring nature of history.  We wonder how aware he is of himself, how much he knows about what we want to hear, and how much he works to satisfy or frustrate those desires.  The division between the vulgar and the esoteric is merely a way of narrowing one’s audience in order to find minds that are most sympathetic to the deepest truth of selfhood and in this way create the connection that all such men/women long for.

History, unlike the present, is a safe place for a philosopher to show us the impossibility of hard and steady knowledge, and in doing so, reveal the fact of free-will, that realm of human agency that asks us to choose that which we desire but know not why.  Eminem does not need history because the very act of persecution has become a form of commodity and I liken this to the days of the Roman Coliseum where heroes were celebrated for their ability to stay alive, and Eminem has been a master warrior in a world built with ideas as bricks and persecution as mortar.  Both men are talented, and quite capable of pleasing the crowds of this world to their own benefit and yet they strive to construct ideological structures within which we may experience the divine realm, one without the vulgarity of values, but one nonetheless where discernment is of the utmost importance.

To summarize, it is clear that persecution is pointed to as an element of self-realization for these two men.  In one song on Relapse Eminem sings the chorus ‘the world is my medicine ball.’  I propose this is the meta-narrative of Persecution and the Art of Writing, that the suffering of the vulgarity and injustice of the world, and the persecution that every man or woman who longs for divinity must face, is instructive because it forces the perplexed philosopher to dig into history, and in doing so learn, as Mark Twain said that “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”