Word: eminem
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Finally, we have a portrait gallery of other people who mattered, remembrances of favorites who died in 2002 and an essay by Jim Poniewozik on the Year in Culture. Eminem, take heart: there's always next year to be a contender for Person of the Year...
...moral attention but not the uniform. 2001 couldn't last. It was the temporary, shocked pulling together of a feuding family after a sudden death. 2001 gave us the music community performing A Tribute to Heroes. 2002 gave us Eminem electrocuting Dick Cheney (in the video for Without Me) and country singer Toby Keith, in his controversial song Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, promising the nation's enemies, "We'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way." The culture wars returned, with books from political playground scrappers like Michael Moore and Sean Hannity. Online...
Carey's fall from the charts was the more tragically spectacular. While promoting Glitter, her vanity movie and album, she did a woozy striptease on MTV, posted a series of bizarre ramblings on her website and even flirted with Eminem. After she was hospitalized for exhaustion and Glitter flopped in a Waterworld-meets--Chris Gaines kind of way, Carey's record label paid her $28 million not to record with it again. This is pretty humiliating stuff, and Charmbracelet is not above begging for sympathy. Carey opens with Through the Rain, a somber ballad that reduces her formidable voice...
Much of Charmbracelet follows this pattern: Carey makes vague allusions to her recent problems while musically cannibalizing her back catalog. There are a few moments when she reveals enough to make the formula interesting, as on the playful Clown, a mid-tempo revenge song that responds to Eminem's sexual innuendo with the lines, "You should've never intimated we were lovers/When you know very well we never even touched each other." But mostly Charmbracelet feels like a hedge. There are the guest rappers (Jay-Z, Cam'ron) of Carey's late '90s hits, the chipper ballads of her multiplatinum...
When I read about people like Eminem, I think of my generation during the 1960s, when we were his age. We were angry too, and our parents didn't understand us or appreciate our music either. Just like this younger generation, we didn't like what we saw. But the difference is that we thought we could change the world, and some of us tried, and are still trying. Eminem's generation seems to be saying in a variety of ways "The world sucks," but these people don't appear to be interested in trying to do anything about...