Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 91

Losing Himself in the Music 87 Superstardom’s close to post mortem It only grows harder, only grows hotter He blows. It’s all over. These hoes is all on him. Coast to coast shows he’s known as the globetrotter. Lonely roads—god only knows, he’s grown farther from home He’s no father. He goes home and barely knows his own daughter. This life is not the life of Jimmy Smith. Jimmy Smith is no superstar, no globetrotter, and no father. All of these descriptions fit Eminem, just as the next verse does, which is rapped in the first person in which Eminem (as he is in these lines) is “caught up between being a father and a prima donna.” In this middle verse, it seems as if the Jimmy Smith persona and the Eminem persona blur into a single identity.3 Eminem does not distinguish between himself and the fictional autobiographical identity portrayed in the movie. He has become this simulation of himself and allowed it to become him. Narrative contradictions exist in the lyrics, but the song fails to acknowledge those contradictions, which blur into the fiction of the song as the next line implies through his description of his and Jimmy’s lives as a “soap opera” and then allows those media-generated selves (Jimmy through the film and Eminem through the his tabloid celebrity) to be dissolved and extinguished in the sound of the music itself: So the soap opera’s told it unfolds I suppose it’s old partner But the beat goes on da da dum da da dum data You better lose yourself in the music, The moment, you own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime That Eminem admits that his life has become a simulation, a melodramatic television show of sorts, is acknowledged by the shift in viewpoint as Eminem enters the third verse as himself: “No more games, I’m a change what you call rage / Tear this motherfuckin’ roof off like two dogs caged.” Yet, his metaphor suggests that two rappers will tear the place down as the next few lines continue the hyperreal blending of identities. This composite version of himself represents his past as if he is Jimmy, explaining that despite the fact that he will shortly describe the “baby mama screamin’ drama” that comes from his being a “prima donna”: All the pain inside amplified by the fact that I can’t get by with my nine to five