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