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Popular Culture Review
And I can’t provide the right type of life for my family
’Cause, man, these food stamps don’t buy diapers
All of these identities—the superstar involved in his mother’s lawsuit and the
loser that can’t make ends meet for his daughter, along with the fictional world of
Jimmy Smith—are integrated in this verse under the single identity marker “I.”
Eminem has become all of these selves, yet he claims that this narrative,
which he has described as a fictional soap opera, is “no movie, and there’s no
Mehki Phifer.” This reference to “Mehki Phifer,” the actress who plays the role
of Future, rather than to the character named Future, further and most clearly
disrupts the balance between reality and fiction in the song. While the song
begins as a des cription of a piece of fiction through this metanarration in which
the distinction between actors and characters unravels, it becomes a
metadescription of the creation of the film itself, acknowledging the relationship
between the fictional material and its real world source as well as the differences
between those ontologies. For Eminem, there is no “Future” and the song
becomes a hyperreal space where Jimmy’s world is negated by Eminem’s and
consequently Eminem’s world is negated by Jimmy’s. While the narrator claims
that this “may be the only opportunity that I’ve got,” we are left unclear as to
whose opportunity is being spoken of—Jimmy Smith’s or Eminem’s. Both selves
have become lost in the music and distanced from the narrator through the use of
the word “you.” But because of the multiplicity of the narratorial voice, the
“you” seemingly still could be either of these identities. Indeed, the verses
suggest that this is how Jimmy and Eminem have and will succeed by
extinguishing themselves through their music.
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
G. Christopher Williams
Notes
1. As Eliot defines it in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), the notion of an objective
correlative suggests that art should merely present the “formula of [a] particular emotion”
rather than presenting the emotion in a directly experiential manner. For example, Eliot
argues that in Hamlet Shakespeare is incapable of expressing Hamlet’s emotions because
“the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: . . . Hamlet’s
bafflement at the absence of [an] objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of
the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem” (100).
2. Borges does so in texts like “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) and especially in the
pseudo-history at the center of “Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Terius” (1941).
3. In “The Making of ‘Lose Yourself,’” Rolling Stone quotes Eminem’s manager, Paul
Rosenberg, pointing out that this blurring was Eminem’s intention: “He wanted to write at
least one of the songs as Jimmy . . . where the similarities get blurred between himself and
the character” (68).