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Popular Culture Review
This prompts a turn toward offering his solution to this inhumane
deviance.
In the second stanza, Eminem suggests that he has the antidote to
the situation that he has just described, and coimects the antidote to his
identity, a move already suggested by coimecting the dead moose to his
desire to get on TV:
But if you feel like I feel, I got the antidote
Women wear your pantyhose, sing the chorus and it
goes...
I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up.
Please stand up, please stand up?
(“The Real Slim Shady”)
The song has announced itself from the first as a search for ‘the real Slim
Shady’: “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” It seeks the identity
of the man who has taken an alternate name, perhaps the man behind the
stage-name or perhaps the identity of the stage persona itself. The spiral
of identity for Marshall Mathers, III, who became Eminem, who calls
himself Slim Shady, breaks down in part because of the animal he has
witnessed on television. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that
the dead moose contributes to the Cynthia Chase-fashion, proleptic
creation of his alternate identity. Chase argues in Decomposing Figures
that actions flow from characters’ desires, not because of who the
character is; thus behavior is not causally related to human identity but
rather to the lack of identity. Slim Shady’s rhetorical causality comes
from the decomposition of human identity. Contact with the decaying
moose, even if it is only visual, unleashes the instability already inherent
in the Byronic Shady’s famous identity. The dangerous sexuality in the
song leads, through the animal, to the end of himself. This end is
imagined in terms like those in Byron’s memorial to his dog (that
inevitably turns into a memorial for himself as he seeks to be buried with
the creature), but that engages both sexuality and autosarcophagy as
Eminem eats his cantaloupes.
The moose stands in for the impotent star. Eminem is the figure
who ought to be the one inspiring fashion, changing language, and set
free from behavioral regulations: