Eminem’s bleach blonde hair and angry face has filled my childhood. While kids my age were in elementary school, his career was exploding. As I snuck in a lot of MTV behind my parents’ backs during the commercials of my favorite Nickelodeon shows, I saw controversy surrounding him that I didn’t fully understand. Even then, I thought people should leave him alone. In my childish understanding, I knew people didn’t like the angry things he said, but then I also knew that he had experienced a rough life. I was able to connect the dots that his anger was nothing more than self-expression of this fact. Perhaps the easiest of the controversies surrounding him to grasp as a kid was the Columbine shooting. It was easy to grasp because it was broken down to me like this: some high school kids shot their peers and people say angry music influenced them to do so. Now, as a sneak-watcher of MTV and sneak-listener of Eminem, I didn’t see the logic in that since I was seeing and listening to this angry man, and not getting angry at all.
All I knew at that point was that I didn’t agree with the angry music theory, and that I felt really bad that kids got killed at their school. I didn’t know what else might have caused them to open fire on their classmates, nor was I able to make any real connections as to the possibilities. On the rapper’s most famous album, The Marshall Mathers LP, he addressed these things thoroughly and called out the idea that he advocated violence just because of what he had alluded to it in previous songs. What I failed to understand back then, was that the question of whether angry songs did or did not influence these shootings is only minor. The better question is this: if not angry music, then what did cause the tragedy? Lack of parental involvement? Unrecognized or unaddressed mental health issues? Access to guns? These are the questions that never seemed to be focused on fully enough.
Fast forward now to 2013. My media intake has been uncensored by parental supervision for years now, and Eminem hasn’t really stirred the pot much recently. This week though, he released his first new album in a while and entitled it The Marshall Mathers LP 2. The title struck me as highly symbolic. It highlights the fact that the same questions that were never conclusively answered after the Columbine shooting are the exact same ones that absolutely must be answered now. They have become more burning, more necessary, and more relevant in light of the gun violence that has only seemed to plague our country more heavily than ever. I can rattle off too many gun violence incidents all too easily; Virginia Tech, the Aurora, Colorado movie theater, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Washington Navy Yard, shootings in Five Points, a shooter in the Garden State Mall in New Jersey, and in LAX airport.
I want to know where the outrage that seemed to have followed the Columbine shooting is now that things are only worse than they were before? We haven’t seen enough of a reform in gun control laws yet in my opinion, we haven’t seen a major reform making mental health care a real preventative force against these tragedies, and heck, now that kids are all glued to their iPads even the ridiculous notion of censoring angry music seems unattainable. So what are we going to do? The Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t contain the answers. What it does do is remind us that the Columbine shooting turned out not to be an isolated incident, and similar tragedies are now everyday news.