Eminem — “Kill You”
I was 11 years old when Eminem released his debut,1999’s The Slim Shady LP. A friend up the block was listening to it and I remember being shocked that they were allowed to listen to it (and that they wanted to). He was a new voice, no one ever did it like him before — and he’s white! Eminem’s obscenities and violence caused a certain brand of national panic. Pearls were clutched but still, millions listened. I saw his videos on TV. It was hard not to hear what he said and how he said it.
I remember the album cover and its crooked color letters, as if it was being marketed to children. Now I see the actual cover: a woman’s legs hanging out of the trunk of a car parked on a dock at night. I am scandalized and 11 years old all over again.
I started listening to Eminem a decade later. I was living in Washington, DC working my corporate music programming job and spending a lot of time alone. My roommate went back to night school and made a whole new gaggle of friends. I spent nights watching The Wire through Netflix in the mail DVDs and going on dates with guys who treated me like shit. My anxiety manifested itself as rage, which I muted with alcohol and weed. The violence and fury in Eminem’s music comforted me.
I fell into his voice. The way he rhymes syllables within words and then with phrases. So famous for his speedy flow and lyrical skill. So many of the stories are the same — the lawsuit against his mother, his ex-wife, raping women, hurting women, threatening women, dealing with a public image no one wanted to see, or accept, but couldn’t look away from. But the craft and style was too good to ignore. It consumed me. I made sense of his rage. I wanted it to be mine. At least he could name it and call it his own.
It was never a full record, just a cycle of songs I picked around from: “The Way I Am,” “I’m Back,” “My Name Is,” “Brain Damage,” “Without Me,” “Evil Deeds,” “White America,” and “Kill You.”
The hooks and dissonance of my favorite Eminem songs wrapped their arms around me and let me feel everything I was feeling without admitting or acknowledging it: loneliness, rage, obliviousness, confusion, and sadness. The lines he had about appropriating black culture, just like Elvis did, and financially benefiting from it, just like Elvis did, tickled the music historian in me. He stood up and declared who he was, anger and all. I put these songs on in my headphones during my walk between the Metro and my apartment, psyching myself up to find someone or something to get mad at. Eminem made me think of myself. And he made me feel less alone in my anger, as if I could bounce it off him to confirm what was thundering inside me.
My most vivid memory is when I’m alone in my bedroom pacing and smoking a joint listening to “Kill You” — its chime permanently lodged in my head. For some reason I was playing it on my stereo instead of keeping it to myself in my headphones. I lived on California Street, a cozy one way tucked neatly into the NW of DC surrounded by ritzy apartment buildings, homes, and down the block from embassy row. My window overlooked a side street lined with trees. I would let the joints burn down to my fingers. It was around the time I was smoking a quarter of weed every eight or nine days for several months. Towards the end I would smoke all night and not feel stoned, so I smoked more hoping to break the barrier.
The floor in our apartment was a patterned wood, not quite linoleum. I had a shag rug in my room but the edges of the floor jutted out underneath. I kept close to the window, blowing smoke through the screen, ashing on the sill. Every time I hear that chime — “When I was just a little baby boy…” — I feel my bare feet sticking to the floor. I see the dust bunnies in the corner. I feel the blood pounding in my skull.
The William Howard Taft Bridge connects Woodley Park to upper Dupont Circle and our apartment was squarely at the center between those two Metro stops. The bridge straddles Rock Creek Park and has globe lampposts on it, with a dusty mint green fence on both sides. I must’ve walked over that bridge a thousand times to a thousand songs and all I can hear now when I think of it is Eminem’s “Kill You.” And the way he elongates words, breathing a new meaning into them, his own experience, one letter at a time. They take a different shape in his mouth. I tried to move mine as quickly as he could move his, egging both of us on in silence.
The trickle hook trembling under his vocals did its job. I played the song on repeat just so I could hear that sound. I still know every lyric. Maybe it’s because he was threatening something and someone I never could. The universal effect the word “you” had on me — he could be rapping about me, the listener, or anyone, which I’m sure was his point — is what made it so easy to hear. I wanted revenge on every person I knew and came in contact with. I wanted someone to feel and understand what was going on inside me. I wanted to show them my madness and rage. Rage was my entire world.
Look at it. Hold it. Please, just take it.
