Dispatches 2 March 2001   Some thoughts on Eminem, Steely Dan and the Grammies: LIFE GOES ON In true Napster fashion, not only were bootlegs of the breathtaking Eminem-Elton Grammy performance available on the file-sharing service just a few hours after the Grammies aired, you could also find fake songs claiming to be the performance. Why do people do these things?   THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS The habit of sitting around discussing the meanings of songs people find cryptic has been a longstanding pop tradition. From "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" to "25 or 6 to 4," nothing has been taken at face value. Everything is subject to exegesis, as though any use of symbols, no matter how obvious, made a song deeper. How could "Puff the Magic Dragon" be a children's song? What does "Puff" mean anyway? There's a trace of that crypto-divination in Eminem's "Stan" (for my money, one of the finest singles of last year). "Stan" alludes to a fairly common urban legend, that Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" is about Collins helplessly standing in the distance watching a friend drown and seeing that someone else nearby could've saved his friend but didn't. ("You know that song by Phil Collins, "In the Air Tonight?" / About that guy who could have saved that other guy from drowning?") In reality, the Collins song is little more than a song about his impending divorce from his first wife. It's a little ironic, isn't it, that the person who himself complains about overly literal interpretations of his text gives in to the same thing? Me, I'm ornery and I never believe in conspiracy theories. Best one I've heard, though, is the ludicrously elaborate one that claims the Pet Shop Boys stands for "Pray Eternally To Satan, He Offers Peace, But Owns Your Soul."   DECONSTRUCTING STEELY What does Eminem share with Steely Dan? They're probably two of the finest users of role play and distance in their songs. That's not that minor or obvious a claim. In the pre-Grammy weeks, "He's just playing a role" was the most common defence of Mr Mathers, repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum, as though that were the most natural thing for artists to do. But if you think about it, it isn't natural at all: what rock and rap music share is that they are rarely about telling someone else's story or inhabiting a character. They're musical forms that depend on experience – unsurprisingly, given the influence of the blues on rock, and of soul on rap, and given rap's dependence on actually growing up on the street – so artists in both fields usually write songs that derive their power from the immediacy of having lived through what they're singing about. Part of why people love(d) Public Enemy is that at some level you felt they knew "911 is a Joke" was a song of personal experience. (The fairly ludicrous Duran Duran cover of that same song illustrates my point.) Even songs about other people are sung in one's own voice ("She Loves You"). That's probably part of why writing your own original material is given such cachet in rock. Consider other fields: whoever blamed Sinatra for not writing his own material? That's where Eminem and Steely Dan are rather different from their respective peers. There's little doubt that Eminem is street, and it's true that many rappers put on a stage persona--in all probability there's a gap between "Dr. Dre" and Andre Young. But those rappers tend to try to never show any cracks in the public persona, while Eminem often revels in the multiple personas he adopts – Slim Shady, Eminem, "Marshall Mathers" (quotes deliberate). While Steely Dan doesn't use explicit personas, the duo's approach to rock is so deliberately dispassionate and cold--this is a duo named after a dildo (from Williams S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch), after all--that there's very little sense that they have lived through what they're singing about. Even in an ostensible love song like "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," their detachment makes them sound like they're imagining someone else singing. Compare this with the norm in rock music: where "Mick Jagger" the strutting hypersexual musical persona ends and Mick Jagger the strutting rock star begins is hard to tell. I'm not sure he knows himself. That's not to say no other musical stars ever separate their personal selves from their work (David Bowie springs to mind). But for critics to assume that it's common for a music star to be detaching themselves from their words may be missing the point.   RETURN TO SENDER Come to think of it, "Stan" is that rarity: a fully epistolary pop song. I tried to think of another pop song that told the whole story in letter-writing, and the closest I came up with was Pat Boone's "Dear John." Any suggestions?   MERCY MERCY ME One of the greatest albums of all time -- Marvin Gaye's What's Going On? -- was reissued on Tuesday, in a spectacular 30th-anniversary double album (including an entire second album!). Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive? Certainly not, as the album's thematic concerns with the harshness of the world constantly reminds us. But such amazing bittersweet music. That reminds me: part of this column's purpose is to draw attention to artists who deserve it, so I should point out that Angie Stone does a beautiful cover of Gaye's "Trouble Man on her Black Diamond album. Or those of you who never really left the 80s could just wait till next Tuesday for the new Deborah Gibson (nee Debbie Gibson) album...