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Eminem - Guts Over Fear ft. Sia


Source: YouTube Video

Stashed in: Music Videos!, Australia!, @eminem, Rap, @sia

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I like his promotion of courage over fear, but I wish he'd lose the misogyny and homophobia. 

Time for him to grow up, you know?

I know.  Wondering how Eminem and Sia linked up musically.

The song is a synth heavy showcasing Sia's forceful voice singing a chorus about how she now feels emboldened in the face of adversity, as the rapper parses his various insecurities and his place in rap. The song's subject matter regards Eminem and his struggles as an artist, and touches up on moments of his career. Australian singer Sia provides the chorus, making this the second time the two artists collaborated, first being "Beautiful Pain" off of the deluxe version of The Marshall Mathers LP 2.[4]

Beautiful Pain is a good song...

...and they were probably introduced by a producer.

As for the misogyny and homophobia, it's satire and him exercising inner demons as Shady:

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/shady-xv-eminem-in-2014/

Deep.  Thank you.  Definitely worth the time to read.  Here's a bit:

Rap is not only still a youth culture, it’s still a predominantly male culture. It feeds off of the need some men have to assert their dominance and masculinity by targeting vulnerable people. The very existence of women is a threat. Anyone who challenges traditional conventions of sexuality is a threat. Poverty is emasculating, and Eminem’s obsession with asserting his masculinity feels like a possible reaction to his upbringing in a run-down section of Detroit. Bullied in school, he honed his verbal put-down skills to a blade. In his early career, it didn’t feel like he was a bully. The pokes at public figures, the jokes about ripping Pamela Lee’s tits off and smacking her around in his debut single, didn’t feel done to death at first, which is why they were written off as irreverent. He didn’t invent the idolization of pimps or the glamorization of violence against women. Like most people do, he was just participating in a system that already existed, without questioning it. As a white rapper in a traditionally black musical culture, he aligned himself against the systemic oppression of black men in America. But he failed to make the parallel connection to the systemic oppression of women of all races. Maybe this was because his deepest fear was that, like horrorcore icon Norman Bates, he would turn into his mother: dependent on drugs, neglected by the state, aging, invisible, and feminized. Oddly, Eminem reserved little of his overflowing ire for Marshall Bruce Mathers Jr., his father, who absconded to California when his son was an infant and never responded to numerous letters that the younger Marshall wrote him as a teen. Eminem chose to mostly project his rage onto those who remained around him, particularly women, including his mother, Debbie, and his on-and-off girlfriend/wife, Kim.

We thought we watched Eminem grow up, from boy-child to boy-man, about a decade ago when he made 8 Mile. Directed by Oscar winner Curtis Hanson,1 8 Mile fully legitimized Eminem as a seriously recognized artistic genius (he can act, too!), and it finally brought hip-hop to the Oscars, for better and worse. 8 Mile saw Eminem revisit the early, hungry years of his career through a fictionalized biopic. The movie’s success and the Academy Award win for “Lose Yourself” were a high point for Eminem, but they also signaled the peak. Where do you go from the top? People who ride off into the sunset often end up going over a cliff.

All of Eminem’s talent and success were not enough to free him from his inherited demons; he fell victim to the same addictive personality that made his mother’s life hell. There were times when he seemed to have become self-aware enough to address hateful songs like “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” apologizing to his mother in 2013 in a song called “Headlights,” in which he asks, “Did I take it too far?” and reaches this logical conclusion: “Why we always at each other’s throats? Especially when dad, he fucked us both. We’re in the same fucking boat.” What’s mystifying is that he’s still dumb enough to rap about punching women in the face. Is it just a bad habit, a different sort of destructive addictive pattern? He seems aware, at least, that he’s in danger of doing the same old thing. Yesterday, he released the video for “Guts Over Fear,” which describes his fear of irrelevancy.

Eminem isn’t the only middle-aged rapper to recently backtrack on seeming personal progress and return to the woman-hating wellspring that initially made him a star. Snoop Dogg was first to pick a fight with Iggy Azalea, posting unflattering memes about her on Instagram, quickly escalating into him calling her a “c—” in a video, before T.I. convinced Snoop to apologize. Snoop’s insults toward Iggy didn’t criticize her put-on accent, persona, or any of the legitimate reasons to critique her rap career. He just reposted a meme that attacked her looks. Snoop is caught in a similar bind to Eminem’s. The pressure to grow up is drowned out by cheers for “Bitches Ain’t Shit.”

The really scary thing is that many men don’t grow up. They continue to take out their insecurities on those who are more vulnerable, physically or culturally. The more the culture changes — the more we have open discussions about sexual assault and domestic violence — the more threatened some people seem to feel. And that is one of the insidious things about going after Eminem. It’s fucking scary! Every time I have mildly criticized him on Twitter, I’ve been barraged with “kill yourself, bitch” tweets, sort of proving that his fans don’t fall that far from the tree. They’re just kidding! In a verbally threatening way that implies the threat of physical violence at the hands of angry men, which women live in fear of every single day! Why u mad? If you call him out for being a bully, you’re an enemy of free speech. If you call him out for being a hateful misogynist, you’re a humorless bitch.

Yeah, I have to think about it but I'm not as quick to rush to judgment about Eminem after reading this.

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