Dostoevsky and Eminem :: Something smarter than us is going to emerge

Dostoevsky and Eminem ...I challenge you to argue that this is not the 21st century Underground Man rapping out his bars. First off, just as the UM was represented as post-reason, a super-conscious man obsessed and oppressed by the ridiculousness of living in a world governed by the hegemony of natural law, Eminem is a figure with just as much ridiculousness, a representation of the ruling rich white American culture's obsession with rap music, a music traditionally of the downtrodden and oppressed, but which Eminem completely perverts and spits back out into a caustic melee of parody, irony, anxiety, and even insanity. His album is full of instances of self-reference and existential dynamics. His Slim Shady-Eminem-Marshall Mathers merry-go-round of pesonalities, his violently ambulating attitude toward women, his obsession with existential guilt, his sado-masochism, and his self-proclaimed status as the embodiment of everything we as people hate about ourselves, everything we keep hidden from our everyday consciousness; these are all dished out and handled with an inveterate and caustic irony worthy of the UM...