I'm not going to try to quote it because I wouldn't know what to cut. From
Kid Oakland:
Wed Oct 27th, 2004 at 05:47:03 GMT
What is there really to say?
Other than to straight up hand it to Eminem, Dr. Dre, Ian Inaba, Anson Vogt, Kevin Elam and Thomas Brohdal and everyone else who had a hand in the making of this video?
Watching this video is one of those experiences that just changes you. Mosh has a transformative power. Like, before I clicked on my computer this morning and downloaded the thing....well, I thought and felt one way...about Eminem, the youth vote, our troops, the state of oppositional culture in America, the meaning of this election, what George Bush means to young Americans...and afterwards, I just had huge fucking scales fall from my eyes....
I felt this powerful sense that I had just seen something calibrated exactly for this moment, something hopeful and disturbing and honest...something spoken from the crux of this hour in our history and yet resolutely looking forward. Mosh is political art that, at the same time, speaks in an authentic and specific voice. It is art that seems to bear a power to unleash something new.
This diary is attempt to get at why that is...what Mosh says and what it means.....right now...
Diaries :: kid oakland's diary ::
i. Private Kelly: thinking about your rage
There is a pivot moment in Mosh that defines the entire video for me....it comes about one third of the way in, cartoon Eminem is rapping to a huge audience of men...and as the camera pulls back we see that they are soldiers in desert fatigues...
All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black
Don't matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather
the camera zooms in on one soldier who is not nodding his head like the others. He is morose, angry, he is thinking as he listens to the music. This is our introduction to Private Kelly. And, as strong as the other depictions are....of Eminem himself, of Swift, of Tenant 508...I think that Private Kelly at this moment is the core of the video.
Mosh is a polemic that is intended to make you think about strong feelings; strong feelings that you have because of the political situation you find yourself living in. Quite specifically, Mosh is intended to allow you to internalize the anger, the hate, and the rage that the videos' young protagonists feel...and yet, Mosh gets you to channel it, gets you to think about what you and they might do with that anger and hate and rage, to think about why you and they feel that anger and hate and rage.
Private Kelly's sunken-cheeked, grimaced face, angrily meditating on the music, alone in the crowd, is at the core of the politics of this video.
ii. the structure
Mosh works inside of multiple frames.
The first frame is a public school classroom and 9/11. The two are joined. One is utopian and appeals to our sense of community and shared civic responsibility. The other is dystopic and represents the use of the machinery of that utopia against itself. We don't get one without the other. That's the start point and world view of Mosh.
The second frame is Eminem/Bush.....and here we get Eminem taking on the "persona" of Bush in order to explode it and play with it. In this case, in portraying himself as GWB reading "My Pet Goat" in a school directly underneath the Trade Towers on 9/11....Eminem is laying out for us that this entire video is going to be a kind of battle between these two personas, the one exploding what we think of the other. Eminem, however, will both play a critic of Bush and, eventually put himself forward as a substitute citizen leader for us. That's important, and is implied in the humorous glimpse we get of Eminem as GWB.
The third frame is the Wall. The Wall is critical to establishing the political context of the video. The wall is where the "person" of Eminem...Marshall Mathers...is sorting out for himself what to think of the news of the day. It's personal. He's got himself up there in the form of photos from his life...and Bush is there as well. (Fwiw, the visual is also a quote of Picasso's Guernica...a blank wall, a bare light bulb, an artist depicting what he thinks about a War.) The wall is important because it implies that Marshall Mathers has been trying to think this through for a long time. That he has made it a personal project to put up what he thinks and feels about our times, with evidence from newspapers and hand-written commentary. And we see him, in stop-time animation, go through this.
The fourth frame are the protagonists: Swift, Private Kelly and Tenant 508. This frame is the story of the three protagonists whose course we will follow through the video, as they reflect on what they see and what happens to them...and then "hood up" and join the mosh mob. Swift, (or at least a cartoon version of Swift, a member of Eminem's group D12), who gets racially profiled on his way home to see his dad. Private Kelly....an alter ego for Marshall Mathers, a soldier about to be reassigend to Iraq and away from his family. And Tenant 508, a single mom about to be evicted with her children...who finds herself watching the news about the War at the same time as she finds out she's been evicted.
iii. playing with fire
On a simple and emotive level...Mosh spends much of its time using massed and hooded "mosh mobs" moving through rainy urban streets to convey a kind of "Fight Club meets Election 2004" vibe. The animations look similar to the video games Grand Theft Auto and State of Emergency....anarchic, anti-authoritarian, juvenile fantasies written as over-the-top games where violence actually becomes a funny and meaningless digital language, the equivalent of bumper cars.
Instead of getting fixed on what might be dangerous and wrong in that....it occurs to me that Eminem is simply being honest and meeting his intended audience where they are at. These fantasies are part and parcel of the mental world of young folks today. Indeed, as we speak, the vast majority of those who've seen this video right now are much more likely to live next to a Suburban Mall with a Starbucks...than down the block from Eight Mile. But this fantasy space....the urban poverty fantasy...is how Eminem gets his audience to internalize the political content of the video.
And it is critical that the video, even when it is depicting the hooded "mosh mobs"...is very clearly about something other than violence and acting out rage. Just because it uses that vocabulary and visual palette, does not mean its audience will not fully understand that it is not about that. In fact, I'd argue that that is part of the point of Mosh.....to take its audience from a world of juvenile fantasy that plays off their dystopic feelings...to a more thoughtful and programatic response to what they are experiencing in the real world. In effect, Eminem is using Grand Theft Auto and Fight Club to bring his viewers out of inchoate rage and anger, and showing them how to create a more thoughtful, strategic, coordinated response. A political response.
iv eminem's politics
There is a brilliant line in this video that just keeps bouncing around in my head:
Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six
Teen million people are equal of this high pitch
Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech....
at which point we see Tenant 508 turning a radio dish from the top of a building.
On top of advocating a thought-out, political, pragmatic way out for his audience's rage and anger....voting on November 2nd....Eminem, in this passage expresses something that goes beyond that. In essence, Eminem is positing a world in which thoughtful citizens who are victims of the powers that be, might actually be able to communicate with one another more effectively than those powers. It is a decentered, free speech, ground-up democracy that Eminem is preaching here.
This is powerful stuff. And there are more hints of this in other parts of the video. November 2nd is not depicted as an end point for the political struggle Eminem describes...it is just a beginning. It's not an answer, it's just a necessary first step. Part of which is a rebirth of oppositional culture and informed participatory democracy...and part of which is a recentering of the political process on the voices of those who have not been listened to.
We mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator
Can you hear us?.......
v there's so much more here
From the amazing content of the wall...Bush knew...Sick wounded troops held in squalor...Senate upholds ban on Coffin photos...Bush Tax Cuts help Rich...
to the brilliant depiction of Bin Laden as cardboard cutout in a news studio, hiding Powell and Rumsfeld cheefully chatting away (a move which both highlights how he's been used as a bogeyman and let's us SEE that and be less scared of him.)
to the personalization of Eminem's battle with Bush along the lines of one's relationship with one's father
to Swift's relationship with his own father, and how they both vote
the amazing scene with Private Kelly on the steps with his wife and kids
and how Swift and Private Kelly use the fire hose to defuse the Police Officers and riot police blocking the mosh mob's path to vote....
And, finally, these two quotes which are destined to reverberate this election season and forward:
And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present
and this:
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us, they can't, we're stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home
vi. mosh the vote
For me, I think the honestly and directness of this video are startling and add to its power.
The fact that it begins and ends with the public school kids. The fact that Eminem does not sugar coat the situation we are in right now. A dystopic utopia....that we need to struggle to find our way out of only makes me respect it more.
In some ways..as confused a metaphor as Moshing is...it is perfect for our time. We have to muddle through the fog of this moment...and see that the "clear eyed" leader we've been following has been anything but:
Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
Which both plays off of rap's fatalism...and plays into the quite American sentiment:
Live free or die.
I think the most brilliant aspect of Mosh is simply its imperative to think about one's rage and to channel it. I keep coming back to Private Kelly in that crowd.
And I wonder, if today, in Iraq, some real Private Kelly is getting a chance to see this video for the first time...and what he or she thinks...good or bad....and what rage he or she must feel face to face with the very real, very troubling dystopia that is the United States occupation of Iraq.
