Eminem - "Sing for the Moment": C/D?

It just doesn't work though.

Rare instance of the sum being less than its parts.

I've heard half of the tracks from the eminem show and this was by far the best one. I want others to come back and explain why it was so dreadful.

I do like the verses to this. the 'come on' and 'sing it' could be corny i suppose.

I think its main flaw is the way it grinds your face into its positive sentiments so much.

(I like eminem = I am in his audience = a previously submerged similarity between ME and the CLASSIC ROCK AUDIENCE oh no. the trick is to turn it into newfound respect and appreciation for the people I'm distancing myself from, rather than doing the lazy and easy and obvious thing and letting it eventually poison my love for em)

(and maybe other americans don't feel this way, but for the benefit of the british posters I want to mention that the aerosmith song is so canonical, so inescapably recurrent on classic rock radio, that my aversion to it is especially reinforced.)

''Julio do you like it more because it's less of a hip-hop track?''

well I like that guitar sample at the end but I don't quite understand how its less of a hip-hop track (this is the bit where i show my almost nil understanding of it) but I like his words on that track (especially the first verse, the way he articulates the generation gap between kids and their parents).

if ppl think his lyrics are lame I want them to come here and explain (no lady if you have to ask you'll never know type shit now).

Verse 1
These ideas are nightmares for white parents, whose worst fear is a child with dyed hair and who likes earrings/Like whatever they say has no bearing, it's so scary in a house that allows no swearing/to see him walking around with his headphones blaring, alone in his own zone, cold and he don't care/He's a problem child, and what bothers him all comes out, when he talks about, his fuckin' dad walkin' out/cuz he just hates him so bad that he blocks him out. If he ever saw him again he'd probably knock him out/His thoughts are wacked, he's mad so he's talkin' back, talkin' black, brainwashed from rock and rap/He sags his pants, do-rags and a stocking cap, his step-father hit him, so he socked him back/and broke his nose, his house is a broken home. There's no control, he just let's his emotions go...

Chorus
C'mon! Sing with me (Sing!)/Sing for the year (Sing It)/Sing for the laughter/ sing for the tear (C'mon!) / Sing it with me/Just for today/Maybe tomorrow/The good Lord will take you away...

Verse 2
Entertainment is changin', intertwinin' with gangstas, in the land of the killers, a sinner's mind is a sanctum/ unholy, only have one homie, only this gun, lonely cuz don't anyone know me/Yet everybody just feels like they can relate, I guess words are a mothafucka they can be great/ or they can degrate, or even worse they can teach hate/It's like these kids hang on every single statement we make, like they worship us/plus all the stores ship us platinum, now how the fuck did this metamorphosis happen?/ From standin' on corners and porches just rappin'; to havin' a fortune, no more kissin' ass/But then these critics crucify you, journalists try to burn you, fans turn on you, attorneys all want a turn at you/To get they hands on every dime you have, they want you to lose your mind every time you mad/So they can try to make you out to look like a loose cannon. Any dispute won't hesitate to produce handguns/That's why these prosecutors wanna convict me, strictly just to get me off of these streets quickly/But all they kids be listenin' to me religiously, so I'm signin' CDs while police fingerprint me/They're for the judge's daughter but his grudge is against me. If I'm such a fuckin' menace, this shit doesn't make sense B/It's all political, if my music is literal, and I'm a criminal how the fuck can I raise a little girl?/I couldn't. I wouldn't be fit to. You're full of shit too, Guerrera, that was a fist that hit you!

Chorus

Verse 3
They say music can alter moods and talk to you, well can it load a gun up for you , and cock it too?/Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude, just tell the judge it was my fault and I'll get sued/See what these kids do is hear about us totin' pistols and they want to get one cuz they think the shit's cool/not knowin' we really just protectin' ourselves, we entertainers, of course the shit's affectin' our sales, you ignoramus/But music is reflection of self, we just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail. It's fucked up ain't it?/ How we can come from practically nothing to being able to have any fuckin' thing that we wanted/That's why we sing for these kids, who don't have a thing except for a dream, and a fuckin' rap magazine/who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long, idolize they favorite rappers and know all they songs/Or for anyone who's ever been through shit in their lives, till they sit and they cry at night wishin' they'd die/Till they throw on a rap record and they sit, and they vibe. We're nothin' to you but we're the fuckin' shit in they eyes/that's why we seize the moment try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it, cuz we consider these minutes golden/and maybe they'll admit it when we're gone. Just let our spirits live on, through our lyrics that you hear in our songs and we can...

Chorus X2

only with a disco beat?! now that's corny! ;)

(i don't even know if that last paragraph makes sense to me.)

that which bases itself on adherence to claimed fixity of eternal concepts as opposed to that which bases itself on adherence to the immediately verifiable world of sensation.

love the ideal vs. sex the particular (or love as a rush of emotional imminance even better)

self respect vs. the respect of others

religion vs. salvation

etc.

yeah, 'the respect of others' and 'salvation' throw me.

i mean also a song "about" justice vs. a song where justice is a concept immediately at hand -- not explored by readymade.

(also on the salvation tip think class differentiation in churches -- you sorta know the creator exists becuz the good book you study tells you so at the top of the line, and way down there you get siezed by the holy spirit and start speaking in tongues. imminance.)

it's much harder for me to think about those sorts of concepts (basically I am opposing them all, whatever they are, to 'love' in my head, and nothing else) being as SUBLIME or INEFFABLE as something like love typically is. (or is presented, conceived of, whatever.) perhaps a shift in that direction might help me make more sense of this.

(yet on say buffy when there's a decisive moment of ethical rightness, I often get the feeling that part of the magic comes from the ethical terrain the show depicts: never one kind of justice, always particular circumstances to deal with, problems to be negotiated between. somehow THAT makes it seem more ineffable to me, whereas a more vanilla presentation of justice-as-fairness or something like that doesn't have that same FEELING to it - compare to the times on the show when it seems to weigh toward one too much, like buffy going on and on about duty. obvious connection to 'practice' and ineffability here, on many understandings of 'practice' as an awesomely mercurial theoretical thingamabob that picks up some magic from lived experience and nowhere else)

justice as notion of experientially grounded rightness vs. justice as a sura-historic set of RULEZ i.e.

justice as the killer getting his comeuppance in the end vs. justice as maybe coz he wasn't read his miranda he can't in a just society.

(law and order is a transcendant show, where it is tested and survives each episode. nypd blue is the opposite.)

translate to rap and "conscious" rap bemoans people wronging notions of universal justice and "street" rap bemoans eternal rules getting in the way of individual characters and their aims.

what i like about sing for the moment is how explicitly it transforms that kid in bedroom moment of imminence into a transcendent univeralist principle.

(alternately, and perhaps apropos of the benjamin thread, scholastic and ecstatic kabbalism)

[meanwhile jess i'm honestly surprised you dislike this song. i know its got lots of the same old em shtick in it but the i love the whole bit about moments as golden and i also love how he extends the shtick and concretizes it further -- the whole bit about loading the gun and holding it. like somehow when he makes his "ooh, is it SOCIETY or is it ME or is it YOUR KID" deal that much more earnest it takes on a whole new spin]

jess, dare I mention 'the great depression' and what you've said about it? I don't even know what I might mean by doing so but I'm sure you can do something with it. I'm mostly thinking of the AOR-jacking. (?)

also i think that besides the most reductive level em and dmx are doing totally different things, altho 8 mile em came closer to dmx than ever before.

as tico sez, I live in the UK (like you didn't know that alex) where we don't really have this thing for classic rock (I think that is the case though io avoid all radio anyway) but also like to say I have never heard of mission until now actually (i was 9 years old in '88 and actually lived in Brazil then).

However, I do have serious problems with the marketing/positioning of this song. This was his post-8 Mile, pre-50 Cent media blitz single, and it seems like he threw it out there so alt-rock radio wouldn't forget about him while he pushes 50 down everyone else's throats. Think about the terrible, thrown-together video. Cliched, obnoxious video tour footage that no one needs to see juxtaposed with a shaky single-camera shot of him standing against some shitty wall rapping. And the new footage is shot in the Nine Inch Nails washed-out yellows and greens style! Who the fuck does that anymore? It's such a blatant, clumsy grab at the attention of MOR white fans. Did this thing get played on BET even once? If the song is clumsy and forced and thrown-together (which it is, despite its strengths), the marketing of it is doubly so. Even worse, it's all based on dividing Em's fanbase into distinctly "white" and "black" subsections. Fuck that noise.

That's one that escaped the memory banks; I couldn't hum it if my life depended on it...

reasons: a) youth. b) never listening to classic rock stations.

jess to you distrust epicness generally or just in rap? (it appears generally from this thread)

because a general distrust of epicness writes off lots of good stuff, including lots of R&B not to mention uh, cheap trick not to mention phil spector.

Hip-hop and epicness has the unfortunate tendancy to produce things like Nas's "Hate Me Now" (and boy did I ever after hearing that pile of shit). But then again you might end up with "Fight The Power" (clearly one of the best songs ever written).

hell, "fight for your right (to party)" != "sing for the moment"

haha i just realized even more than u2 this is the hip-hop "jeremy"!!

taking sides: earnest/mawkish obsfucation vs. earnest/mawkish, um, earnestness

That said, I think this sloppy, sloppy song is pretty much ass.

That's a genius idea, it would have saved this song (I would pick the Crue over stupid old Aerosmith any day).

it was fucking dicksweat