The fourth in a feature on the Vine where we listen to the latest #1 single and analyse it to death so you don’t have to.
Eminem (feat. Rihanna)
Love The Way You Lie
(Interscope/Universal)
'Love The Way You Lie' by Eminem (feat. Rihanna) is the new #1 single this week, knocking Katy Perry and Snoop’s bubblegum confection 'California Gurls' from the top spot. The song is Eminem’s 7th Australian #1 single, and Rihanna’s 5th Australian #1 single (and her second since this year after “Rude Boy”). It’s the fifth #1 single in a row from a band or artist that has been around since the 1990s (after Snoop Dogg, Usher, Brian McFadden, and Train - Eminem’s “My Name Is” was a hit in 1999) - the singles charts are seemingly a fairly conservative place these days. It’s the first pop song this year to get to #1 without having a video clip (yet), and the first #1 this year to feature offensive language. “Love The Way You Lie” also has a relatively similar mix of emo and hiphop to “Airplanes” by B.o.B. featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams, which spent most of the last 2 months at #2 in the charts. Which is no coincidence: both songs were produced by Alex Da Kidd.
Eminem (ft. Rihanna) - 'Love The Way You Lie'
It’s not going to be news to you that Eminem uses iffy topic material. After all, he has a song about killing his ex and dumping her body in the river while his daughter watches ('’97 Bonnie And Clyde') and a song with a verse about date-raping an underage girl ('Guilty Conscience') - not to mention all that controversy about his homophobia that ended up with an Elton John duet. Eminem makes music that invites questions about morality: how should we respond to music with predatory topic material? Should we avoid it? Listen to it? And does it matter whether they really mean it?
Rihanna’s vocal starts off the song with the chorus:
“just gonna stand there and watch me burn / well that’s alright because I like the way it hurts” (and if there’s a musical hook in the song, it’s the way Rihanna’s voice has an almost country music edge when she sings the high notes on “stand” and “watch”). Her chorus functions as the female response to Eminem’s rap; over angsty minor-key guitar chords and a relatively straightforward beat, he goes off about being magnetically attracted to a woman who he has major reservations about. So far, so emo. Of course, Eminem being Eminem, it eventually gets iffy: he finishes the song with the line
“if she ever tries to fuckin’ leave again / I’ma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire”.
So does Eminem
mean it? It’s certainly sung from the first person perspective, it could plausibly come from his life, and his voice has a definite emotional edge of
meaning it. But Eminem’s genius is in pushing his songs into a very fine line where it’s hard to tell whether he means it or not. Mathers has a variety of different personae which are deliberately over-the-top and which have distinct personalities - in “Guilty Conscience”, for example, Eminem’s character advocates underage date-rape functions as the devil on a shoulder (with Dr Dre’s angel on the other). You can hear Eminem knowingly blurring the lines of authenticity in “Love The Way You Lie” too – after all, it features the line
“don’t you hear sincerity in my voice when I talk?” as a reply to Rihanna’s chorus accusing him of lying.
People often assume that lyrics which use the first person are from the singer’s perspective. It’s sometimes hard to hear the emotion in a singer’s voice and not think that they’re feeling the emotions in the song. But it ain’t necessarily so: Ray Charles famously said that he mostly thought about the oppression of blacks in the US, whatever he was singing about – it was the thoughts of injustice that gave him an emotional edge to his vocals, rather than the often anodyne lyrics he was singing. And plenty of singer-songwriters – including Eminem – write songs that have a first person perspective, that use the word “I”, but that are not based on the experiences of the singer.
Take the singer-songwriter Randy Newman, these days best known for his Pixar movie themes like “You’ve Got A Friend In me”. Newman spent much of the 1970s writing from the perspective of an “unreliable narrator”, someone who may not be aware of their major flaws. Thus, Newman wrote critically acclaimed songs from the first-person perspective of a rapist (“Suzanne”), a slave trader (“Sail Away”), and an abusive husband (“Marie”). These lyrics did not reflect Newman’s views on the subject, but their topic matter was easily as morally dangerous as what Eminem does. Still, Newman never got the kind of controversy Eminem attracts, mostly because Eminem has been vastly more popular than Newman ever was.
And that popularity matters, because the worry about music with iffy topic material is in whether it influences the way people behave. If practically nobody hears that music, it’s not going to influence people. Psychological research shows again and again that innocuous things - like the softness of your chair - influence your behaviour in ways you’re not consciously aware of (people who sit on soft chairs are more likely to compromise than people sitting on hard chairs). And music is at least as powerful as your chair, especially music with as much emotional edge as Eminem’s. The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” had some effect on Charlie Manson’s killing spree, to use one famous example. Of course, “Helter Skelter” was about a rollercoaster, and plenty of people with psychoses will believe unusual things about particularly innocuous songs.
On the other hand, expressions of difficult, almost-taboo thoughts and feelings in music can have a positive effect. For a lot of people, music is an emotional outlet. Listening to sad-bastard depressing music – Elliott Smith or Radiohead, for example – can help the depressed. If you hear that other people have similar troubles and pains to you, or can reflect your mood, it can bring solace - this is part of why psychologists sometimes encourage the mentally ill to go to group therapy; hearing other people with problems puts yours into perspective, makes you feel less alone. I imagine plenty of people occasionally have murderous thoughts about their spouses, though most of them would never go through with it. But perhaps Eminem helps those people to deal with their irrational impulses and come to terms with them.
In any case, “Love The Way You Lie”, with all its angst and
burning people alive, is more metaphor than literal ‘meaning it’. It doesn’t take a particularly smutty mind to see the sexual connotations in all that tying to the bed and burning alive. In fact, “Love The Way You Lie” expresses a particularly Capital-R Romantic view of love. For the Romantics (and we’re talking 19th century types like Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte, rather than the band that did “What I Like About You”), love was tragic; irrational and uncontrollable. Think Cathy and Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights – he was a brooding, violent type without many selling points, and they never really got along. But still they were drawn to each other almost animalistically, irrationally, and their union inevitably ended in tragedy and death. One of the great tragic love stories. Apparently. This Romantic view of love never really went away – our current cultural mega-phenomenon,
Twilight, is Capital-R Romantic to the core, and very much like
Wuthering Heights in a lot of ways. And for better or worse, I don’t need to explain
Twilight to you.
Personally, I can’t really relate to the Romantic viewpoint these days. But, if you’re human, people you love have almost certainly been irrational and impulsive, and have found it hard to control their feelings. If this is a major theme in your life – as it must be to plenty of teenagers in Eminem’s target market, who struggle with their own raging hormones and pent-up frustrations - I can certainly see how a song like “Love The Way You Lie” (or
Twilight for that matter) could bring you solace.
Tim Byron