I googled this NY Time article up after seeing orgers say that middle age people love Eminem.

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYTimes

A gaggle of my girlfriends are surreptitiously smitten with Eminem. They buy
his posters on eBay. They play him on their Walkmen at the gym. They sing along
lustily to "Cleanin' Out My Closet" and "Lose Yourself" in the car. They
rhapsodize that his amazing vignettes of dysfunctional families make him the
Raymond Carver of hip-hop.

They crowd into movie theatres along with teenage boys in watch caps, and then
insist that Eminem's rapping his way out of a Detroit car factory in "8 Mile"
is way hotter than Jennifer Beals's dancing her way out of the Pittsburgh steel
mill in "Flashdance."

They put off helping their kids with homework so they can watch the rapper's
trailer-park mom being interviewed on "Primetime Live."

"My 11-year-old daughter is repulsed that I like him," a friend says, as her
daughter chimes in that mom is "psychotic and weird." Mothers, the little girl
explains, are not supposed to like people who talk about "drugs and sex and
hard lives." Kids don't want to see their parents hopped up over a 30-year-old
hip-hopper.

It doesn't feel quite so rebellious to like The Most Evil Rapper Alive, as
Zadie Smith dubbed Eminem in Vibe, if your mom is rapping along when he
describes how he'd like to rape and kill his mom.

"I have to listen to his music in the car because my kids don't want to hear
him anymore," a friend with teenage boys says. "He's attractive and smart and
very, very macho. There's no fake posturing in his music. He blasts away."

Frantic to be hip, eager to stay young, we are robbing our children of their
toys. Like Mick Jagger, we want to deny the reality of time and be cool unto
eternity. Eminem sings only about himself, which makes him a perfect boomers'
crooner.

But yo, dawg, our suffocating yuppie love has turned Marshall Mathers into
Jerry Mathers. Eminem is now as cuddly as Beaver Cleaver.

Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore haven't criticized him lately. Instead, his talent
has been hailed by the arbiters of real culture.

In a radical chic ode to the rapper in The New York Observer, Paul Slansky, the
Los Angeles writer, suggested that middle-aged fans liked to echo Eminem's
anger after they drove in the car pool: "So we drop off the kids, roll down the
windows and blast Eminem."

In the same paper, Andrew Sarris called the star the new James Dean, and in The
Times, Neal Gabler deemed him "the meta-Elvis."

Pat O'Brien chatted with Eminem on "Access Hollywood" about his "crib" in a
Detroit suburb and his Oscar chances. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times
Magazine that the singer's "mayhem is so calculatedly over the top that it
seems no more or less offensive than typical multiplex Grand Guignol."

As Don Imus drily observed to Frank last week: If we're talking about Eminem,
isn't he over? Can his street cred survive his being on the short list for Time
magazine's Person of the Year, alongside Dick Cheney?

He's charming the people he's supposed to be menacing. What happens when Rebel
Without a Cause becomes Rebel With Applause?

Eminem used to become irritated when interviewers and other musicians, like
Moby, criticized the misogyny, homophobia and violence in his lyrics. Now he
probably misses being able to get a rise out of people.

The biggest fight he's had lately is with a hand puppet, Triumph the Insult
Comic Dog, whom he and his posse pushed around at the MTV awards. (The dog
later sniffed, "My mom was a bitch, too, but I don't go writing songs about
it.")

Rock 'n' roll and hip-hop used to be about protest; now they're the soundtrack
of commodity capitalism, pushing cars, clothes, computers, vodka and running
shoes.

It used to take longer for rebellion to go commercial. Deadheads were truckin'
for decades before Jerry Garcia began peddling his tie-dyed ties in Christmas
catalogs.

Eminem says he will never shill, and he told Pat O'Brien he can still be raw:
"I can't see losing that edge . . . especially now being on top. I got new
problems." Yet he's flipped the script, rounding his edges for the mainstream.
In "8 Mile," he's portrayed as a defender of women and gays. On the cover of
his latest CD, "The Eminem Show," he has traded his do-rag and baggy Nikes for
a black suit.

He'll have to be very smart and very wicked if he doesn't want to hear himself
in elevators.


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Now that is fucking funny!

2 long 4 me 2 read but i will say..

Eminem has lost his touch on me. I am a continued supporter and fam of Eminem, but he just dont give me that fire like he used 2 no mo. Although 8 Mile was astounding.

Ya can't expect an artist to give the same reaction year after year. As long as the music is still good, everything's cool.