His drug-addicted mom was physically and emotionally abusive, and his dad was absent. The rapper grew up poor, was bullied as a kid, and flunked ninth grade three times before dropping out of high school in Detroit.
It's true that Marshall Mathers-that's Eminem's nom de reality-has always had his reasons to be angry.
He's also been defended on the basis that he offers a voice for the voiceless who speaks openly about working-class male rage and his own feelings of powerlessness. In the process of bashing everybody from Hillary Clinton to Michael Jackson to ex-wife Kim Scott, he's been accused of hating women, gay people, his mother, himself, his past, and society at large. To begin with, the facts: Although some have excused Eminem's violent lyrics by saying that they represent nothing more than a shocking brand of comedy, the rapper has always been more than just a jokester. So, what's the world's most notorious woman-bashing hip-hop jokester doing making a serious song about violence against women? The Backstory And unlike more than a few popular revenge ballads, so extreme that they can almost be taken lightly, "Love the Way You Lie" is clearly not a joke. Unlike some of the previous angry warnings against abuse found in popular songs, this one has an edge of highly personal knowledge. And for millions of people, the subject matter is real-not just because they've seen news reports about Rihanna's abuse by Chris Brown, but because millions of people experience violence in their own relationships. "It was authentic, it was real," Rihanna added.
He pretty much just broke down the cycle of domestic violence and it's something that people don't have a lot of insight on… It's something that I understood, something I connected with." ( Source)įar from distancing her own personal life from the song, then, Rihanna gave listeners a certain degree of license to speculate about the connections between the song and both performers' own troubled histories-Rihanna as a victim of domestic violence, Eminem as a perpetrator. But "Love the Way You Lie" was tagged as a "message song" about the real problem of domestic violence by none other than Rihanna herself, who said this about it in July 2010, "It's something that, you know, we've both experienced…on different sides, different ends of the table.
has been to deny that his more violent songs are meant to send a message. The song's intense depiction of a violent relationship raises questions powerful enough to attract interest not just from Eminem fans, but also from educators, domestic violence activists, feminist bloggers, and an unusually broad slew of commentators concerned about Eminem's influence on teenagers and about his seemingly unguarded misogyny.Įver since he made his controversial debut more than a decade ago, Eminem's M.O. The beats underlying the vocals aren't doing much that's particularly original, and the melody of Rihanna's hook doesn't do much to break new ground, either.īut the words. Why all the feelings? It's not like people haven't heard Eminem rap about violence or Rihanna sing about love. It feels intense, meaningful, chilling, frightening, deep, and sometimes worrisome. We can pretty much encapsulate "Love the Way You Lie" in just one four-letter word.