A walk down Eight Mile Road
BackHold on to your seats for this one: I listen to Eminem.
It is not always by choice that I do. If it was up to me, I would probably listen only to as little as I could get by with, and I am pretty sure I could get by with less than I have heard, so far.
In the name of full disclosure, I will name the two works by Eminem I have heard: "Lose Yourself" (the cleaned-up version of the award-winning song) and "Eight Mile Road" (ahem).
We will take a moment here to bring the uninitiated up to speed. Eminem is the stage name of Marshall Mathers (³M and M² - see?), a young, white man who has in the past few years ascended to the critical and commercial pinnacle of the rap music industry.
Hardly anyone should need to be told what rap music is or how it has come to be the mode of choice for expression of inner-city angst and frustration. It also can be, as Eminem demonstrates, a language of determination and hope.
"Lose Yourself" is a careening ballad - if a poem can be called that, and I think it can - about the anxieties and conflicts that collide at the edge of the realization of a closely held creative dream.
"Eight Mile Road" looks at the same destination from its grim beginning. Recognition and reward are only parts of a goal forged in the bleak Detroit neighborhood for which the song is named. The quest is for a ticket out of the grimy, desperate drain around which so many lives circle and finally lose hope before they at last disappear to become part of what they fear and hate.
It all sounds familiar, for a number of reasons. One is that I have seen some "Eight Mile Roads" in my time.
One was west Bartlesville, Okla., where I lived for 13 years and watched as many existed, grew, failed and even died - and where few found success or recognition, even on what we consider ordinary terms.
Once the home of hard-working zinc smelter employees, its houses, businesses and streets have mostly fallen into disrepair since the reverberations of the postwar boom died away and the eastern part of town took the economic forefront.
The fortunes of the young people born and living there often follow that downward arc. Among the ones I knew, the desire to get out, to escape, as if the neighborhood had some power to hold them, was mentioned often. They believed west Bartlesville, the least influential part of town, still could wrestle them each into poverty, prison or death - or all three.
"Eight Mile Road" exists in other places and has been in other times. We know them by name: The Bowery, Tobacco Road, the East End and a section of Jerusalem once known as "the college."
Then there was a town mentioned in the Gospel of John that sounded, to me, a lot like someone might describe west Bartlesville. "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?² sneered Nathanael, a future apostle, clearly unimpressed with the news of this preacher named Jesus.
Not anymore, we might answer, than can come out of west Bartlesville or Bessemer or Hyde Park. But out of Nazareth, a Galilean jerkwater, came a man who unarguably changed the way people look at everything.
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