Playing It Safe

Sasha Frere-Jones reviews Eminem's latest album, Encore, in The New Yorker. Sasha's not impressed, but he does like one thing: the song--and video--"Mosh."

"Mosh" is, as Frere-Jones puts it, a "furious jeremiad against President Bush." True enough. But then he goes on to claim, amazingly, that putting out the song required bravery, rather than being the perfectly safe act it was.

Worse, Frere-Jones seems to think "Mosh" is a serious anti-war statement. Here's a portion of the lyric: "Let [Bush] go fight his own war let him impress daddy that way/ No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil." This is the kind of stuff that gives mindless sloganeering a bad name. The video, which suggests that Bush and Bin Laden are in cahoots, does the impossible by being even stupider than the song.

I don't blame Eminem. He's got talent and knows what sells--there's no reason to expect him to understand anything about world politics. But I would hope for a slightly higher level of criticism from The New Yorker.