Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 88

84 Popular Culture Review weren’t getting along at the time. None of it was to be taken literally.” This response would lead readers to believe that this is part of the “irony” and “parody” of his lyrical content, and indeed there seems some honest and obvious sincerity in this explanation. Then, he pauses briefly following the above comment to add, “Although at the time, I wanted to fucking do it.” To Eminem, both statements would seem to be true, it was all a put on, but it was also an alltoo-real desire. Slim Shady allows him to play Clyde through Slim in the song, but Slim is not a dispassionate and separate self through which Marshall’s feelings can be examined. Slim and Marshall both parody and fantasize Kim’s death, leaving the self that Eminem represents as the narrator of the song a fractured and contradictory one. That self is not objective, but, in the postmodern sense of the self demonstrated by Borges, it is a more authentic one, containing all of the fragmented and contradictory output and appearance of the self as all authentically “true.” Thus, the self that Eminem simulates is an authentic version of the postmodern constructed personality. Slim Shady is artificial, but so too are many of our personas. Sociology has long understood the artificial nature of human personality and the need for personas. Consider Erving Goffman’s definition in The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life (1959) of the “fronts” that we use to define ourselves to others. These social masks are not merely those used by professional performers but ones that we all use in performing ourselves. He says that the front is “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those that observe the performance” (22). Fronts serve through our appearance and manner both “to tell us of the performer’s social status” as well as to “warn us of the interaction role the performer will be expected to play in the oncoming situation.” What becomes complicated in examining Eminem and his comments about himself, and himself in the manner that are his music and his personas, is that even he seems to need to be informed by the cues of his own manner to be warned about the role he is to play within the context of his songs. Often, again, he seems to play multiple roles that complicate how he and we interpret who he is in the song as well as who his personas are. Up until now, I have only briefly spelled out how this kind of persona generation-through-metanarrative is related to Baudrillard’s notion of simulation. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillaid uses an example from painting— neofiguration— F