Children seem to learn lessons more effectively when you show them than when you tell them. That’s why I want to take this opportunity to thank Eminem and Sean “Puffy” Combs.
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In no more time than it takes to flash a camera, they taught an important lesson point to my preteen son–and taught it more effectively than a week’s worth of preaching from me.
The lesson has to do with the value of putting forth a proper appearance, as my elders used to say. There is value, I have tried to say, in combing your hair once in a while and putting on a nice clean-and-pressed suit and tie and polishing your shoes.
To appreciate this lesson, you have to be clued in enough to know how these two young men usually dress.
Eminem, also known as Marshall Bruce Mathers III and “The Real Slim Shady,” usually dresses like a walking garage sale–enormous moonwalker-sized gym shoes, baggy pants hanging precariously on his hips and a gigantic T-shirt draping to his knees. You might call it the “full hip-hop” look.
Puffy usually goes to the opposite extreme. He looks, as my grandma used to say, “prosperous,” to put it mildly. He can afford it. The multimillionaire rap and fashion mogul sometimes drips more jewelry than Tiffany’s windows. He flashes “bling-bling,” as the young folks like to say these days, imitating the jingle of a cash register.
But not in court.
No, when Eminem pleaded guilty in a Mt. Clemens, Mich., courtroom to a weapons charge last week, stemming from a June 4 confrontation outside a Warren, Mich., bar, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Conservative suit, necktie, shirt and glasses. His usually bright blond topknot had been cut off. He wore Ben Franklin-style spectacles. Only a modest earring signaled the old Em.
Puffy has made similarly modest appearances in his high-profile trial to answer felony gun possession charges stemming from a December 1999, nightclub shooting that left three people injured. In court photos, his style is Wall Street. Pin-striped suits. Conservative ties.
No bling-bling.
I showed a news photo of Eminem to the guy who first told me about the young rapper, my son. Last year, when Eminem had the nation’s No. 1 selling pop CD for several months, “everybody” in my son’s 5th-grade class was into him, I was informed. It didn’t matter that his mother and I would only buy the censored version of Eminem’s CDs. He could hear the uncensored versions every day at recess on somebody else’s Walkman.
When I showed news photos of Eminem in court to my son, his mouth dropped open and he exclaimed one of his sincerest indicators of amazement, “What’s up with that?!”
What do you think of his wardrobe, I asked.
“I think,” my son said as his astonishment broke into an impish chuckle, “he looks like he’s trying to turn white again.”
By this, my African-American son meant no racial disrespect. He merely was observing that Eminem’s fame has come largely from living the bad-boy, street-punk image usually associated with black gangster-style rappers. Even when he or she actually grew up in an affluent suburb, the gangster-style rapper wants you to think that home is “the street.”
That may help explain why Puffy allowed himself to get into his pickle with the law. It does not do you much good to work your way up out the streets if you fail to work the streets out of you.
Anyway, now that Eminem’s hide is in the hands of America’s criminal justice system, as Jay Leno quipped, “the last thing he wants is to be treated like a black man!”
No, now that his hide is on the line, he is more than happy to just be white again, thank you very much.
“He usually looks cool, but now he’s looking serious . . . and conservative,” my son said.
I asked, “May I quote you?”
“Only if you say that I’m 12. I am almost 12. Just round it up.”
I wanted to quote him accurately because he revealed something very important when he said Eminem used to look cool.
“Coolness” is the ultimate compliment in the vocabulary of today’s youths. It determines who gets the biggest shares of the $100 billion spent by today’s 32 million teenagers.
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Critics as diverse as Lynne Cheney and various gay and lesbian activist groups decry Eminem’s raunchy, misogynist and gay-bashing lyrics and the industry that has nominated him for honors at this year’s Grammys. But in my son’s 6th-grade circle, Eminem already has fallen out of the heights of cool, crowded out of the white rap pantheon by others like Kid Rock, Papa Roach and the Insane Clown Posse, whoever they are.
No, tastes often change. Money can come and go. But the simple virtues like honesty, character and integrity have staying power, long after the bling-bling goes kablooey.
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