The American Rebel

I scrutinize every word, memorize every line
I spit it once, refuel and re-energize and rewind
I give sight to the blind, my insight through the mind
I exercise my right to express when i feel it's time
It's just all in your mind, what you interpret it as
I say to fight, you take it as i'mma whip someone's ass

Come along follow me as i lead through the darknessas
I provide just enough spark that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength
Come with me and i won't steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as i guide us through the fog
To the light at the end of the tunnel
We gonna fight, we gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march
Through the swamp, we gonna mosh through the marsh
Take us right through the doors (c'mon)

Imagine it pouring, it's raining down on us
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone's tryina tell us something,
Maybe this is god just sayin' we're responsible
For this monster, this coward,
That we have empowered
This is bin laden, look at his head noddin'
How could we allow something like this without pumping our fists
Now this is our final hour
Let me be the voice in your strength and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply by six...
Teen million people, are equal at this high pitch
Maybe we can reach alqueda through my speech
Let the president answer a higher anarchy
Strap him with an ak-47, let him 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
No more psychological warfare, to trick us to thinking that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country, we're patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes its all lies
The stars and stripes, they've been swiped, washed out and wiped
And replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
If i get sniped tonight you know why,
Cause i told you to fight.

And as we proceed,
To mosh through this desert storm,
In these closing statements, if they should argue
Let us beg to differ
As we set aside our differences
And assemble our own army
To disarm this weapon of mass destruction
That we call our president, for the present
And mosh for the future of our next generation
To speak and be heard

[Partial Lyrics To Eminems: "Mosh"]


The video - more than 90% animation - starts with a cartoon Eminem in a suit reading My Pet Goat upside down to a classroom full of children. Only a few frames later we are immersed in his thinking process post-September 11, 2001, and before the war on Iraq.

We literally see Eminem thinking and conceptualizing his rage as he shadowboxes in front of a wall plastered with crucial newspaper headlines - such as "Bush knew", "Bush declares war", "Congress OKs US$87 billion", "Bush tax cuts help rich" and "Blechtell" (sic). The wall, as a symbol, is a powerful hip-hop quote of Pablo Picasso's Guernica.

To the sound of Mosh's hypnotically funereal beat, anti-war sentiment fuses with classic class struggle. Eminem's persona merges into the character Private Kelly, who is also thinking hard, trying to conceptualize his rage. After watching Eminem rapping live to the troops in Baghdad, Private Kelly goes back home to his family and is greeted by a "re-enlist" letter. He becomes a deserter, hoods up, joins the mosh mob of the angry and disfranchised and follows the Leader (Eminem himself) toward a new, crucial mission.

In this bleak atmosphere about to be transformed, Osama bin Laden is nothing but a cardboard cutout issuing fatwas from a sound stage. When the fake cave wall falls, the happy chattering duo of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld take center stage.

On the surface, Eminem's political move is inscribed in a larger battle between a Hobbesian world view - the predominantly urban black, disfranchised, fight-for-your-rights crowd - and the Rousseau contingent - the more hipped-out, peace-and-love, environmentally conscious dance/trance/chill-out crowd.

But Eminem transcends it by channeling the feelings of disorientation of trailer-park America, suburban-mall America and, especially, urban black America - which is anti-Bush with a vengeance, as this correspondent recently attested in Memphis, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles (see Free at last? May 28)

The urban black vote might always have been Democrat: but the key point of Eminem's video is to force the desperate masses, all kinds of desperate masses, not to urban guerrillahood, but to the polls, "to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president".

For an 18-year-old voting for the first time, "Mosh" provokes the same impact that the barricades of May 1968 in Paris did on the "children of Mao and Coca-Cola", as film genius Jean-Luc Godard put it.

The esthetic of the video may be cartoon teenage wasteland - a code easily identified by Eminem's core audience - but hardly could there be a better metaphor for the current US political nightmare than "moshing".

The thing is, Eminem and director Inaba use "moshing" to organize a strategic, political response to alienation and dystopia. Voting, in this case, is only the first, necessary step toward a society of real free speech and informed, participatory democracy.

[By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online, Oct. 30, 2004]


Eminem's "Mosh" Video: