Hip-hop has long been a cult, honoring single mothers and many sacrifices. “She was barely even grown up and she became my momma!” Cee-Lo Green’s mournful opening on the wounded piano Goodie Folks villain of the idle 1995 song Guess who. “I never knew my father, so even when times were bad/ I was glad I had my momma.”
About the most powerful song of the gospel hood; dear Mama2Pac most famously paid tribute to the tenacity of his family matriarch, Afeni Shakur, the Black Panther of the political revolution. An empathetic line by chance: “Like a crack of fury, momma / The queen was always black.” One of only a few surviving rap songs selected for the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.
Whether it’s Kanye West compare your heart Recently, Donda West wrote an elegant songbook for Nikko Giovanni, or Jay-Z revelation “she cried tears of joy” when Gloria Carter finally came out to her single mother Lesbia after years of social shame, you don’t have to look far to catch a song where a mother is elevated to the status of a deity. .
This made many of Eminem’s lyrical attacks on his mother, Debbie Nelson, who died this week at the age of 69, stand out as shocking. Turning a rough childhood and a breakup in a Detroit trailer park into a sleazy cartoon where nothing was missing, Eminem’s Debbie songs are often portrayed as a villainous, Nurse Ratched-esque character, while her drug use was allegedly considered a bit too mature. to parody
“I just found mine, no more dope than I do!” Slim Shady made his breakthrough debut in 1999 with the single My Name Is. The attacks seemed darker as time went on, with the rapture of jokes (on the track to kill you) and the suggestion that Debbie may have Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Cleanin’ From My Closet, which ended up at No 4 in the UK charts, ended with a rude speech to her: “Come on, guess what? I am dead: as dead as can be!”
Some felt Eminem’s attacks were the realization of an extreme, Jerry Springer-fuelled era in pop culture, where reckless boundaries were pushed by everyone from Vince McMahon to muckier, Attitude-Era shows wrestling “boy mags” off the shelf at the supermarket. However, many others – including Debbie herself, who sued Eminem for defamation – felt the line had been crossed.
Growing up without a father due to dementia, and with a working mother who later worked seven jobs to provide for three boys, I gravitated towards music of predation and dog themes. It was a rare space where individual mothers were more consistently deified than written negative comments when a political dissertation was conducted in the British Navy. There was a rich tradition of rappers paying tribute to the women who held the family together, and that’s what really made Eminem’s mom-bashing lyrics so horrendous.
Given the bad blood, it was hard to see how Eminem and his mother could ever reconcile. However, then Eminem’s softer 2013 rap-ballad Headlights. Here he repents Cleanin’ Out My Closet always coming out and turning his position with a touching line: “You are still beautiful to me, because you are my mother.”
In the music video, he gives Debbie a warm hug and feels this is a pivotal moment in Eminem’s legacy: the shift from rapping venom about a broken childhood to solidarity. In this song, even though the production is a little tepid, Eminem acknowledges that he and his mother are “survivors” rather than enemies.
The rollercoaster saga of Eminem and Debbie exemplifies the way hip-hop is perhaps surprisingly rich in empathetic lyrics about struggling mothers. Even artists who reveal difficult truths – like Biggie sharing his mom’s cancer diagnosis with the world Deadly Thoughtsor the underground hero James the Bold complains of being neglected by the woman of the house dearest mother – it tends to peak at the moment it reaches the point where it reveals respect or repairs a broken relationship.
It’s the kind of thing where working men have complicated relationships with the women who gave birth to them – like Debbie and Mathers Marshall. While the road might be rocky and the painful memories are usually excavated, rappers (and by extension fans who feel “seen” through lyrics) immortalize mothers in music tend to walk with much lighter shoulders.