download video http://movies12.archive.org/3/movies/Mosh2/GNN_Mosh_bb2.mov

What is there really to say?

Other than to straight up hand it to Eminem, Dr. Dre, Ian Inaba, Anson Vogt, Kevin Elam and Thomas Brohdal and everyone else who had a hand in the making of this video?

Watching this video is one of those experiences that just changes you. Mosh has a transformative power. Like, before I clicked on my computer this morning and downloaded the thing....well, I thought and felt one way...about Eminem, the youth vote, our troops, the state of oppositional culture in America, the meaning of this election, what George Bush means to young Americans...and afterwards, I just had huge fucking scales fall from my eyes....

I felt this powerful sense that I had just seen something calibrated exactly for this moment, something hopeful and disturbing and honest...something spoken from the crux of this hour in our history and yet resolutely looking forward. Mosh is political art that, at the same time, speaks in an authentic and specific voice. It is art that seems to bear a power to unleash something new.

This diary is attempt to get at why that is...what Mosh says and what it means.....right now...

Diaries :: kid oakland’s diary ::

i. Private Kelly: thinking about your rage

There is a pivot moment in Mosh that defines the entire video for me....it comes about one third of the way in, cartoon Eminem is rapping to a huge audience of men...and as the camera pulls back we see that they are soldiers in desert fatigues...

All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black Don’t matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather

the camera zooms in on one soldier who is not nodding his head like the others. He is morose, angry, he is thinking as he listens to the music. This is our introduction to Private Kelly. And, as strong as the other depictions are....of Eminem himself, of Lloyd Banks, of Tenant 508...I think that Private Kelly at this moment is the core of the video.

Mosh is a polemic that is intended to make you think about strong feelings; strong feelings that you have because of the political situation you find yourself living in. Quite specifically, Mosh is intended to allow you to internalize the anger, the hate, and the rage that the videos’ young protagonists feel...and yet, Mosh gets you to channel it, gets you to think about what you and they might do with that anger and hate and rage, to think about why you and they feel that anger and hate and rage.

Private Kelly’s sunken-cheeked, grimaced face, angrily meditating on the music, alone in the crowd, is at the core of the politics of this video.

ii. the structure

Mosh works inside of multiple frames.

The first frame is a public school classroom on 9/11. The two are joined. One is utopian and appeals to our sense of community and shared civic responsibility. The other is dystopic and represents the use of the machinery of that utopia against itself. We don’t get one without the other. That’s the start point and world view of Mosh.

The second frame is Eminem/Bush.....and here we get Eminem taking on the "persona" of Bush in order to explode it and play with it. In this case, in portraying himself as GWB reading "My Pet Goat" in a school directly underneath the Trade Towers on 9/11....Eminem is laying out for us that this entire video is going to be a kind of battle between these two personas, the one exploding what we think of the other. Eminem, however, will both play a critic of Bush and, eventually put himself forward as a kind of citizen leader for us. That’s important, and is implied in the humorous glimpse we get of Eminem as GWB, and later, in his shirt and tie again, signing in to vote against Bush.

The third frame is the Wall. The Wall is critical to establishing the political context of the video. The wall is where the "person" of Eminem...Marshall Mathers...is sorting out for himself what to think of the news of the day. It’s personal. He’s got himself up there in the form of photos from his life...and Bush is there as well, in newspaper headlines and in photos with his father. (Fwiw, the visual is also a quote of Picasso’s Guernica...a blank wall, a bare light bulb, an artist depicting what he thinks about a War.) The wall is important because it implies that Marshall Mathers has been trying to think this through for a long time. That he has made it a personal project to put up what he thinks and feels about our times, with evidence from newspapers and hand-written commentary. And we see him, in stop-time animation, go through this.

The fourth frame is the protagonists: Lloyd Banks, Private Kelly and Tenant 508. This frame is the story of the three protagonists whose course we will follow through the video, as they reflect on what they see and what happens to them...and then "hood up" and join the mosh mob. Lloyd Banks, (or really an animated version of Lloyd), who gets racially profiled on his way home to see his dad. Private Kelly....an alter ego for Marshall Mathers, a soldier about to be reassigend to Iraq and away from his family. And Tenant 508, a single mom about to be evicted with her children...who finds herself watching TV news at the same time as she finds out she’s been evicted.

the fifth frame: is the motion of all of the characters in the video from disenfranshisement and rage to coordinated action and showing up to vote. It is critical that this is shown as a thought-out decision: we see each character reflect and decide and then join. This links back through all the first four frames. In effect, Eminem is positing voting as a response, not simply to Bush and the war, but to 9/11, the longstanding injustices visited on our protagonists and the evidence on the Wall.

Finally, it’s important to see the motion of the fifth frame as a powerful antidote to voter suppression and the "wall of fear" strategies of the GOP. If it rains let it rain, the wetter the better begins a visual arc that carries us through the video in which the voters face rain and police intimidation...and even the challenges represented by the civic character of the polling place where you have to sign in and maybe stand in a long line. If you are voting explicitly as a rejection of "fear" and "intimidation" and as a response to Iraq and 9/11, as Eminem implies we are, then why would you let intimidation and fear stop you from voting?

iii. playing with fire

On a simple and emotive level...Mosh spends much of its time using massed and hooded "mosh mobs" moving through rainy urban streets to convey a kind of "Fight Club meets Election 2004" vibe. The animations look similar to the video games Grand Theft Auto and State of Emergency....anarchic, anti-authoritarian, juvenile fantasies written as over-the-top games where violence actually becomes a funny and meaningless digital language, the equivalent of bumper cars.

Instead of getting fixed on what might be dangerous and wrong in that....it occurs to me that Eminem is simply being honest and meeting his intended audience where they are at. These fantasies are part and parcel of the mental world of young folks today. Indeed, as we speak, the vast majority of those who’ve seen this video right now are much more likely to live next to a Suburban Mall with a Starbucks...than down the block from Eight Mile. But this fantasy space....the urban poverty fantasy...is how Eminem gets his audience to internalize the political content of the video.

And it is critical that the video, even when it is depicting the hooded "mosh mobs"...is very clearly about something other than violence and acting out rage. Just because it uses that vocabulary and visual palette, does not mean its audience will not fully understand that it is not about that. In fact, I’d argue that that is part of the point of Mosh.....to take its audience from a world of juvenile fantasy that plays off their dystopic feelings...to a more thoughtful and programatic response to what they are experiencing in the real world. In effect, Eminem is using Grand Theft Auto and Fight Club to bring his viewers out of inchoate rage and anger, and showing them how to create a more thoughtful, strategic, coordinated response. A political response.

iv eminem’s politics

There is a brilliant line in this video that just keeps bouncing around in my head:

Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six Teen million people are equal of this high pitch Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech....

at which point we see Tenant 508 turning a radio dish from the top of a building.

On top of advocating a thought-out, political, pragmatic way out for his audience’s rage and anger....voting on November 2nd....Eminem, in this passage expresses something that goes beyond that. In essence, Eminem is positing a world in which thoughtful citizens who are victims of the powers that be, might actually be able to communicate with one another more effectively than those powers. It is a decentered, free speech, ground-up democracy that Eminem is preaching here.

This is powerful stuff. And there are more hints of this in other parts of the video. November 2nd is not depicted as an end point for the political struggle Eminem describes...it is just a beginning. It’s not an answer, it’s just a necessary first step. Part of which is a rebirth of oppositional culture and informed participatory democracy...and part of which is a recentering of the political process on the voices of those who have not been listened to.

We mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator

Can you hear us?.......

v there’s so much more here

# From the amazing content of the wall...Bush knew...Sick wounded troops held in squalor...Senate upholds ban on Coffin photos...Bush Tax Cuts help Rich... # to the brilliant depiction of Bin Laden as cardboard cutout in a news studio, hiding Cheney and Rumsfeld cheerfully chatting away (a move which highlights how Bin Laden has been used as a bogeyman.) # to the personalization of Eminem’s battle with Bush along the lines of one’s relationship with one’s father # to Lloyd Bank’s relationship with his own father, and how Lloyd’s dad joins him to vote # the amazing scene with Private Kelly on the steps with his angry wife and kids # and how Lloyd and Private Kelly use the fire hose to defuse the Police Officers and riot police blocking the mosh mob’s path to vote.... # and finally, Eminem’s posture to the flag. His adoption of it..and his depiction of it flying in the rain and as having been stolen by Bush.

And, finally, these two quotes which are destined to reverberate this election season and forward:

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 this:

If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better They ain’t gonna stop us, they can’t, we’re stronger now more then ever, They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go, Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home

vi. mosh the vote

For me, I think the honestly and directness of this video, and the way Eminem shows himself to be forthrightly political: a figure who reads, and thinks and tries to figure things out, are startling and add to its power. The fact that it begins and ends with the public school kids. The fact that Eminem does not sugar coat the situation we are in right now. A dystopic utopia....that we need to struggle to find our way out of only makes me respect it more.

In some ways as confused a political metaphor as Moshing is, it is the right one for this time and place. We do indeed have to muddle and fight our way through the fog of this moment, this dystopia...to see that the "clear eyed" leader we’ve been following has been anything but. We need to reject him to reclaim our damaged utopia and begin to rebuild it:

Look in his eyes, it’s all lies, the stars and stripes They’ve been swiped, washed out and wiped, And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die

Which both plays off of rap’s fatalism...and plays into the quite American sentiment:

Live free or die.

I think the most brilliant aspect of Mosh is simply its imperative to think about one’s rage and to channel it. I keep coming back to Private Kelly in that crowd.

And I wonder, if today, in Iraq, some real Private Kelly is getting a chance to see this video for the first time...and what he or she thinks...good or bad....and what rage he or she must feel face to face with the very real, very troubling dystopia that is the United States occupation of Iraq.

lyrics with screen shots

http://www.benfrank.net/mosh/