RDAT Tournament – Game 11 – Outside NYC Bracket Final

Eminem – The Slim Shady LP vs. Kayne West – The College Dropout

• Game 4 – Outside NYC – The Great White Hope vs. Black Excellence
• Game 5 – Outside NYC – Jersey Blunts vs. Social Chicago

My first memories of Eminem are linked with my college’s indoor athletic facility. I routinely caught the trolley up Commonwealth Avenue and played pick-up basketball. The sound system wasn’t up for debate and on most nights, the soundtrack to the games would be whatever WBCN was playing. One night they played ‘My Name Is’ by Eminem and the rest is history…

OK, so that’s likely a fictionalized version of history. What’s more likely is the gym was a former practice facility for the Portland Trail Blazers and the audio memory is a conglomerate of the countless times that song and others from that album were played publicly by any and everybody.

WBCN and the people playing pickup in a Portland practice facility have their skin complexion in common and since that’s where I was at the time, I can’t say how this album was received in ‘The Hood’. Luckily that’s something Em is aware of and why linking with Dre is important. It removes the initial possibility of it being a hoax since it’s connected with a former member of NWA, even if Marshall bites back at the proverbial hand feeding him.

The last of the four singles released on The Slim Shady LP, this is a track that I still listen to today. It shows off his ability to tell a story in a shortened amount of time, attracting relate-ability to his core audience and still having fun with it all. The final verse is not only the most memorable, but slickly infuses a reference to the first album from the Aftermath label – the forgotten Dr. Dre Presents… the Aftermath.

The aftermath of hubris is usually painful memories. The Black Star review brought back one of my greatest regrets – not attending the Spitkicker Tour in the spring of 2000. While Kanye West wouldn’t be on the national radar until 2004, I remember hearing him on ‘Guerrilla Monsoon Rap‘ off Talib Kweli’s Quality in 2002. He’s just on the chorus, but if a listener liked that beat or ‘Get By’, the biggest single from the album; they might be curious enough to search in the notes for the producer.

Before The College Dropout, West produced ‘This Can’t Be Life’ off The Dynasty: Roc La Familia and four tracks on The Blueprint in 2001. I was back on a college campus at the time and watched heads bounce for ‘Izzo (H.O.V.A.)’. A couple of years later, I mouthed along with Jay when he shouts out, “Kanyeezy you did it again, you a genius nigga!” at the opening of ‘Lucifer’ off The Black Album.

So while he wasn’t there, Kanye was already in my ears when I first saw him on Def Poetry Jam and I believe I would have seen him if I was able to attend that concert back in 2000.

This performance is like the crack in the dam that eventually released the flood. After this, it was like he was everywhere and always had been. ‘Through the Wire’ was everywhere before the album dropped in February of 2004 and while I had stopped watching videos by that point, I can remember seeing Stacey Dash running through an airport for ‘All Falls Down‘ as West ‘recycled’ his poetry behind a simple guitar loop that gets more and more complicated.

The College Dropout is similarly simple and complicated as Kanye cycles through the materialism message from ‘All Falls Down’, rac his disgust of higher education and everything associated with it. I was at a Predominately White Institution, but didn’t feel a need to find and/or hand with Greeks of any color. Listening to ‘School Spirit’ didn’t confirm my decision, but I felt I could relate with him.

I couldn’t personally relate to ‘Jesus Walks’, but felt the power of the song despite my perfunctory praise and worship growing up. It’s a fascinating statement song, especially since we’re three songs away from “The New Workout Plan”, a track about premarital sex. Now, I’m not a bible-ologist, but I thought that Jesus said basically sex outside of marriage is just as much a sin as homosexuality.

So that he’s repeatedly stated his belief that he’s not going to Hell because he did ‘Jesus Walks’ has always thrown me for a loop; similar to Em’s obsession with homosexuals. The ‘Ken Kaniff’ skit was strange in 1999, it didn’t get better on subsequent albums and if released in today’s climate, it would overshadow the album and create a Twitter-storm. But there are flaws in every great work. To quote Tyler Durden, “Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.”