My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.
Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.
I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!
50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley
36. Eminem – The Eminem Show
By the time this album came out I was already a full blown Eminem fan. But in order to truly describe the arc of my appreciation, it is important to return to a time when I was most definitely not a member of the Eminem Appreciation Society.
When Cousin Tim moved to Brooklyn in 2000, he brought a home-recording career that was almost the exact inverse of mine. Same amount of output but entirely different genre. He was a hip-hop fanatic and had been since the early 1980’s. He’d been recording rap almost as long.
At this time I would have classified myself as an appreciator but not an aficionado of the genre. I had a few Public Enemy albums but their politics made them acceptable to a dyed-in-the-wool punk rocker like myself. When Eminem hit the scene I might has well have been a member of the Moral Majority.
All I knew was that he used the word “faggot” with extreme regularity. I took umbrage and set about writing a song that was in essence a come-on. I wanted to shame Eminem by calling him on his homophobia. Of course, this was before I ever actually LISTENED to him. I only listened to what people SAID about him.
My Eminem flirt song never got off the ground mostly because Timothy insisted that I listen to him. After about 20 minutes I realized that he was more punk rock than anything I’d been listening to for years. The beats, the musical tracks, the WORDS. It is no surprise that Seamus Heaney is quoted on the dust cover of the new Eminem autobiography. Forget Kurt Cobain. Forget Paul Westerberg. (And if you know me you know how HUGE that is).
The voice of this generation, the one that stretches from the late ’70’s to 4 minutes from now, the True Poet Laureate of America is a dirtbag from Detroit who just happened to be born with two M’s in front of his two names.
And The Eminem Show is his Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
He ranges from the broad scope of modern society and hypocrisy (“White America”) …
to the deepest darkest details of his own harrowing life (“Cleaning Out My Closet”).
If you are converted already and I’m preaching to you, then I am glad to be in your company. If you’ve discounted him because of the genre he performs in or his penchant for violent hyperbole, you need to take a closer look.
After all, you don’t want to be the Dylan fan booing at the Newport Jazz Festival because he plugged his guitar into an amplifier. Or do you?
— Brendan O’Malley
