Eminem and Rihanna: The Monster Tour

Eminem is practically a recluse. He rarely does press. His latest album is a brilliant re-visiting of the territory he scorched in The Marshall Mathers LP, with new more adult and, in many ways, more pained examinations. There is also a macho re-assertion of power, the most obvious example being the dazzlingly fast “Rap God.” He’s in his 40s now. His daughter just graduated from high school. He guests on other people’s albums. He produces other people’s albums. He has a movie in the works (but that’s been the truth for a while). He’s had a tough bunch of years. He beat his addiction to prescription pills. His best friend was killed. He completely retreated from public life for almost that whole entire time. He gained 100 pounds. He then lost 100 pounds and got lean again, lean and muscled like a pit bull. He doesn’t tour a lot. That’s why when I heard that he and Rihanna were doing a small tour of the United States (only a couple of cities, a couple of dates), I thought: “Who the hell knows with this guy. We should probably go see him now.” I’ve been a fan from the beginning. I’m not a big concert-goer, but this one I felt I couldn’t miss. The O’Malley family are Eminem fanatics, and so my sister Jean drove down and we went together, missing our other two siblings the entire time. They were with us in spirit!

The stadium

My sister Jean, ahead of me, on our way to the stadium

Eminem has done four songs with Rihanna, a couple on his albums and a couple on hers. It’s an odd pairing but makes a lot of sense when you hear the songs. I like it when he has women singing with him (the first example being “Stan,” with Dido crooning in the background). It’s not that they soften him. It’s that their softness highlights his rage, and counter-acts it, bringing other things to the surface in him. The hurt little kid. The rage-boy. The guy who has only loved once and will never get over it. The pissed-off one-woman man. And she? She brings with her the darkness of her tabloid life, her seeming imperturbability about violence (explicitly referenced in her duet with Eminem “Love the Way You Lie”, which put him at #1 again), and her blasé public demeanor. She’s part Zen goddess part rebellious dead-eyed teenager. Her interviews are agonizing because she only has about 20 words in her vocabulary. But there is something in the pairing with Eminem that satisfies. And of course, he’s no dummy. Touring with her, where she is not just a guest-spot but shares the bill, brings in the RiRi fans, which he needs. It’s an act of generosity but it’s also smart.

It was a small intimate show.

Because she shared the bill with him, the show was kind of uneven. (The NY Times review of the show is pretty good, although I completely disagree that MM has “failed to innovate” recently. What? But there’s some really good analysis and observation there besides that.) I was there for Eminem only. You could feel the energy in MetLife Stadium pendulum wildly throughout the night, with the screams reaching Mania Psychotic Level when Eminem came on, a surge in electricity and force, where sound has feel, where it just borders violence. People cheered for Rihanna, of course, and if Eminem hadn’t been there you would have thought they were loud excited cheers. But it felt like everyone was just lying in wait, through Rihanna’s numbers, waiting for him. She’s a star. But she’s not a star like him and you could feel it in the quality and intensity of those cheers.

The show’s set-list was well-organized, despite all that. Rihanna did all her stuff in one go – as opposed to mixing it up with Eminem’s stuff, and that was a smart choice. It’s not that I suffered through her set – I find her kind of captivating, truth be told. During one of her ballads, the entire stadium held up their little flashlight apps on their phone, the modern-day version of holding up a lighter. It was so cool.

But I was definitely waiting for him to come back. And when he did, he stayed back, roaring through a set of his greatest hits, all Eminem, all Marshall, a non-stop assault for an hour. So it was well-designed, I thought – give the Rihanna fans some uninterrupted time, and then get her out of the way for Marshall. I was happy with it, at any rate.

He did “Criminal,” which I was thrilled about. He did old stuff. “My Name Is.” “The Way I Am.” He did new stuff too. “Rap God,” which was even more breath-taking in person. He did “Sing For the Moment.” He did “Stan,” with Rihanna taking the Dido part. He did “Crack a Bottle.” He did “I’m Not Afraid”, dedicating it to anyone who has struggled with addiction, and to anyone who has an addicted person in their lives. Hearing 75,000 people sing along, arms in the air, was a profound experience.

He gave us a TON of himself, with no Rihanna in sight, and the energy righted itself. He finished off with “Lose Yourself,” which blew the roof off, and then she came on, and they did “Monster” to close out the show, before walking offstage together.

I had multiple moments where I looked around me at that crowd, the crowd above me, the crowd below, and all I thought was, “Fame, man. Fame.” It’s overwhelming.

Like … what?

Excuse me?

It would be like being Neil Armstrong or any of the handful (literally) of men who have stood on the surface of the moon. Who do those astronauts commiserate with? No one but each other. They have had a singular experience shared by an elite group. What does it FEEL like to stand on that huge stage and look out at that? He said at one point, “This stage is HUGE, Jersey!” He ran up and down the stage, making sure to include everyone. He raised his arms to those in the highest tiers. There were gigantic screens where we could see him in closeup but I forced myself to also look at that small figure down there, to see him in his corporeality, that he really was down there, he wasn’t just coming to me via video feed. Jean said later, “I couldn’t believe he was right there.”

He is incredible live, and that was the revelation for me. He was not holed up in himself, he was not relying on pyrotechnics (although there were many). He performed. He acted the SHIT out of all of his songs. He held the mike out to the audience to hear us call back to him in unison. He was drenched in sweat. He made sense of those dizzying layered tiers of lyrics, you could see the gestures, the sense in those gestures, regardless of how fast the song was. He did a couple of his dance anthems, like “Without Me,” where you could barely hear him because we all were singing along. Every single word. That sound. What must that feel like? To hear what you wrote one night on a loose-leaf pad come back at you amplified 75,000-fold?

As strange as this may sound, I have always thought of Eminem as an introvert. He created alter egos who could express his psychotic fantasies for him. Slim Shady. Eminem. These were the doppelgängers who allowed him to get on those stages and do the things he wanted to do, express the things he wanted to express. But he’s always struck me as an almost nerdy obsessive introvert, huddled over a dictionary, or video games, or movies, lost in his own private world. So the revelation was how extroverted, how OUT he was as a performer. He reached out to us. He owned that stage, but there was a feedback loop going on, our noise pushing him on. It was total Rock Star time. He’s so fantastic on his albums, diverse, technically brilliant, hilarious, committed, and it was awesome to see how that feeling translates to his live persona. He doesn’t “hide” in the studio. There it was: the feelings in those songs, the way those songs speak to the largest possible groups of people … coming OUT of him. No shyness. No hiding behind “fuck you, I don’t care”, although he did flip the audience off multiple times. That was more of a bratty “You and me, we’re in this shit-show together” thing though. He did not have contempt for us, he did not hide from us. He gave us the goods. He’s a showman.

The Monster Tour only has a couple more dates. Jean and I were so happy we got a chance to see him live. We would look at each other, during this or that number, with awe-struck expressions, shared moments of wordless love and excitement. The whole night was like that. When he first appeared, strapped to a table rising up out of the stage (really, Marshall?) … the sound of that crowd practically lifted the stadium up off of its foundation. Jean and I kept clutching at each other and saying articulate things like, “Oh my GOD.”

Thank you, Eminem. I’m glad you stuck around. People love you out here. That love was palpable last night.