| Are these women getting inside Eminem’s head? |

This week, rapper Eminem made headlines when, in a new music video, he performed a violently misogynistic rap that attacked singer Lana Del Rey. Del Rey, who is 29 and best known for her songs “Young and Beautiful” and “Summertime Sadness,” has been publicly effusive in her admiration for Eminem (né Marshall Mathers). In the video, Eminem fantasizes about brutalizing the singer in a verse that also lionizes the behavior of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, who was caught on surveillance video earlier this year knocking his fiancé unconscious in an elevator:

Play nice? Bitch I’ll punch Lana Del Rey right in the face twice, like Ray Rice in broad daylight in the plain sight of the elevator surveillance,
’Til her head is banging on the railing, then celebrate with the Ravens.

That Eminem said or rapped something violently misogynistic should not, in itself, come as a surprise. It’s par for the course for him, who has been making money rapping about beating and killing women for more than a decade. He has rapped about slapping women until they can’t stand, and murdering his ex-wife and stuffing her in his car trunk — and that’s just the beginning. And his violently misogynistic rhetoric is almost always directed at a specific woman: his ex-wife, the singer Mariah Carey and the late Amy Winehouse, to name just a few of many examples.
It’s unclear whether Eminem, or any of the myriad other rappers and musical artists of all genres who publicly fantasize about brutalizing women, do so because they think it’s “edgy” and “boundary-pushing.” If they do, they’re sorely mistaken. Violence against women, which is distressingly common in the United States, is possibly the most banal topic they could choose. It’s so common, and so widely accepted and ignored, that to align oneself with wife beaters and rapists isn’t anywhere near as outrageous as these artists seem to think it is. Would that it were.
I can’t get inside Eminem’s head – and I’m quite sure I wouldn’t want to, given the chance – but I suspect that his outburst against Del Rey had little to do with Del Rey herself, despite its specificity.

The real reason may be his fear that time has passed him by, and the very group he has so-often victimized in his lyrics — young women — seem to be running circles around him.
Exhibit A?
Taylor Swift, the 24-year-old phenom who is arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now (fret not, BeyHive, I’m sure your queen will reclaim her crown soon) released her fifth album, 1989, in late October after months of buildup and publicity. The hype was justified: 1989 is a great album, and it’s been hailed as such by everyone from NPR’s music critic to current king of rap Kendrick Lamar.
It’s also a record-breaking album: It sold more than 1 million copies in the first week of release. The last time that happened was more than a decade ago. To be precise, it was in 2002. And the album in question? Eminem’s “The Eminem Show.”
Swift is well aware of this, and she’s been quite open about her delight at busting this particular record. Earlier this week, she released a video of her celebrating and posted a photo of her as a round-faced child, with the caption, “The last time an album sold as many copies as 1989 did [in its] first week, it was 2002, I was 12, and going through my ‘braids phase.’ ” She doesn’t appear to be trying to pick a fight with Eminem, or to suggest that she’s broken his record – just a record.
Eminem, a man who has sold millions of albums and made millions of dollars rapping about committing violence against young women, just had his longstanding record broken by a young woman. Perhaps the best way to understand his latest track is as a display of aggrieved entitlement, a temper tantrum thrown by a man who realizes that he is no longer king of this particular castle, and that the new rulers are the very people he has so often disparaged.