Loren Kajikawa, Program Head & Professor of Music History & Culture, George Washington University
“Will The Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?”: Eminem as Political Football
Loren Kajikawa is chair of the music program at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics.
Kajikawa’s writings have appeared in American Music, Black Music Research Journal, ECHO: a music-centered journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Music and Society, among others. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California Press, 2015) explores the relationship between rap music’s backing tracks and racial representation. In addition to his publications, Kajikawa is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music (Vol. 12-13) and he currently serves as co-editor of “Tracking Pop,” the University of Michigan Press’s series of books about popular music.
Kajikawa has been invited to give the AMS/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Lecture in Cleveland, Ohio, and he regularly presents his work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, American Studies Association, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and Society for American Music, among others. As a graduate student, he received the 2008 Mark Tucker Award for the best paper presented at the Society for American Music conference in San Antonio, Texas.
Abstract: In recent years, rapper Eminem has been vocal about his political allegiances. In 2024, for example, he took the stage at a Detroit rally in support of Kamala Harris, calling out Trump as a threat to the country and introducing former president Barack Obama, who began his speech by rapping lyrics from one of Eminem’s most famous songs, “Lose Yourself.” Despite Eminem’s stated support for Democratic candidates and his rejection of Trump, the white rapper also has been claimed by Republican politicians including Marco Rubio and Vivek Ramaswamy. In fact, early in his career, Eminem branded himself as a politically incorrect provocateur. Early commercial recordings, along with the semi-autobiographical 2002 film 8 Mile, cast him as an angry underdog—a working class, white rapper lashing out at the establishment. Thus, despite his recent efforts to position himself firmly in opposition to Donald Trump, much of Eminem’s early work aligns well with the cultural logic of MAGA politics. This paper explores these contradictions and examines how Eminem’s music and legacy remain open to being adopted by both Democrats and Republicans during the 2024 presidential campaign. How do Barack Obama and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom chose to rap the opening lines of “Lose Yourself” at different campaign events, draw on hip hop history to bolster their respective positions? What does Eminem’s relevance twenty-five years after his mainstream debut tell us about hip hop’s political evolution?
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