Transcript 
Text in [ ] are lyrics in the song


0:04Welcome to Pop Hour Devolution where four PhDs talk about stuff.
0:10 My name is Juliette Levy and I have a PhD in History.
0:13 My name is Stevie Ruiz and I teach in Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge. And I'm coming to you from an expertise around environmental justice, critical science studies and comparative race and ethnicity.
0:28 Hi. My name is Hannah Cutting Jones.I am a food historian, so I have a PhD in history and I work in Food Studies and Global Studies at University of Oregon.
0:40 My name is AJ Withers and I have a PhD in social work. My research focuses on oppression and subordination and how to fight back. We're discussing Marshall Mathers or Eminem’s June 2024 video “Houdini”. A few days before the video dropped Eminem released a teaser video with magician David Blaine.
Blaine eats a wine glass and Eminem says, “well, for my last trick, I'm going to make my career disappear”. Houdini opens with Eminem's longtime manager, Paul Rosenberg telling Eminem:
[I was listening to the album. Good fucking luck. You're on your own] alerting the viewer that there is something controversial or even cancelable about the video.
What might sound like a fresh beat is a remix of the Steve Miller band's 1982 Abracadabra. [abra abra cadabra] Houdini depicts the reappearance of Mather's alter ego Slim Shady.
Shady emerges through a time portal from 2002 and shows his contempt for the world today and for contemporary matters.
Just before the one-minute mark of the roughly five minute long video, Mathers says that the old him would show up to ciphers or group freestyles with drugs and wearing a bud light shirt.
This is the first anti trans dog whistle.
15 seconds later, he's mocking violence against women through a pun about the gender motivated shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, the contemporary Marshall Mathers then dresses up as Rap Boy, the superhero character from an Eminem video decades past. Mathers goes out to defeat Shady all the while Shady and Mathers both drop offensive lyrics.
When Mathers and Shady touch, the two become a single reintegrated Eminem.
This Eminem goes on to drop multiple anti trans lyrics.
Eminem tells us he's acutely aware of his problematic lyrics.
[I think that shit imma gonna to say that shit cancel me but ok, that's it].
Some of the video is self-critical talking about his past problematic opiate use and being a [white jerk]
He even says of his adult children shown responding angrily in the video [my own kids, they’re brats].
One of Eminem's three kids is nonbinary.
Eminem tells us [for my last trick ‘poof’ just like that’.
10 days after release, Houdini had 65 million views on YouTube 

SR 3:28 when I was watching this, it was this kind of late 1990’ moment that he was trying to relive, and Eminem is trying to travel through time and space.
And in my reading of it, my first encounter of controversy with Eminem was his kind of homophobic remarks that were made in the early 2000’s.
And that he tried to rectify himself through this kind of performance he did with Elton John.
And I almost felt like this storyboard or story that he's trying to tell where he's traveling back to the early 2000’s and late 1990’s felt like he was trying to substitute this controversy with the once old tale of homophobia as a kind of as a signal to kind of moral panic in the US.
Now to this issue of transphobia, I'm and substituting one for the other and saying that he was going to regain his kind of controversy status through that.
What I also find about this as well is that it's still rooted in queer phobia, transphobia and ridiculing and mocking trans people as the kind of new boogeyman in the room.
And I think we see this in kind of different aspects in the video where we see trans folks or transgender folks being mocked with beards.
But also him kind of moving back and forth between his younger self and his current self and I thought that was really compelling to see, show the power of consumption in the US, in trying to shape and engineer these types of boogeymen that we have, especially around youth culture.
AJ for like, the listeners, could you break down how you see transphobia playing out in the video, like, and give us some examples just so folks can break it down in their head.

AJW
5:42 Sure. And other folks can add. Absolutely.
So he says the old him would wear a Bud Light shirt.
The new him certainly wouldn't because Bud Light made the fatal error of giving a trans woman a branded beer with her face on in celebration of an event in her life.
And so Bud Light is the enemy because they support trans people.
Anything that has is anything adjacent to trans people is now part of the enemy and constructed as part of like a global conspiracy to indoctrinate our children, which doesn't exist.
And, and trans people are constructed as groomers.
He also says [my transgender cat’s Siamese, identifies as black but acts Chinese] obviously being racially evocative and cats aren't transgender.
Cats can't be transgender.
Gender is socially constructed, and cats just are cats.
They don't have the same kind of rigid gender binary; they just are cats.
And one defense of this video that I saw was that it's not transphobic because Siamese cats are Chinese - that really loses what it loses, it loses the connection to the fact that that has nothing to do with transgender.
Yeah, it's just completely irrelevant and unnecessary.
He also, in a previous video years ago, he had his manager who in this video says Paul Rosenberg, who he says is on his own, his manager dressed up as Britney Spears.
And he in this video shows a picture of him and calls him [you male cross-dresser, fake-ass bitch] and refers to RuPaul’s big balls.
But also, he does this thing where he says, [I’ll hit an 8-year-old in the face with a participation trophy], which is a comment on, on that how children are treated today.
And then after that says [I have zero doubts that the world ‘bout to turn into some girl scouts, that censorship bureau’s out’, sports-playing boys are transformed into girls and, and this is a horrifying thing and there is obviously like a moralism here around censorship that is the literal reading, but the, the reading is also an anti-trans reading.
And I'd say there, it's also a dog whistle to a conspiracy theory about how men are being feminized globally through chemicals in the water.
The, the gay frogs that Alex Jones talks about.
So I might be missing a couple.
But those are some of the keys.

JL
8:56 That’s Plenty.
Yeah, he's a middle aged white guy and he's behaving like a middle aged white guy, sort of, of the worst kind where it's like, ‘ugh, I don't want to be told what I can and can't say’ he's just sort of anti-woke, grumpy, but also a celebrity trying to sort of justify that grumpiness because he has a claim to this opinion that somehow he knows is going to be provocative.
Like, you know, he's not, he's not behaving any differently than Triumph the insult dog or Gene Simmons, right?
He's just being an unpleasant human being and the part that I think, I mean, there are so many things that are wrong with the lyrics in that song, on top of the fact that they're being produced by this older white guy, which is what it, what, what he’s deeply, deeply, I think, uncomfortable with.and that, you know, when you see where the song is now landing on billboards, it's, that's, that's, it's just, you know, it's, there's the message and then there's the fact that the package is problematic, and that people don't care.
People are gonna listen to it because this is, I mean, the song isn't particular, I mean, it's no different than the original one.It's a sort of a mashup retro version of it.
So, it's just sort of lazy and, and, and middle aged and, and bad and, and then it has all these problematic aspects, that AJ and Stevie have already identified.

HCJ
10:27 Juliette, were you saying that, I mean, where did it land on the charts because I don't know.

JL
10:32, it's number one in Canada right now, but Australia, Canada, Germany, Iceland.

HCJ
10:42I listened to a couple of different, clips yesterday from other podcasts kind of analyzing this new video. And it was interesting because a couple of younger people were, were talking about it and saying he's so old, he's so gross. Like, why is he doing this? And they just said, nobody cares about what he thinks at this point. He's trying to be relevant again and really nobody's listening.
I mean, the, the charts would say differently, I guess about that.
Then I listened to another a clip of a podcast where the hosts were definitely older and they thought it was really brilliant. They thought it was really his take on that he had had all these challenges in his life and that it was a message being given maybe to younger people to persevere, keep going life so rough and look what I overcame to become this.

JL
11:44Oh my God.

HCJ
11:45 That was the, the interpretation that they had.
So, yeah, the other thing that I want to say and then I'll turn it over to someone else is that it really made me consider the political moment that we're in with Donald Trump and that we're in this horrifying déja-vu of the election looming.
And we have someone like Eminem, I think the reason that he does appeal to younger people if he does to a particular group is that he like Trump is admired by certain people for just saying whatever he thinks.
He doesn't care what people think, right?
He doesn't want to be politically correct and he tells audiences, I don't know if it's in this song, but I've definitely heard that this sentiment, you know, take what I say with a grain of salt, like, you know, I'm a rapper so he kind of feels like that gives him a, a free pass.
But I think it is, it's interesting to consider what, what's going on in popular culture and politically.
And we have this kind of fast-paced craziness with how much is coming at us constantly and very little thoughtful interpretation of, of what that means.
 But yeah, it's, it's a gross kind of sexist.
13:08you know, homophobic kind of vibe that is pretty gross to see.

AJW
13:12 Eminem is doing this - like using cancelability - as a market strategy and that's a thing that a lot of white men are doing right now.
Be it Kid Rock, be it Justin Bieber who went on the Canceled Tour and made millions of dollars off of this idea of being canceled.
Actual people who are being canceled like Susan Sarandon say one thing against genocide in Palestine and are written off by her agency.
But these folks can go on the attack and actually actively work to silence people who are speaking out against genocide.
I'm not saying that Eminem is doing that but the people that are buying his albums likely are. And that side of that culture war definitely is.
So Eminem I think is says he's gonna make his career disappear and that's what Houdini is, but actually it's bringing him back.
And I think that's part of what is so gross about the overtness of this.
And also I, I think like the, this is an attack on trans people and as like a white trans person who lives in Canada, that the attack on trans folks is different than in the United States. But it's very real and it's one that I feel very acutely, but it's also one that I think is important never to lose that, that the center of that attack is very much about white nationalism.

SR
14:55 I think one of the things that it's a commentary as well as the, the last scene of the, of the video, it's everyone has like these beards on you and folks that I think are even or cis or trans.
And I think that or mocking trans and I think one of the things that I got out of it is as well is like, there's how do we regain our masculinity.
But in particular, I think you, you hit the nail on the head about white masculinity in particular, that it's in some type of crisis.
And that if we were to kind of restore this moment that we once had where he's traveling back in time, I think this whole idea of like this imposter.
And I think this is the thing about trans.
So that, that, that you hit the nail on the head is that, you know, he uses cross dressing interchangeably with trans, which are two different ways of being in the world.
And I think one of the things that I got out of as well is just the, the nature of how easy it is to ridicule people in our society and demean them and dehumanize them.
But also do it at a, at their, at, at their expense or for a laugh or a brunt of a joke.
And I think that's one of the things that I get out of it is that what harm will this cause?
Will this cause more bullying?
I think it's that relevancy factor too that he wants to be relevant.
I don't know if it's gonna work.
But I think that it shows that there's a movement in popular culture trying to, to obtain those things.

JL
16:33 Are we contributing to that by talking about it?

AJW
16:37 That's a part of the trap, right?
Is that we, this is exactly the feedback loop that he wants is the critique, the outrage.
So in part of that, I want to point out Eminem is like an outdated ridiculous man who not only is like full of toxic masculinity, but he's just a joke as a man and he's a caricature of himself who's a caricature of himself.
And he's profoundly pathetic.
And so in us doing this, I think it's important that we also make it clear that he is just very sad as a human.

HCJ
17:19 I think you both are making some really excellent points about this.
And I just wanted to say something quickly about the racial aspect of this that I think is really interesting.
I'm remembering the Super Bowl halftime performance from a couple of years ago where Eminem performs after Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg and some other artists. And I believe Dr Dre actually produced this recent music video of his.
But anyway, during that, right after his set, Eminem takes a knee for about a minute and most people read this as a sign of solidarity with Colin Kaepernick's very well known protests against police brutality and racial injustice that had been going on, you know, went on for several years.
And I just think it's interesting how Eminem not only hides behind Slim Shady, but also hides behind these other artists, right?
They all have little cameos.
They're all part of this video and it's almost like he's saying I get a pass because these guys all support me, they help me make my “art” and they have for years.
And so overall, he seems to be positioning himself to be able to get away with some of this egregious language and messaging because he is aligning himself with some politically correct issues and with others who have taken more progressive stances.

JL
19:23 So, I mean, it all comes back to, like, ‘I'm just joking. It's a joke. Like, it's a funny thing if you're upset, if you're upset. Like, I'm sorry if you get upset about this, but I'm just joking’ and, you know, I don't, again, I don't think that makes it any less terrible, but I, I find it so obviously it just an angry, an angry white guy really pissed off with the world because he's getting older and he's doing whatever he can to fight time.

AJW
19:56 People also continue to point to the fact in 2013, apologizing for previous homophobic comments, he says that he supports gay, lesbian and trans people.
And then, then he uses the homophobic “f” slur in 2018 and then says, I quote, I feel like it might be too far like right after releasing that album.
So sort of walks it back a bit so he can, he does do this where he's like, ‘oh sorry, not so sorry. Oh sorry, not so sorry’.
And then I just want to talk about what folks think about the fact that he is the father of a non binary kid who appears in the video and presumably consents to appear in the video.

JL
20:47The ultimate excuse, right? ‘You see, I can't possibly mean any of this’ 

AJW
20:54 Eminem has a black friend.

JL
20:56That is exactly it.

I’m afraid we’re running out of time and we have to end this first, inaugural episode of Pop Hour Devolution. 
Why don’t we give our final thoughts, let people know what we’re up to and let them know where they can find us?

AJW
21:06 Yeah, my big take away is one of complete unsurprise in terms of how invested mainstream culture is in the gender binary and in how people really work to be relevant via and adjacent to that binary.
People are fighting back and I feel positive about that and I think it's important that that more allies support that fight. Folks can reach me through X potentially. Also, who knows, I'm also on blue sky and I'll put that in the show notes.I don't know what my address is.
And I will work on a podcast over the next while, sort of emerging out of my research on anti-trans organizing and its relationship to white supremacy.
And I just have a new book out Disability Politics & Theory, the revised and expanded edition through Fernwood.

HCJ
22:12 Well, I think as a commentary on just popular culture, what it says about a lot of social justice issues about you know, that the state of our political, cultural social struggles right now, it feels like a world that is completely false on so many levels and so separated from reality.
That was the other thing I kept thinking about was we have climate crisis, we have all of these things that are absolutely dire circumstances.
And it's like we're just drawn to escape.
And I think these, if these are interesting examples of things that straddle both escapism and being political commentary, whether they want to or not.
So but very disturbing messaging about of course, gender and power dynamics.
Plenty to, to think about as we think about public history and think about engaging with more of a, you know, broader audience.
What I am working on currently, I am hoping to start a podcast about nutrition and about the history of nutrition in particular. I'm working on a project right now about protein and our obsession with protein. And I'm hoping to turn that into a, a longer research project.
I'm also editing a book manuscript about my work in the Pacific Islands. Looking at specifically at colonialism and decolonization and the ways in which that was kind of in name only, but looking at food dependence and also the role of religion.
We could have also talked about that today as well.
So people can reach me at University of Oregon.
email is hcutting@Uoregon,edu and yeah, stay tuned.
Hopefully we will all be launching some exciting projects.

SR
24:24I'm excited to hear all of you guys.
People don't dissect these things enough.
And I if anything, I, I would like to kind of just end with the fact that this is something I, I intend to continue in my own podcast.
And it's something that I'm interested in, in pursuing it, especially around the housing justice issue in Los Angeles. I, I'm gonna be completing a podcast over the summer or at least one episode or two episodes on that.
I hope to launch on the housing crisis in Los Angeles.
And in particular, what I'm interested in is delving into these deep questions about who is at risk around these basic needs issues.
And how do we how do these communities have provided solvable solutions to the housing crisis but don't align with the kind of city politics around.
and also asking big questions about who is profiting off of houseless and homelessness in Los Angeles.There's billions of dollars going into the housing crisis, but much of it is allocated for temporary housing rather than permanent housing and putting families and, and loved ones and, and pets and animals.
And so those are things that I'm gonna be picking up in my podcast called ‘No Rest For the Awake’. And that'll be launching at the end of summer 2024.So look out!

JL
25:51 I teach history at the University of California Riverside.
And one of the things that I do in every class and that I focused consistently is on understand and know your sources, right?
And I think one of the things that this conversation has, made clear is I mean, I just think people don't care where their sources come from because everything has become entertainment. And so, it, it just makes me, well, it commits me to my, my job.
I am going to continue to teach students to question the sources and question why they get what they get in their feeds. 
It has not made me. I do not ‘stan’ for Eminem, to use sort of that circular thing.
And you can reach me at my name juliette@ucr.edu.
And, you can find me, I'm still on X @profjuliette. I don't know how much longer I'll be there.
Just come see me.
Today's episode was made as part of the National Humanity Center Podcasting Institute in June 2024.
It was produced and edited by AJ Withers with the help of Pamella Lach and Patrick Flanagan theme music is opinions by Anthony Cooper on a Creative Commons license 4.0.