After a five-year absence, Eminem has a new album and a new music video, the latter of which reveals just how stale and dusty our pop cultural punching bags have become.
Eminem: The Original Friedberg and Seltzer. If nothing else, this music video will force them to scrap their list of references for Movie Movie: 2009, and spend an entire 20 minutes fart-writing another list of new pop culture references to put in a blender, puree to a fine sludge, and pour onto celluloid. They don't want to rip off Eminem, after all.
Judging by this video, at first glance it would seem that Eminem is way behind the curve pop-culture-wise. I mean: Kim Kardashian has a big butt? Nalin' Sarah Palin? Fat Jessica Simpson? Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson? A Rock Of Love parody? Haven't we moved past these pop cultural punching bags and onto new ones? Well, yes and no. Certainly there are newer, more shiny, but just as annoying tabloid targets—Octomom, various Real Housewives, Goopy Gwyneth, Miley Cyrus—but everyone who Eminem "skewers" in "We Made You" is still very much at the forefront. (Kim Kardashian, Sarah Palin, and Lindsay Lohan are all on the front page of People.com right now.) They've just been there for a while, and have been properly skewered so many times, they're like walking desiccated shish kabobs instead of walking punchlines.
Still, considering that "We Made You" also contains Rain Man, Star Trek, and Sin City parodies, it doesn't seem like Eminem is striving to be current, he's just striving to be funny—and failing, to the Friedberg-and-Seltzer degree. "We Made You" is slightly better than Disaster Movie, but that's only because it's shorter.