Relevant Movie Summary:
Over the years, I have watched the movie 8 Mile many times. The movie is based on Eminem’s life in Detroit, before he hit the big time. Well, close enough to Eminem’s life for government work. [1][2] In the movie, he is called Rabbit, but for simplicity, we’ll just call him Eminem here.
Eminem is living in hell in Detroit. He wants to get out, and he sees his music as the only ticket out. He’s like a lot of black kids in the ghettos of America, who perceive professional sports (and rap music too), as their winning ticket out of their bleak and hopeless reality.
The title song is “Lose Yourself” with Eminem singing. The movie trailer is an MTV-like video of the song “Lose Yourself”. The trailer does a great job of summing up the points I want to make for a CMG Take. I swiped snapshots of Eminem’s life from the trailer to summarize the movie.
Below: A series of slides showing the hell on Earth that Eminem is trying to escape. Eminem is living in a trailer home with his alcoholic and unemployed mom. Mom’s self-esteem is so low, she settles for a scum-of-the-earth boyfriend, who pretty much lives in the trailer with them all. Eminem’s little sister lives at the trailer, and he unsuccessfully tries to protect her from all the shit flying around. Eminem is broke, so he’s driving a beater. He works at a job he hates, as a punch press operator, and getting to work in his beater is an adventure. Finally, his worse fear is that that he ends up in prison or shot, unless he makes his music happen.
CMG Take:
In the Relevant Movie Summary, I set things up for how desperately Eminem wants to change his life. He doesn’t want to live in a trailer park with his Mom. He wants to protect his sister. He doesn’t want to be broke, driving a beater and working at a job he hates that doesn’t even cover his meager bills.
Eminem also fantasizes about being a star getting the women, cars and fan adulation. But mostly Eminem loves to play music and he wants to earn a living by music alone. There is a scene on the Movie Trailer where he is on the bus with headphone on, absorbed in listening to and writing his music. It reminded me Michael Jordan playing basketball. Impressive.
Sooo. . . what’s the CMG Take. When we want to go in a new direction, it’s related with spring time and liver energy. Springtime is the season of when new things start to grow. Eminem wants his old life to be left behind and he wants to start a new life. A healthy spring-time energy of liver is about asserting oneself. You assert towards your goal --like making music for a living. When the liver is overworking, one becomes aggressive and in someone’s face. Pushing things too much. One feels, like Eminem, that they only have one shot so they’ve got to grab the stage, the job, the girl, the whatever.
They are the toe-tappers and watch-glancers in the coffee house line feeling like it is taking forever to get their brew -- while their car is idling outside in a Do-Not-Park zone. These people are wound tight. Don’t get in their way. They are easily prone to angry outbursts, or worse. It’s easy to paint Eminem as the bad guy here. But if I was living his life, as depicted in this movie, I’d be just like him. Get the Fuck Out of My Way. I’m makin’ this music happen and nothin’ is stopping me.
Even though Eminem has a do-whatever-it-takes attitude to make his dream happen, he is afflicted with paralyzing stage-fright. Well, your music isn’t going to take off if the singer doesn’t take the stage. So what’s the deal with the stage-fright?
Eminem mistakenly believes that this rap stage appearance is his last shot to get out of hell and into music heaven. He’s putting too much unrealistic pressure on himself. New doors always open, if you stick to your passion.
Eminem is wound tight. His energy is all bottled up inside. This energy isn’t flowing smoothly to be productive. It’s creating classic Chinese Medicine symptoms related to intense stress. The following slides highlight some Chinese Medicine details about his stage fright symptoms happening just before and while on stage. The symptoms are gathered from the Movie Trailer and the lyrics to the title track of Lose Yourself.
Below: Eminem is stressed before the reaallly big Ed Sullivan like Shoooowww. The muscular tension prevents the qi from naturally flowing through the body and it gets bottled up in the trunk.
Below: Eminem gets sweaty palms. The qi in the trunk bottles up with such intensity, it turns into unhealthy fire. The fire flares out to the hands in an attempt by the body to rid it of the heat, so sweating occurs. Ironically, Eminem might also have cold hands, because the healthy qi that naturally warms the body can’t flow to the hands to warm them.
Below: The bottled up qi in the trunk can’t flow to the muscles in the knees to do their job of holding up one’s body weight, so the knees feel weak.
Below: The bottled up qi in the trunk can’t flow to the muscles in the arms to do their job of holding up the arms, against the force of gravity, so the arms feel heavy.
Below: The bottled up qi in the trunk gets in the way of the natural flow of food through the digestive system. Eminem probably felt a knot in his stomach, reflecting the bottled up qi there. Then the pressure of the knotted qi rose up taking the food with it and that leads to vomiting.
Below: Eminem can’t remember what he wrote down. The bottled up qi in the trunk prevents the qi from naturally moving the blood to the head to feed the brain’s function. One of the brain’s function is to remember things, but he is unable to because the lack of blood in his brain needed to do these functions.
Above: Eminem choked on stage by not saying anything. He storms off stage and releases all this pent up energy. However, this energy is so pressurized that the release of it becomes unhealthy to those around him.
Below: Once Eminem’s qi is released, he slams doors and picks fights acting like a gunslinger at OK Corral.
Footnotes:
[1] When I was living in Detroit in 1983, I was working for Andersen Consulting doing computer work for the Michigan Unemployment Office. It was a huge job and I was just one small cog in the giant wheel. I loved computer work in school, but real life was a buzz-kill. The project was sold with unreasonable deadlines, so we had to crank out the work. None of us felt good about doing slipshod work, but what were you gonna do with these deadlines. Missing deadlines was not an option. We worked a lot of overtime, but it wasn’t the solution.
Anyway to cope, all the cogs used a running joke that “it was good enough for government work”. It meant just finish the task, no matter what the quality and move on. When Arthur Andersen went down the tubes years later, due to Enron, it didn’t surprise me. Low quality work will catch up with you sooner or later.
[2] I started this blog entry, because I was watching an archived show of Charlie Rose interviewing Brian Grazer. Brian was the producer of 8 Mile. Brian said he met with Eminem, and Eminem told Brian his story about living in Detroit. Brian thought it was a great idea for a movie, so they made the movie based on Eminem’s life.
Back Story:
I have many more blog entry ideas, than I have time to write about them. I want to explain why I picked this blog entry to do next, via the Back Story.
I remember when I was about ten years old and my family was living on the SouthSide of Chicago, before we moved further south in Chicago. We lived in a neighborhood that was changing from all white to all black. My best friend, Billy, had already moved, and I never saw him again. I don’t remember playing with anyone else before Billy moved. I never needed another friend besides Billy. We spent all our time together mostly playing sports.
When I grew up, at almost every family holiday get-together, my uncle told me how he thought I would grow up to be a professional baseball player. He thought I was that good. I never looked at it that way, I just loved to play sports with my friend.
Anyway, the neighborhood was about half white and half black. The whites were moving out, because of the increased racial tensions, and for many whites, they were afraid of their property values going downhill. We moved a few years later. As my older brother once said, “At first South Shore wasn’t safe for blacks and then it wasn’t safe for whites”. Even though we had left, my Dad kept his dental practice in the same neighborhood until his office building was torn down in about 1978. Nowadays, the neighborhood is scary and rife with gangs.
Why is this Back Story? I am in a coffeehouse in Seattle writing this. I have a few great friends that fill me up. I’ve never needed a lot of friends, but the few I have, I cherish. I remember living in that neighborhood after Billy moved. My next-door neighbors were black and I hung out with the kids. I remember shooting pool with them in their basement. But what I remember most about them was the music they listened too. I was 10 years old in 1966, and all I remember them playing was Motown music. I loved it. I never heard it before. I remember them playing one song over and over again as they skipped rope in front of their house. It was a few black girls with one of them holding either end of the rope, while one of them jumped in to skip. I couldn’t believe how fast they could skip rope. I was always very athletic, but I wouldn’t last more than a second before tripping, if I jumped in to skip. I was mesmerized, while they played Motown songs. I especially remember them playing Jimmy Mack by Martha and the Vandellas over and over again in the summer as they skipped. After we moved, I never saw these neighbors again. Yet, I often think how watching them skip that summer opened up Motown music to me.
Anyway, I had a lot of notes to explain the Back Story of why I picked this Eminem song/movie to write about. As I pondered what to say, I searched for an iTunes song to listen to on my headphones. I saw Jimmie Mack and I went back in time to my childhood days of listening to it. I felt the same way then, as I felt about hearing Eminem play rap music for the first time in 8 Mile. Grateful, for a whole new world to enter.
Oh yeah, I actually lived in Detroit for a year in 1983. I wasn’t listening to rap, as Eminem probably wasn’t out of diapers yet. And I don’t remember listening to Motown. I do remember working hard and partying hard, while the Detroit clubs seemed to only play Bob Seger. It was fine with me -- as Night Moves at closing time is a fond memory too.
Below: In 1983, I worked for a year in Detroit as a computer guy. I worked on 8 Mile Road and across the street was the GM Building, shown above. I worked in the computer room from 6 PM to 6 AM. When I got off work and walked to my car, almost everyday, I’d get propositioned for a “date”. I turned it down every time, because I’m “morally correct”. However, Jamie Lee never asked me.
Of course, I’m driving a Maserati to over-compensate and to piss off the locals.
