Confession

I like Eminem.

God. There. I said it. I do. I do. I am going to suffer incredible insults from peers that know better of my musical tastes. They might even lose faith in my ability to properly judge music.

I know he represents everything that "true" hip hop fans hate. I know that "real" hip hop is all about the underground, and that he is anything but. That he is as mainstream as you can get. That he is even, God Almighty, one step below the wretched and talentless Jay-Z. I know all of this. And I have even been known to say this at social gatherings. I have.

But the winds of change have blown mightily in weeks past.

So it's time I fess up: I have secretly downloaded all of his number ones. And now I know them all by heart. And I listen to certain ones several times a day. And I keep fastforwarding on my MP3 player to get to them when walking out and about.

Yeah, I said it. I like him.

I am excited for 8 Mile to come out in France (Feb 28). That's right. I am. I'll be there on one of the first night's it's playing with all of the suburban boys with their French ghetto accents and their Nike pants tucked into their socks (That's the "tough" look around here. For clarification, the suburbs of Paris are not nice like the suburbs of New York or Chicago. The well-off people live in the city, and the ghettos are in the suburbs. So when I say suburban boys, understand that I am not talking about the rich white guys pretending to be ghetto. I'm talking about the boys that really live in the ghetto and come to Paris on the weekend. Some people might find those last two sentences horribly fucked up, but I find them representative of reality, so there we go). Me, them, and their swish-swooshy athletic pants and fanny packs.

(Did you guys know that the bad-ass, ghetto-boy look in Paris involves fanny packs? How funny is that? Could you imagine an American gangster sporting a fanny pack? One time I was alone in a particularly shady neighborhood, waiting for the bus around 22.30 when a pack of them approched me. A girl, alone, at night, in a deserted and poorly-lit neighborhood. My heart started pounding. And then the biggest, scariest of the five of them started saying something in their inversed language - they speak French backwards so that people can't understand them - and pulled out a brick of hash. From his fanny pack. I couldn't help it. I just started giggling as quietly as possible. That's just not bad-ass to me. Am I alone here? Can I get an amen?)

Anyway, I'll be there. Me, the fanny packers, and Eminem. And I will sing along to "Lose Yourself" in the cinema silently to myself. 'Cause I know all the words now.

So now you know. Do with it what you will. I just couldn't live the lie anymore.