Volume 4, Issue 71: Nolan Arenado

"He has the sort of throwback game that transcends generations."

Jun 03, 2023

Hey, the book’s out. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should. If you have, you should write a (hopefully positive!) review of it on Goodreads or Amazon or both. I hope those of you who have a copy are enjoying it.

Also, if you live in THE CHICAGOLAND AREA, you should come out and see me at Anderson’s Bookshop in Downers Grove THIS TUESDAY NIGHT JUNE 6 AT 6 P.M. CT. You can find more details right here. Come on out, we’ll have a blast.

Buy THE TIME HAS COME

“You are not listening to that shit in my house,” my dad yelled. We were at the dinner table, and I had just washed up from mowing the lawn. I was 15 years old. I looked like this. My dad was getting some Dad Bluster on.

“I put those headphones and heard what you were listening to on the tractor,” he said, not yelling anymore but speaking in a sharp, so-disappointed way that was much worse than if he had still been yelling. “I had no idea you were listening to junk like that.” He then took out the cassette tape and made a big show of putting it in the trash. I was not one for rebelling against my parents, not then, not ever really, so I didn’t say anything. It was fine anyway. It was a recorded copy I’d gotten from my friend. I could just make another one.

He shook his head. “Where do you even find stuff like that? How is that even music?” Mom stifled a chuckle. Her dad had said the same thing to her, and Dad’s dad had surely done the same thing.

My dad, of course, didn’t get it. He didn’t get music now, today, in 1990, what was cool, what mattered, what kids like me were listening to. He was a dad. Dads are lame—by definition. What was he listening to? Bruce Springsteen. Led Zeppelin. John Mellencamp. Tom Petty. You know: Old people music. Yesterday’s news. Not the stuff that mattered. Not the music that I listened to, not my music, me, with my finger on the pulse of America. The future of music. The future that would be mine, not his, and surely not John Mellencamp’s.

“I mean, what was that rap crap even about?” he said. He said rap crap. “Some guy talking about Doing It on an inner tube? Do you even know what Doing It is?” At this point Mom actively laughed.

“That’s a good song!” I said, as defiant as I was going to get.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he took a bite of pork chop. He looked disgusted, and a little confused. “Inner tubes, lotion, pumping it … just rap crap, all of it.”

Dad didn’t understand, obviously. I was 15 years old. Even if he didn’t know Vanilla Ice’s “(Life Is A) Fantasy” was cool, all that mattered is that I did. He couldn’t possibly understand. He’s just a dad, after all.

In my dreams I envision myself at the ocean
Beautiful girls rubbin' me down with some lotion
Even though you know I flow as cold as an ice cube
Let me tell you how it is to make love on an inner tube
Floatin' on water while splashin' waves on your body
Flowin' and goin', now pump it, pump it, Hottie
See, I want to get loose with you, is that all right?
Girl, I want to do it outside, under the moonlight
And get on down so we can make that love
You be the hand and Iceman'll be the glove.

Yeah, Springsteen could eat it.

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It is disturbing, in several different ways, that when I looked up the clip for that song just now, and started playing it … I was able to recite the lyrics from memory. I think I can do that for the entire Side A of that album. I am not proud. I am the opposite of proud. But it is nevertheless true.

I’m so lucky Nirvana happened.

*************************

Also, last Vanilla Ice thing, but good god this is the very definition of a cursed video.

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My son William has gotten really into Eminem. It started out as pump-up music for his baseball games, mostly “Lose Yourself,” William getting all fired up pre-game, Mom’s spaghetti-style. But in an age of Spotify, where, unlike us, children can literally conjure up any song they want at any time from the sky, he was able to quickly go deep into the Eminem canon. I knew I was in trouble when, not long after I first heard him listening to “Lose Yourself,” he asked me what my favorite Eminem song was.

“Probably ‘Till I Collapse?’” I said. “I guess ‘Stan’ is pretty good too. But probably ‘Till I Collapse.’”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding and bowing, like he was wearing a hoodie pulled down over his ears rather than a T-shirt his grandpa got him for Christmas. “That’s cool. I like ‘Soldier’ off that album a lot. ‘Square Dance’ too.”

I didn’t know what either one of those songs were. I pretended like I did, though. I wanted him to think I was cool.

It is easy to forget, 20 years later, just how terrifying Eminem was to people when he came out. Zadie Smith called him “The Most Evil Rapper Alive” in Vibe—Smith was being sarcastic, but people went ahead and quoted her straight anyway—and he was twice investigated by the Secret Service. He was the rap horror villain that invaded the suburbs, who got into your children’s homes and told them about his mother’s crack habit and the ex-wife he had locked in his trunk. There were even a series of embarrassed, your-mom-just-popped-a-gummy-for-the-first-time stories among Baby Boomer writers at the time about how guilty some of them felt for actually liking this monster. I remember a hilarious one in The New York Observer, but of course, the zenith of the genre was Maureen Dowd, who, on November 24, 2002, four months before Colin Powell told the United Nations that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, wrote this lede in The New York Times.

A gaggle of my girlfriends are surreptitiously smitten with Eminem. They buy his posters on eBay. They play him on their Walkmen at the gym. They sing along lustily to ''Cleanin' Out My Closet'' and ''Lose Yourself'' in the car. They rhapsodize that his amazing vignettes of dysfunctional families make him the Raymond Carver of hip-hop.
They crowd into movie theatres along with teenage boys in watch caps, and then insist that Eminem's rapping his way out of a Detroit car factory in ''8 Mile'' is way hotter than Jennifer Beals's dancing her way out of the Pittsburgh steel mill in ''Flashdance.''

(Give Maureen a break. I wouldn’t want anybody reading anything I wrote around that time either.)

I was 27 years old when Eminem truly exploded, a little too old and jaded (and, at that time, too obsessed with The White Stripes and The Strokes anyway) to get too into what the teenagers were listening to. But I knew Eminem was pissing people off, and that was the time of my life when I would actively cheer stuff like that on, albeit from the sidelines. I didn’t think about the racial politics of Eminem’s success, or his casual misogyny and homophobia, or really much about him at all. I just figured anybody who got people that upset couldn’t be all bad.

The years went on, and the culture warmed up to Eminem, as it always does to anyone who has been around long enough to make you feel nostalgia about being young and not having to worry about everything all the time. He is now an elder statesman of rap, evolving from a national scourge who was eating your children’s souls to performing at halftime of the Super Bowl. But I had not actually listened to his music much in the last 20 years. Too much Wilco, I guess.

Which is to say: I was not particularly concerned with William listening to Eminem. I trust William: He is a kind-hearted person, and nothing is going to change that, not least of all a 50-year-old man who was in Funny People. And besides: I’m not going to be one of those dads. I’m cool. I’m a cool dad.

But. I was driving William home from baseball practice the other day, and I asked him if he wanted me to put on some Eminem for the drive.

“That’s OK,” he said. “I like Eminem. But I might need a little break from him.”

“Oh, really?” I said, dope, so dope. “Just listened to him too much?”

“Well …” William paused, trying to make sure what he wanted to say came out correctly. “He kinda says some cringey stuff sometimes. I mean, he’s really angry.”

“Yeah, I think I remember that,” I said, not sweating the rap crap. “Doesn’t he have some weird stuff about his wife?”

“And his mom!” William said, his eyes wide. “He really hates his mom!”

He took my phone to scroll through my Spotify.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think maybe some of that isn’t appropriate. I don’t know if you should let me listen to that.”

Every generation is adjusting to the generation that came before them—everyone is always fighting the last war. My dad didn’t get my music when I was a kid, and I saw him as lame because of it, so when my son decides he likes an artist, I vow to be totally chill about it, he’s a big kid, he can make his own decisions.

And then he tells me he shouldn’t be listening to it. I spent years thinking Tipper Gore was the lamest human on the planet. Now William is Tipper Gore-ing himself. It’s the backlash to the backlash. Now, your dad is lame for not stopping you from listening to problematic music.

If it’s too loud, you’re too young, man.

As we stopped by and picked up some postgame burgers, I asked him if he was done with Eminem now.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll just pick and choose the songs that aren’t so angry.”

“I think that’s wise,” I said, not cool, not dope.

“But I still totally like rap,” he said. “So do you know any, like, positive rap? Stuff that isn’t so angry?”

This—this I could do. I put together a playlist for him, some Tribe Called Quest, some Jurassic Five, some Kendrick Lamar, even some Wu-Tang Clan. I can’t tell if he likes it or not. I don’t know what he’s listening to in there. I wonder if that, at the end of the day, is my real job as Dad: To not know what he’s listening to in there. To trust him. And to leave myself out of it.

Besides, he’s figuring it out just fine on his own.

This kid’s gonna be just fine. Though I have to say: If he starts listening to Vanilla Ice, I’m throwing him out of the house.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

Aren’t You Glad the Celtics Aren’t in the NBA Finals? New York. No matter what happens, everything’s better without Boston.
What’s the Deal With Scottie Pippen? CNN. On retired athletes, and why we care.
The May MLB All-Stars, MLB.com. Your monthly update.
Melissa McCarthy Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Little Mermaid.
Robert DeNiro Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with About My Father.
It Was My Week to Write the MLB Power Rankings, MLB.com. Dirty secret: William and I work on the rankings every week together.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we’re back this week, talking “The Little Mermaid,” “Fast X,” “You Hurt My Feelings” and the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Also, we’re taping our annual in-person show today. (Sorry, you can’t come by, it’s at Grierson’s house. But you should listen!)

Seeing Red, we posted the audio of Bernie’s and my event at Left Bank Books last week.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week, taping next week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

"How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker. I have always wondered the details of the contracts for pop stars doing events for the ultra wealthy, and this is a delightful read that explains it all.

Also, I loved this story about the last days of the San Diego Chicken.

Oh, and obviously you’ve read the Tim Alberta piece on Chris Licht, right?

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

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Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

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