The Boy on the Bus: scary Eminem fan freaks out guy on bus. Well written, but slightly disingenuous in its implications. I’ve been freaked by kids on buses and trains, been beaten up by one bunch. Some of the kids probably had band patches or t-shirts or were copying styles or moves off of their favourite artists. Some of said artists probably did the same when they were those kids too. The lesson? Adolescent boys – particularly adolescent boys who are stupid, poor or both – are aggressive creatures, and sometimes they focus that aggression through music.
The boy on the bus was antisocial, scary, horrible, but he didn’t actually do anything. Which isn’t to say he won’t next time. But what the article, in its conversational impartiality, seems to hint is that if it weren’t for his Slim Shady attitude he wouldn’t be doing it at all. That’s possible.
But I think it’s as likely that if it weren’t for Shady giving him a walk to walk and a talk to talk, giving him cool boundaries of action, even if those boundaries scare you or me, he’d have lashed out before now, or for real. We can’t know either way, that’s the point. We can’t know without knowing each individual kid, and we’ll never know each individual kid, but we do know Eminem, or we think we do, and so we try and project.
That link via Catherine.