Is it better to be loved than feared or to be feared instead of loved? In The Prince, political philosopher Niccolo Macchiavelli says that it is better to be feared. If the fear is used correctly, you will have power. But can you gain love through fear and is this love the more powerful resource? By charting out the career and influences of the rapper Eminem, we find evidence that one may be able to gain love through fear and any amount of love gained will be far more beneficial than fear.
Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, aka Slim Shady, is the second highest selling rapper in history having sold thirty-seven point five million albums since his career began in 1996.1 Eminem followed in the steps of the band NWA, whose brand of gangster rap won the hearts of passionate young hip-hop fans by showing the public how harsh life could be in low income neighborhoods such as their native Compton, California. NWA’s most well known song is titled —- the Police! Because of these lyrics, groups of concerned parents, especially the Parents Music Resource Center led by second lady Tipper Gore, came forward to protest and potentially censor the groups’ message which they said romanticized drugs, violence, and the lives of street gangs. Eminem himself would eventually become the subject of this group’s ire, describing protests against his concerts as “picket signs for my wicked rhymes”.2 The backlash from such organizations ultimately did not make the genre any less appealing to both urban and suburban youths.3 In order to fit the mold cast by NWA, Tupac Shakur, and others, Mathers developed an alter ego for himself named Slim Shady.
Machiavelli and Marshall Mathers have one vital thing in common. They both understood that the most important step to gaining power is becoming who the public wants you to be. Machiavelli says one must do this because men are not loyal.4 As Machiavelli writes in Chapter 18 of the Prince, one should, “appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change the opposite.” The astonishing thing about the career of Eminem and other rappers of the late nineteen-hundreds is that they won their fame by doing just that. Yes, they weren’t merciful, faithful, and so on, but the public didn’t want them to be. While the Prince’s subjects desired their sovereign to have all of those exact virtues, the rap fanatic of the eighties, nineties, and early two thousands wanted their artists to have rough edges that were fashioned from years of hard living in tough neighborhoods.
Machiavelli says that one should desire to be both loved and feared, but that it is safer to be feared.5 In Machiavelli’s time, being feared kept the people one reigned over from expressing their malcontented feelings through rebellion and allowed the Prince to retain power. One of the most well-known examples of this administrative strategy offered by the author was the story of Ramiro d’Orca, who was called upon by Cesare Borgia to bring order to his principality after a series of revolts in Urbino and the Romagna. d’Orca was a hard man who used military cruelty to convert the city away from a place ruled by “robbery, quarrels and every kind of violence”6 to a place that was subject to the rule of law. d’Orca succeeded in organizing the Romagna, but Cesare Borgia realized that the people would be soon fed up with d’Orca’s tendencies and may react violently towards him. Borgia adopted a new strategy that would ease the growing unrest of his citizens and separate himself from the actions of Ramiro d’Orca. Cesare Borgia executed the governor of Urbino and left his body in the public square. Here, we are given an example of cruelty inspiring love. Borgia’s subjects loved him because by the execution of d’Orca, they were relieved of the excessive cruelty that they were once subjected to. This also served to make the subjects docile and cautious enough to avoid d’Orca’s fate.
“Fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”7 The subjects of Cesare Borgia cherished him for not exhibiting the same type of excessive rapacity as their former masters who were more interested in collecting taxes and land than in actually ruling. The fear felt by those Italians was both sensible and understandable. The fear aroused by the explicit lyrics and music videos created by rap artists was decidedly less so. Much of the hysteria was mustered up by the PMRC while lobbying Washington to stick a parental advisory sticker on albums containing offensive lyrics that referenced sex, drugs, and violence was blind hysteria. At the height of the organization, merely one year before the debut of NWA, they were able to cause a series of Senate hearings in 1985 on the subject of lyrics in music. They had convinced parents to fear that simply being exposed to foul lyrics would lead their children to commit acts of “suicide, satanism, and drug and alcohol abuse”.8 This push back on the part of groups such as the PRMC made the type of music that would be renovated by Eminem a decade later forbidden fruit to youths. Eminem and his fellow rappers did not see this opposition as a hindrance to their success. Whether they knew it or not, those performers were about to take a page directly from Machiavelli’s book:
Those that may be called properly used, if of evil it is lawful to speak well,that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one’s security, and that they are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects. (Machiavelli, Chapter 8)
Instead of submitting to the organized fury of the PRMC by censoring their own lyrics or ceasing to touch on so-called sensitive subjects the members of the hip-hop community continued to vigorously pursue their art on their own terms. In doing so, they were actually able to expand their genre to the point that rap music with crude, violent, and sexual themes has exited the ranks of ‘underground’ music and entered into the mainstream In fact, when the record companies were forced to make use of parental advisory stickers they began producing what is now known as ‘clean’ records which are void of foul language and sensitive content as well as the original album. The recording industry was actually able to sell more albums by diversifying their audience to include younger consumers.
Princes do not exist in the modern day as they did during the life of Machiavelli. It is more than fair to say that the professions that can be closest compared to princes via manipulating people to gain power is business, politics, and entertainment. Before Marshall Mathers became a prince of the entertainment world, he was a scrawny white boy, who because of his single mother’s struggles with addiction and inability to hold a job, was constantly moving as a child. As a result, Mathers was never able to establish himself in a single school and was constantly targeted by bullies.9 Marshall Mathers on his own was not the prototypical person that could make it in the hip-hop industry. To compensate for this shortcoming, he changed his image to one that fit the public’s idea of what a rapper should be. Eminem’s plan worked and for most of his career the public was unable to make the distinction between Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady.10 Machiavelli explains the public’s inability to separate the man from his alias with the following passage from Chapter Eighteen of his book, “one who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.” One must also wonder whether or not Mathers’ had deceived himself about the true nature of Slim Shady. As his art progressed, Slim Shady more and more became an outlet for Marshall Mathers’ anger and frustrations. Marshall Mathers was soon able to use his monstrous alter-ego to the fullest of its potential.
- “RIAA Top Selling Artists By Album,” Recording Industry Association of America, accessed April 28, 2015, https://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinum.php?content_selector=top-selling-artists
- Mathers, Marshall. “Cleanin’ Out My Closet.” In The Eminem Show. Detroit MI, and New York, NY: Shady Records, 2002 http://www.eminem.com/lyrics/eminem-show/cleanin-out-my-closet
- Mathers, Marshall. “White America.” In The Eminem Show. Detroit, MI, and New York, NY: Shady Records, 2002 http://www.eminem.com/lyrics/eminem-show/white-america
This is in reference to the line: “sponsors working ’round the clock, to try to stop my concerts early, surely hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston, after it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. (London, UK: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2014) 80
This is in reference to the line: “Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and that as you succeed they are yours entirely.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. (London, UK: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2014) 80
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. (London, UK: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2014) 39
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. (London, UK: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2014) 80
- “Tipper Gore Widens War on Rock,” New York Times, January 4, 1988, accessed April 28, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/04/arts/tipper-gore-widens-war-on-rock.html
- “Eminem Biography,” Bio.com, accessed April 27, 2015 http://www.biography.com/people/eminem-9542093#early-life
- Mathers, Marshall. “Without Me.” In The Eminem Show. Detroit MI, and New York, NY: Shady Records, 2002 http://www.eminem.com/lyrics/eminem-show/without-me
This is in reference to the line: “I’ve created a monster ‘cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more, they want Shady. I’m chopped liver!”
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