Slim Shady a character Eminem has adopted as his evil alter ago raps My life’s

Slim Shady, a character Eminem has adopted as his “evil” alter ago, raps, “My life’s like kind of what my wife’s like – fucked up after I beat her fucking ass every night.” Or how about: “I don’t give a fuck, if this chick was my own mother, I’d still fuck her with no rubber, and cum inside her.” The rapper claims that nobody would take this seriously, that he is only playing a role, but the sight of hundreds of testosterone-soaked men rapping along to this – something I’ve witnessed – gives the opposite impression.Eminem’s music is saturated with the sense that women have become too assertive, too powerful. Eminem traces his own feeling of disempowerment again and again to women – either his “slut” (ie sexually active) mother, his ex-wife, or women generally. Rape serves in his raps as his way of reasserting control over “mouthy” women. He has even mooted starring in a porn film where he “fucks all the women who have ever dissed me” – silencing those “bitches” who should have known their place.So, yes, Eminem is an icon of rebellion. But where Elvis rebelled against the sexually puritan strand of 1950s America, James Dean against the refusal to take the emotional life of teenagers (especially gay ones) seriously, and Johnny Rotten against established power in all its forms, Eminem is a symptom of the backlash against all this. He is spearheading a rebellion against the progress charted by earlier youth icons. A generation of Eminem fans is not quite, I imagine, what the Sixties generation expected to give birth to..

Van Morrison/ Sam Butera

I don’t know what I’m talking about I realise this on the train to Cardiff. I try to list the Van Morrison songs I know, and I can only come up with three. There’s the one that Dexy’s did on Top of the Pops in front of a picture of portly dartist Jocky Wilson. There’s the religious duet (and unless Sir Cliff shines his light, we’re not gonna get that). And there’s the one you always hear at karaoke nights with the line about making love “behind the stadium with you”, which I’ve always liked because the seedy specificness reminds me of Jarvis Cocker. And that’s it.
Given those three, the mystique surrounding Van Morrison is a source of bewilderment to me.

Much of that mystique seems to centre on Astral Weeks, an album he made in 1968 after leaving Them. It’s one of those records you always see on critics’ All Time Greatest lists, but I’ve never knowingly heard it, just as I’ve never knowingly heard Tim Buckley’s Starsailor or Big Star’s Thirteen or so much as a note of Gram Parsons, mainly because – perhaps hypocritically – I don’t like being told what to like, and I believe that life’s too short, and music is too big, for anything other than finding your own idiosyncratic path.Most of the people in St David’s Hall, however, look like they’ve been Van fans for 30 years, and I’m intimidated by their knowledge. Butera’s anecdotes about this time are frustratingly inaudible, as he chooses to tell them through a mic which is set for the tenor sax, not the human larynx.Sam is joined in due course by a man in a pork pie hat and round shades who looks like he’s wandered in from a Blues Brothers tribute by mistake The applause alerts me to the fact that he is Van Morrison. Together, they rattle through a couple of standards – “Kansas City Here I Come” and “Jump, Jive An’ Wail” – and, quite apart from his obvious lack of visual charm (his jowls wobble when he’s really getting into it, maaan), it soon becomes apparent that Van Morrison’s voice is a deeply unlovely thing, calling to mind the bellowings of a constipated wildebeest.Van can play sax too, as he proves in his own set When he isn’t scaring the living daylights out of his band.