Whose brilliant idea was it to model the Grammys on the Academy Awards? Remind me, music was meant to be more revolutionary than Hollywood, yes? Hollywood was Hollywood, after all, a term of contempt for the bloated, phony, slick idea of entertainment of another era. With the Oscars you expected the glitz and the smarminess and the big production numbers. It was good, old-fashioned camp.

But what mindless, self-applauding dodo thought a bunch of big production numbers with sappy, middle-of-the road acts like Faith Hill and ’N Sync and some cartoon cowboys and Madonna using a disco-mirrored limo as a giant dildo would substitute for the grit and raunch of rock ’n’ roll? Tell me, please, what happened? Did the zombies, the pod people, take over while we slept?

Despite the potentially homicidal side to it, ya gotta hand it to the rappers. The second annual (we’ll see about that) Source magazine awards had to be shut down when shooting broke out. Now that’s passion, baby. The only mildly entertaining gimmick at the Grammys was, incidentally, also gun-related—when (everybody loves) Raymond shot T-shirts into the audience from a pneumatic cannon.

Pretty sad to think that the Heineken and Discover card commercials pretty much upstaged the awards. The Discover card parody of Van Halen (the rise and pathetic fall of the glitter, hair group Danger Kitty) was practically the highlight of the evening.

Let’s face it, the Grammy honchos needed Eminem. Badly. If I could attribute an ounce of moxie to the idiots who planned this thing, I’d say they put him up to it. The PR flacks probably realized that three hours of cotton candy fluff was going to be deadly without some bad boy’s badass CD to deal with. And days and days of free publicity leading up to the show. The drones on the cable sound-bitten talk-talk shows turned it neatly into a which-side-are-you-on question so they could rig one more gratuitous poll that would solve everything, as if shut-ins and shopping channel surfers’ opinions (the only people watching daytime tv) are the definitive judgment of "the American people."

By way of introducing Eminem, that corporate moron Michael Green, the president of NARAS (which organizes the Grammys) made fatuous comparisons between the brouhaha over Eminem’s homophobia & murderous mysogyny and the (adult) reaction to Elvis and Stones when they first appeared. This is an inane analogy that only a pandering, platitudinous CEO could come up with.

Of course rock is meant to be offensive. Which goes doubly for rap and hip-hop. It’s about poking sticks in the saxony-plush, wall-to-wall suburban cages of complacent adults—at any cost. Outrage is its bastard love child. Punks flaunted swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia (along with S&M regalia and images of gay porn). Nothing like an orange-haired yob with every orifice pierced, parading SS insignia, at the Holborn tube station first thing in the morning to get your average stockbroker’s blood boiling. I’m not suggesting that Eminem’s use of "faggot" is the same thing. The punk Nazi thing was clearly used to shock and alienate. The punks who sported this stuff put themselves beyond the pale. Use of the word "faggot" simply reinforces a common slur. The use of swastikas by ’70s punks was an anti-bourgeoisie statement, whereas the use of "faggot" is just going along with the mindless status quo. Even though teenagers (and I currently have one in captivity) frequently use "faggot" or "gay" as an all-purpose put-down and synonym for lame (as in "Aerosmith and Bon Jovi are so faggy"), I don’t buy Eminem’s rationalization that he was using it, as he says, to mean "a gutless and cowardly person."

The only feasible explanation of Eminem’s homophobia, misogyny, and homicidal fantasies is multiphrenia. This has nothing to do with the unreliable narrator in rock—Mick Jagger as we know is not Satan or even into Satanism ("into satin, perhaps," as Marianne Faithull once said). And we presume Steely Dan are not into coercing underage girls into threesomes as their Grammy-Award-winning song implies. Eminem’s geometrically multiplying personalities are closer to the pathological urge and inherent mental instability of rock. It’s the teen brain emptied of its disturbing contents and set to loud music.

There are at least three Eminems on display on any given album. There’s Eminem the core personality: the white rapper living his life, more or less happy with himself and his situation in life. There’s Marshall Mathers (Eminem’s given name): this is Eminem when he’s pissed off. Then there’s the really bad, hateful dude, Slim Shady. Slim Shady is evil and sadistic, the drug-taking, woman-beating thug—Eminem in extremis.

Slim Shady erupted with murderous, gay-bashing, mother-hating fury on his second and most recent CD, The Marshall Mathers LP (that’s the one everybody is tut-tutting about). It’s hardly co-incidental that the main theme of this album is fame and its horrors. It’s almost as if Eminem’s notoriety was some sort of drug that Slim Shady gets high on, spewing out this hateful venom. Hey, fame is worse than growing up in the hood, man, a lot worse. It’s psychic feedback—and there ain’t nothin’ more lethal than that. It took the Stones a dozen or so albums to get into a looking glass war with themselves, but the world has gotten smaller and, above all, faster. In Eminem’s case, the curse of self-referentiality raised its ugly head almost overnight. If Eminem has a true enemy, it’s his anti-matter self, Slim Shady. Hey Marshall, look out for that dude, ’cause he knows where you live.

By the way, Eminem, or whatever you wanna call him, was great. In "Stan," the song he did at the Grammys, he inhabits yet another persona: the alternately fawning and murderous Eminem fan. The whole production (with the rear-projection rain and the squatter bed-sit set) was almost the only thing in the whole rigged show that worked—although the presence of Elton John gave the song some uneasy intimations of Cabaret. Elton playing the piano in his little clown outfit while the raging beast threatens to drive us all over the bridge.

Eminem seemed strangely profound last night. The little Ecstasy-eater was the only artist (aside from the native American drumming) whose performance transcended the plastic context, where the music grabbed you and you didn’t think a hundred second-guessing dwarfs and sweetening junkies hadn’t tinkered with the song and surgically removed its heart and soul and sanitized it so it was fit to go on the air between the commercials.

Hey, honey, pass me the chips and dip. If I’m gonna turn into my father, I want everything that goes with.