9 December 2000
Only now has it struck me that ‘Stan’, with its chorus by the then-unknown Dido, may have been influenced by ‘You Got Me’, that fabulous single the year before by The Roots which features a similar sweet chorus by a female singer, Erykah Badu. Certainly at the time I remember the cognitive dissonance of Dido’s wistful presence as what gave ‘Stan’ its immediate impact. Now that we know Dido, and how singing about her tea going cold is as interesting as she ever gets, we can focus on ‘Stan’ as a whole.
From one perspective, ‘Stan’ is a rap take on the dreadful man-kills-woman murder ballad format. We know Stan’s name. We’re not told the name of his pregnant girlfriend, who during the song becomes a stereotypical nagging woman and is finally killed off by being locked in the boot of the car Stan crashes. However, unlike a murder ballad this killing isn’t the crux of the drama, but merely incidental to the main story of ‘Stan’. It’s just Eminem dramatising an over-the-top fan by throwing in the sexist, misogynistic woman-in-refrigerator trope for shock value. It stinks.
‘Stan’ also gives us more homophobia in an Eminem hit. The lyric “P.S. we should be together too” is set up and delivered as another shock-value punchline: the male gay-panic trope you get in US frat-boy comedies of this era like American Pie. We’ve already seen this sort of stuff in the video for Eminem’s previous Irish number one, ‘The Real Slim Shady’, so I’m not in the mood for any ‘benefit of the doubt’ or what have you. You may argue that he’s only throwing in this violent misogyny and puerile homophobia purely for shock value and doesn’t personally believe them—or as he says himself in ‘Stan’ about self-harm, “I say that shit just clownin'”—in which case he’s still guilty of perpetuating them. Stan is the tragic anti-hero of this track, and an anti-hero is just a hero who gets to do ‘cool’ bad stuff; going out in a blaze of self-destruction and taking your pregnant girlfriend with you doesn’t strike me as narrative comeuppance. I hate this stuff.
On a lesser order of putridness, ‘Stan’ is such a cliched track anyway. We get plenty of establishing detail about how Stan thinks Eminem is brilliant, especially his early underground material: yeah, make sure you get that self-lacerating warts n’ all stuff in there! Then you have Eminem in the last verse sitting down and writing his letter back to Stan: aw, he’s so nice and surprisingly down to earth! The whole final fake-reveal of “..it was you!” is Nashville country music levels of cornball. And just in case you missed it, Stan also namechecks Phil Collins.
‘Stan’ was our Christmas number one for 2000. Perhaps you still play it every year along with ‘Fairytale Of New York’ – you know, while putting up the decorations, to get you in the mood of peace on earth and good will to all. May your tea always be gone cold.
