Blog Post 4: Behind The Music

Jessica Schwendeman
WST 3015 – Perez
Blog Assignment – Behind The Music
3/8/10

For this assignment about music themed around violence towards women, I chose to analyze the song “97 Bonnie & Clyde” by Eminem.

It is a story-telling song, detailing a father driving his daughter down to the beach. He explains to her that “mama’s just sleeping” (Mathers) in the trunk, when really, it is clear to the listener that the father has murdered her immediately before these events, and is driving down to the pier to dump her body. The narrator uses childish words and phrasing to speak with his daughter, such as “da-da” and “little boo-boo” (Mathers). Throughout, he asserts to his daughter to not be afraid, and that they are going to be all right and life will be better from now on because it will be “just the two of us” (Mathers) without the mother.

Clearly, this is an extraordinarily violent and disturbing song, which perpetuates systems of violence. The motive given for killing the mother was that “mama was real, real bad…she was being mean to dad and made him real, real mad” (Mathers), and later goes on to describe the mother as “one of those crazy-type women that do crazy things, and if she don’t get her way, she’ll throw a fit” (Mathers). Clearly the narrator is contributing to victim-blaming, assuming that the woman brought on his anger and is therefore at fault for the murder – assuming that she was responsible for this act of violence (Kirk 265). The father is perpetuating this system by telling his daughter (though she is very young) that she shouldn’t be a woman who nags or harps on her partner, because otherwise she’ll get what’s coming to her – in this case, a violent death.

The song mentions that the mother had a restraining order on the father (Mathers), which implies that this was not the first violent act that had occurred, Men are the perpetrators of 95% of all cases of domestic violence (Seely 200), and this case is no exception, though it is obviously extreme. However, the song mentioned that the woman had remarried and had another child with another man, apparently signifying that she had removed herself from the situation as much as she could, which unfortunately many women are not able to do. Even so, her attacker still was able to have some control and be in her life, which eventually ended in tragedy.


Works Cited
Kirk, Gwyn and Okazawa-Rey, Margo. "Violence Against Women." Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. 5th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 257-271.

Mathers, Marshall. "97 Bonnie & Clyde." Rec. 1997. The Slim Shady LP. Eminem. Bass Brothers, 1997. MP3.

Seely, Megan. Fight Like a Girl: How to be a Fearless Feminist. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007.