Romantic lead. Photograph: Kevin
Winter/Getty Images
Of all the risks of going out with a rap star - spiralling jewellery costs, yet more pesky bodyguards, the difficulty of off-street parking that stretch limo - being done over by his lyrics probably doesn't rate that highly. Still, though, top marks for forbearance to Eminem's ex- and now ex-ex-wife Kimberley, who remarried the singer at a ritzy do (a "real classy, intimate affair", according to the Chicago Tribune) in Michigan on Saturday.
This despite having famously been ripped apart (almost literally) on several occasions by hubbie Eminem, supposedly as part of the day job. Some choice cuts? Difficult to beat "Da-da made a nice bed for mommy ... at the bottom of the lake", from Bonnie and Clyde. But who could forget his touching address to her in Kim: "I'll be right back ... Well, I will. You'll be in the trunk."? You wonder whether they reprised that in the vows. I'm guessing not.
"We've got a really funny relationship," Eminem told MTV in 2000, and today's Independent certainly agrees, folding that rocky Marshall-and-Kim romance into Generic Celebrity on-and-offs, from Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti to, inevitably, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Interesting to speculate, of course, about serial returners, the ones who can't quite let it die. And you might indeed ask all sorts of questions about what tempts you to get back with a man who's made millions out of lyrics in which he fantasises about murdering you in near-pornographic detail.
But maybe that's the point. Who on earth would get involved with someone who handles words for a living? Graham Greene's splinter of ice in the heart gets somewhere near to it (if not quite all the way - it seems Eminem's more a chainsaw in the heart kinda guy), and of course the entire history of literature, like that of journalism, is marked by charred patches of earth where people have settled scores.
But, as a blogpost we did a while back about songs brimming with hatred reveals, you should probably think especially hard before going anywhere near a songwriter. As Brett Anderson, Marvin Gaye and Warren Beatty/Mick Jagger/James Taylor can all testify.
