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Thanks to Siva for putting me on the Sivacracy team. I'm Joel Dinerstein, author of an award-winning cultural history of jazz and industrialization, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture Between the World Wars. An ex-rock critic and journalist, I'm currently an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Tulane, and I will be writing about music, popular culture, and issues of race. Now to Eminem:

This is the most courageous, successful artistic political statement by a musician since, I don't know, maybe "What's Going On" or "Blowin' in the Wind." I'm not kidding and I'm not prone to such exaggeration. I was incredibly moved by its power and vision, and it even ends by being socially responsible while avoiding corny, shallow cries for peace. It's the best use of digital video I've seen as well. Towards the end, as the inter-racial masses march to a slow, trudging beat -- resonating not only with the soldiers in Iraq, but Hiphop Nation and the undead -- their collective head-down death-march transmutes Malcolm X's famous speech, "The Ballot or The Bullet" for a new generation: we either vote Bush out now -- "this coward, this monster" -- or he gets us all killed. I never would have predicted Eminem had this in him. Eminem's team (including Dr. Dre, director Ian Inaba, and animator Anson Vogt) here produce a virtual short-story with few precedents: it organically integrates the visual, the musical, the lyrical, the political, the power of the powerless and the pop-cultural ephemeral (see, he's got me doing it already) into a well-paced narrative in which his leadership role is modest. "Come along / as I provide / just enough spark / that we need/ to proceed," he raps, to ignite individual action into collective struggle.

You go on with your good self, Marshall.