The reason Eminem hired a porn star for a 2009 music video
We live in Donald Trump’s world today, whether we like it or not.
When Trump descended down that golden escalator to kick off his presidential campaign more than a decade ago, he was, truly, a shock to the political system. People couldn’t wrap their heads around his rise to prominence, but, looking back, the signs were already there that America was headed in this direction.
The 2008 presidential election was contested between the Republican John McCain and the Democratic candidate and eventual winner Barack Obama. When it became evident in the polls that McCain’s campaign was facing an uphill battle, a little-known figure was selected as his prospective vice president in a bid to shift things in the Republicans’ favour. Her name was Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.
Largely unknown outside of Alaska, Palin was an unusual political figure for the period. She did not seem to be especially interested in policy, while her perceived lack of intelligence and experience was a big talking point. Her instincts were fiercely right-wing, and she was known for stoking culture war issues. In other words, she helped to set the stage for the eventual rise of Donald J Trump.
Someone who seemed to recognise the significance of Sarah Palin’s entry into the mainstream of national and global politics was Eminem, who, at the time, was rebuilding his career following a years-long hiatus. His 2009 album Relapse was his first since Encore had come out five years earlier, and with it, he sought to pull himself back to the top of the cultural conversation. To that end, he took on Sarah Palin.
He mentioned her in his song ‘We Made You’, which took on a range of other prominent figures of the period, including Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. But it was his targeting of Palin that felt most consequential, given her significant political stature at the time.
The music video for ‘We Made You’ continues the work of the song’s lyrics, which is to say that it mocks the celebrities Eminem shows such contempt for. To play the Palin character in the video, porn star Lisa Ann was cast. She had previously parodied Palin in porn movies, but this job was a bigger deal for her, in the sense that so many more people would see her perform the part.
Speaking on the Veterans Minimum podcast recently, Lisa Ann insisted that she initially believed the offer to appear in the Eminem video was “a prank call from one of my friends.” But when she realised it was real, she understood the part’s potential cultural significance. “This is going to be embedded in the internet forever,” she remembered thinking.
The video was widely praised for its critique of the vacuous nature of the era’s tabloid culture, at the centre of which were people like Kim Kardashian and Sarah Palin. While Em couldn’t have known the specific path American politics were soon to take with Trump at the helm, he was perceptive enough to note that Palin was a consequential figure of that late 2000s period, and casting Ann in his video highlighted the absurdity of the era’s increasingly unmoored culture and politics.