Buy Or Don’t Buy

Some time ago, around the time of the release of Eminem’s album The Eminem Show (2002), I decided that he was the only rapper with the chops to tell the story of Enron. That is, Eminem would portray the rise and fall of the Fortune 500 energy-trading behemoth in an epic, 3-disc concept album entitled Emron (20??). Although the Enron Corporation is long dead and Eminem today appears to prefer life as a full-time shadowy, reclusive figure to his former rap career, I nevertheless believe that the window of opportunity for Emron has not yet closed.

The cover art on The Eminem Show played a role in the genesis of my Emron concept. It depicts a stage with cheesy, Broadway-style red velvet curtains. The part in the curtains tapers up to a sharp point, like a teardrop. Eminem sits in the narrow triangle of pitch-darkness between the curtains, his chin at rest on his folded hands, his arms at rest on his legs.

In front of the curtains, meanwhile, a microphone stand looks a little too tall, even gangly in the way of an awkward adolescent, and an empty spotlight shining on the curtain to Eminem’s right waits to be filled with the body of a star.

The Eminem Show finds Eminem in a pensive mood, in other words. The indecisiveness of the curtains—Why not open all the way? Are the curtains opening or are they closing? Are they hiding something?—provides a glimpse into the mind of the inexpressive, introspective rapper framed by them.

It’s blatant: the Eminem of Show is expressively inexpressive, extrovertedly introverted. The cover of The Eminem Show makes you want to reach out to Eminem, give him a little pat on the shoulder, and be like, “Eminem—uh, is everything OK at home?” And of course it’s not, as we know from songs like “Kim,” “Kill You” (both from The Marshall Mathers LP [2000]) and “ ’97 Bonnie and Clyde” (from The Slim Shady LP [1999]).

But that’s not all. The cover of The Eminem Show makes no less clear that Slim’s lack of initiative is a function of the enormous power that he has accumulated over the course of his meteoric rise. The Broadway-y stage implies that Eminem’s acceptance by the mainstream is nothing less than total, and he is dressed in a suit that bears the unmistakable symptoms of an Armani. And that’s before you’ve even heard the album: in “Without Me,” the first single, Eminem makes clear that he has “settled all my lawsuits,” which is something that a very rich man would do.

Let’s sum up: The cover art of The Eminem Show is very artful about the fact that Eminem is pensive, indecisive, introverted, and maybe a tad depressed, and the reason why he is revealing this is . . . Because he can. Eminem’s apparent depression is a passive-aggressive display of his raw economic power. Eminem is such a hot commodity that the power in this relationship belongs to him exclusively—whether his fans are waiting for him or not, he is free to withhold himself from them (from you) whenever he feels like it. It has to do with supply and demand.

Yet as clear as the cover art is about the freedom won by Eminem through his towering success, it is no less clear that Eminem has no clear idea of what he wants to do with it—besides sit around on Broadway stages, of course. You end up feeling sorry for him anyway in spite of it all.

So now you’re probably asking what this has to do with Enron. I’ll explain, but first a brief review of the epoch-defining catastrophe that Enron leaders Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow unleashed upon the world’s financial markets back in 2001.

At the time, Eminem was on tour with the “Up in Smoke Tour,” also featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, plus numerous other luminaries of that period. If you had gone to see the “Up in Smoke Tour” during the first half of that year, you might have seen Enron executives backstage, up in some tricked-out skybox, or way down in the front row of any mega-auditorium you can think of. As Bethany McLean wrote in the March 5, 2001 issue of Fortune, Enron was the “It Stock” of Wall Street. While most observers acknowledged that Enron’s business model was too convoluted to understand, it looked like the wave of the future: By turning energy into a commodity that could be traded on a totally open market, Enron wasn’t just making money, it was redefining the making of a money in a direction of unlimited 21st century progress, or something like that, somehow.
Enron was some Thomas Friedman mustachioed horseshit, but sexy. If you were coming from Enron, it was time to party. Nevertheless, if you happened to be at the party with Enron, and wanted to ask if they could explain how their business worked, you avoided that because they were known to get defensive.

It’s just that it was really complicated, OK? You know the type of person that I mean. In her article in Fortune, McLean quotes Skilling as saying, “People who raise questions [about how Enron works] are people who have not gone through [our business] in detail and who want to throw rocks at us.” That’s paranoid.

As the company began to unravel, the strange affinity for gangsta-ism at the heart of the Enron project assumed sharper contours. Whereas many publicly traded companies show the utmost respect for their investors and employees, Enron treated its like straight-up bitches. For example, Enron executives began selling off their shares in the company as early as August 2000, when, at $90 a share, Enron stock reached its all-time highest value. While he steadily evacuated his own portfolio, Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay insisted to the media, “Buy: Enron stock,” and that it would only be a matter of time before its decline in value turned around.

In the second half of 2001, the uniquely hypocritical, duplicitous variety of insider trading that they had perfected meant that Lay as well Skilling, Fastow, and their inner circle could still probably afford to sit where they wanted to at hip hop concerts. Nevertheless, in the fall of 2001 the price of Enron stock began to decline precipitously. By the time Enron declared bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, its stock was worth $0.61 and its bonds had been rated “junk” by all of Wall Street’s major ratings firms.

For an outsider, it is a great thrill to imagine what it must have been like to have been Lay, Skilling, or Fastow, to preside over such an elaborate and ultimately fragile house of cards. As is now well known, the way that Enron was able to seem like such a profitable company for such a long time, while simultaneously racking up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and producing absolutely nothing to pay it back, is because Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow was able to hide Enron’s debts by creating a complicated system of phony companies and the concomitant illusion of innumerable financial transactions, big and small, that never actually took place. And while the precise nature of the involvement of Skilling, Lay, and the others in all of this remains unclear, they all must have known by August 2000 at the latest. That was when Enron executives started dumping their stock, after all.

That means a solid year at the helm of a fraud so vast and so intricate that even a financial mind with the premier sophistication of Kenneth Lay’s was unable to stop it when oblivion finally came in sight. It would have been like living in the most expensive hallucination of all time and having to keep up appearances. It would have been like handing out brown acid at Woodstock, every hour on the hour, and constantly fighting back the rising tide of guys clambering to stand before the crowd and warn them not to use it, more and more of them always multiplying, so much so that you were compelled to employ violence in more and more extreme forms to hold at bay the growing numbers of would-be good Samaritans—and why?

Just to save your own ass. That’s it, that’s how glorious it all was. That’s the only reason.

And I have not even mentioned anything about the California electricity deregulation crisis, Lay’s intimate personal connections with George W. Bush, “mark-to-market” accounting, EnronOnline, EnronBroadband, or the accounting firm of Arthur W. Andersen.

One of the major problems faced by Enron executives in the years since 2001 has been that it is extremely hard to feel sorry for them. For example, numerous Americans reacted to the news that Lay had died of a heart attack immediately after his conviction on numerous accounts of fraud, conspiracy, and perjury by saying, “Fuck that douche.” It didn’t help matters that Lay had been on vacation in the Rockies with his family when it happened. There is something unnatural about feeling pity for anyone surrounded by wealth and comfort, whatever the circumstances—it sands against the grain of human intuition—especially when it had been paid for, at least in part, with so many lost 401(k)’s.

The magic of Eminem—his alchemy—is that he makes you feel sorry for him even though he is rich, powerful, and rubbing your face in it in an obnoxious way. I would be happy to hear an album about Enron from Notorious B.I.G., Mister Lif, Dead Prez, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Rob Base, Arrested Development, Afrika Bambaata, OutKast, or Vanilla Ice, but it would never amount to more than satire. A burlesque of an easy target. Eminem, however, could elevate the drama of Enron to Shakespearean proportions just by posing on the album cover.

The way that the album cover for Emron would look is this: Interior. Night. A corporate boardroom. The camera sits on one end of a long boardroom table, shiny with a long, fat bar of silver moonlight down the middle. From our perspective the table converges on the lone figure of Eminem seated all the way at the other end. Behind him, a huge picture window ablaze with Houston’s dazzling nighttime skyline.

As in the cover of The Eminem Show, Eminem’s face is propped on his folded hands. He looks away. He has something on his mind, something that consumes him. He is alone.

Why? Because the complex web of financial instruments that Eminem has utilized to prevent the global financial community from discovering that he has not produced a single earnings statement in the entire history of his firm that does not in some way depend upon fundamentally illegal accounting irregularities is loosening up. It will not be long before he will be faced with a choice, to protect his own skin by selling his Emron Corporation stock options at what internal metrics—not disclosed to the public—project to be the stocks’ maximum lifetime potential value, or else go down with the ship, and inform on his CFO and COO to the Department of Justice before they inform on him.
The boardroom table is naked, but for that moonlight strip and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue that Eminem drinks by himself, but only after he pours it into a crystal glass with pieces of ice shaved with the trademark Emron “Crooked E” insignia by a special Icelandic machine.
Don’t get me wrong: I would not be too depressed if Emron never became a concept album. Granted, we’d be missing out on such singles as the club-burner “Shady Texas” (It’s me Slim Shady, I’m livin’ in Texas/I started an energy-trading company with secrets) and the more somber, “Stan”-like “F*** You” (You were my Chief Financial Officer, I thought we was tight for life/but in reality you’re a bitch like my motherfucking wife), but if Emron were a poster, with no songs at all, I’d be able to declare victory. Normally I like to keep my cards a little closer to the vest than that, but whatever.