Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and the Intergenerational Cofandom of Fortnite

While we were with kids and cousins at Fun City, a huge trampoline park/arcade/ball pit/ninja warrior situation nearby in Syracuse over the break, I had an idea for an academic paper. The idea is how the integration of nostalgic hip hop artists like Snoop Dogg and Eminem into Fortnite creates a powerful combination of nostalgia and discovery that is intergenerational and therefore exceedingly appealing and effective both in the programming for the video game and for the subsequent marketing and brand extensions of the game and the celebrities.

I’m Gen X and we are a lot of things as a generation, but one thing that sets us apart from our parents (Boomers) is that we are gamers. We grew up with Super Mario Bros, and while personally wouldn’t call myself a die hard gamer, I did spend copious hours endeavoring to save the Princess. Now, with our kids, we get to play these awesome video games that are immersive, challenging and really fun. Plus the graphics (outside of Minecraft; I can’t support the intentional return to pixels and don’t get me started on the systemic safety issues of Roblox) are phenomenal compared to what we had. We would have killed for a game like Fortnite back in the day. I was excited about Nintendo’s Duck Hunt and that my mom let us have the console with the gun. And you don’t want to know what we did to our Sims in Sim City.

On top of all of that, we are rediscovering the music we grew up with through our kids’ eyes. We get to participate in the the fandom with them - Mommy knows all the words to Lose Yourself, sometimes she even lets a preteen listen to the explicit versions. This invites conversations where we work together to understand what swears are, what they mean, and when grown ups (not kids) decide (swearing is a choice) to use them. We also talk about where Snoop Dogg and Eminem grew up and what their songs are about. Explaining the genesis of 90s hip hop as an art form and the racial, socioeconomic and gender implications surrounding its ascension is something I’ll never get tired of attempting to do justice. The kids love the raps; Snoop in his melodic, mellow, smooth style, Eminem in his amped up, angry, words-coming-faster-than-you-can-even-think style. There’s a reason they made a mini-gun with Eminem’s super fast rap from his song Rap God as part of the weapon. The rap plays on hyperspeed when you shoot the gun. The first time I saw it, I laughed out loud. It was a sweet trick, a quip almost, in the game, it was for those of us who knew, AND it was for the kids who just liked a gun that did that.

In revisiting the careers of Snoop and Eminem, we’ve come across the good and the bad and I realized along with the nostalgia comes a little cultural amnesia. They’re different people now - older men who are now looking back on their lives and putting forward much more namaste personas than those from before. It’s hard to reconcile at times. I’ve explained what a gang is, what causes people to join them, what South Central LA is like, what happened in the 90s that caused a lot of the events they rap about (systemic racial inequities, police brutality, socioeconomic disparity and more). In watching video retrospectives on their lives and careers I’m reminded of the deep misogyny and sexism that permeates their earlier music. Snoop has no apologies for referring to women as bitches and hos. And while these words have been somewhat reclaimed by women, I wanted our kids to know these are humans behind the music. Humans who make good and bad choices. Explaining that gangsta rap comes from real life experiences regarding a man who they now watch as a sweet, sensitive and funny coach on The Voice or the ever-endearing mascot of the 2024 Olympics, is a huge contradiction. One born of a genius marketing team, who have extended Snoop’s brand as far as it will go into big box retailers, TV ads, and of course, Fortnite (where he lives on as a skin in the game even after the event featuring him ended).

Eminem is a deeply complex, conflicted and flawed human. Explaining his treatment of women, queer people and other ideas we don’t agree with in our family was eye opening. We watched a video that showed some of his earlier, more violent songs, and my son said, “Wow, I idolized this dude. And now, well, I don’t.” He was shook up about it and while I didn’t mean to go that deep into the catalog (I forgot just how bad it could get, with his suicide attempt just before getting famous, the song about how he wanted to kill his girlfriend, and of course all of the gay stuff) I was glad to reset expectations for my son on what someone like Eminem offered. I like to tell myself it’s not just the feminist in me, it’s that he has more power than he realizes if he knows the artist not just the art. We can make informed decisions if we’re going to appreciate the art or not, but we have to know (and remind ourselves) who the person was who made it. There’s enough Andrew Tates out there waiting to snare young men into that macho, woman-hating world, that I know I need to prepare him to on how to think critically in his own defense.

And now Eminem is 52, looking back on his life, the Slim Shady character and we’re all there with him doing it again. He’s got a new album out, a new hit song (Houdini! Ever appropriate!) and you’ve got to give it to the Gen Xers for staying so gosh darn relevant. Hard to believe we’re still asking that age old question “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” now coupled with “Guess who’s back, back again…”

Fortnite is filled with holographic characters, yours being one of them. The game is set in a dystopian land where it’s Hunger Games type rules and everyone runs around grabbing loot (guns, bandages, food, etc), trying to eliminate the other players and be the last one standing. The graphics are bright, luscious, glorious even, you can get lost in them. More than that, they are fun. The bus that drops you into the world is hilarious and everyone thanks the bus driver. The skins are elaborate and don’t recognize gender. I’ve seen many a boy with an avatar that looks vaguely like a girl and I think to myself, this might just be how we reach some kind of equity. When it’s not that they know the difference (they do), it’s that they don’t care. They think the ones that lean feminine are just as bad ass, sometimes more. The boys don’t say, “Oh, I don’t want the girl one” because there is no girl one. The designers of the game have a sense of humor and include references to pop culture and memes - Skibbidi Toilet is particularly popular with the almost-middle school set and it’s featured on a backpack. Peter Griffin from Family Guy is a skin in the game. The songs they add are fun and random throwbacks - one emote, or quick dance the player can add to their repetoire of actions - is set to Bye, Bye, Bye by N’SYNC and it’s a HUGE favorite. All the young boys know the choreo now. Mommy knows the Bye Bye Bye dance!

This cofandom across generations is exciting. It makes you feel like this is a good use of the technology. The guns less so - they are there and they are part of the game. The real names are used - rifle, pistol, shotgun - and my least favorite part is that the kids say things like “I shotgunned him in the head!” Yes, that part sucks. But I talk to my kids. They do the drills at school, we talk about what it means and what it is for. They talk about the guns in the game, we use it as a way to talk about what guns mean in our world, our society. I like to encourage their media literacy and digital literacy by watching with them, playing the game with them, and making sure we know why things are the way they are (it’s the feminist in me - question everything).

Us Gen Xers may be the last generation that remembers a world without electronics, but now we’re the ones regulating them. My wife and I say how long and put limits on electronics time. We make sure our kids know they can do other things like reading, writing in their journal, playing the clarinet, building with Legos, and so on. We talk about regulation and moderation - how much is too much, how to know when it is and how to train your brain to take breaks (even when you don’t want to). But when it comes to Fortnite, I’m into it. I’m into it because it’s our music that’s becoming their music, our game references becoming their game lore. (Lore! I love that word and it’s triumphant comeback). As a communications researcher, if game studies is the future of communications studies (Chess & Consalvo, 2022), well, I’m here for that too.