Cover: "Superman"

When I first heard the song "Superman" by Eminem in 2003, I was really young. Too young to understand the meaning of the lyrics or what it meant to me.

I remember being in the car with a strange man, he was rapping the lyrics to the song and at the time, it felt like a nice experience. At the time, I was primarily listening to pop and R&B music. I didn't get into hip hop and rap music until around 2006.

When I did start listening to rap music, this particular song had left an imprint onto my psyche. It reminded me of the strange man and my strange childhood. I began to like music where rappers called women bitches. I liked being called a bitch. I liked men like that strange man in the car who degraded women. For a while, highly degrading and sexually explicit music was the only thing I would listen to. It comforted me in a weird way.

For the longest time, I thought that this kind of music represented how people should be treated by the men in their life, and that anything else was abnormal and should be avoided. Love and respect be damned.

It wasn't until fairly recently that I realized how backwards my thinking had been. When I listened to this song at a younger age, I envisioned a man mistreating a woman and treating her like a piece of property and I saw nothing wrong with it. Today I hear this song and envision an abused man who'd been mistreated and handled like a piece of property, using stories, metaphors and lyrical poetry to vent out his anger at his abusers. I'm more at peace when I listen to this song now than I was in the past.

I think that it's amazing how the same song can produce a different feeling and a different meaning over time. Maybe not everyone experiences this, but those who do will understand the true power of music as well as the power of words.

"Superman" will always be one of my favorite songs by Eminem and I really enjoyed singing this cover.