In the age over over-coached celebrity, where stars are styled and handled to the point of polite blandness, Kanye West's penchant for occasionally actually speaking his mind in public is refreshing. The uproar that has met Kanye's short disruption of Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV VMAs would be mind boggling if we, as a culture, had our priorities remotely straight. If only the internet was this offended by, say, Obama's ongoing torture cover-up. Of course, I'd imagine that's received significantly less press.
Let's look at what happened and why people are upset: Young swift beats out Beyonce for best female video. She comes to up accept her award, and Kanye jumps on stage for a few seconds, grabs the mic and says "I'm really happy for you, I'm gonna let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time! Of all time!" before leaving the stage. He was eventually ejected from the premises. Videos of the actual broadcast getting taken down all the time, but this stupid news brief contains Kanye's entire outburst at 40 seconds in.
Was Kanye rude? Yes. As someone who has a strange and obsessive attraction to award shows (they make me cry) and has fantasized about winning an Oscar since I was in short pants, I might be furious if I got my Big Moment and had it disrupted by someone else's urgent opinion that another person should have won instead. So in a sense I feel bad for Taylor Swift, and think Kanye was in the wrong. Then again, Taylor Swift may be young, but she's been in the industry for years. This isn't her first or most prestigious award, and it won't be her last. Kanye didn't say anything mean to or about her. How enormous is her personal tragedy here, really? Especially considering that she now is America's Sweetheart and probably got a sympathy boost in album sales, in addition to acres of fawning publicity. I'm sure she's just fine.
Kanye, on the other hand, is being raked over the coals. The internet isn't always the best judge of public opinion, but I'm coming across more hatred of him than I did of, oh, let's say Chris Brown after he battered Rhianna. I can't help but notice that Kanye is being crucified for disrespecting a young blond white woman (while kinda-defending a black woman, no less,) and that Beyonce, who ended up winning video of the year, was ultimately the one overshadowed. Her positive publicity came from bending over backwards to share her spotlight with poor widdle Swift. Meanwhile, Li'l Mama, who jumped on stage and mugged at the end of Jay-Z's steller (if uncharacteristically raspy) performance of "Empire State of Mind" (a more egregious offense, in my rulebook,) has become a joke, not an egotistical villain.
Obviously the two disruptions are not directly analagous, but I'd wager that the racism that is coming out explicitly in some of The Public's anger at Kanye plays a role in the wide divergence in general reaction. Jay-Z is a black man, he can take care of himself in the face of a young black female who raps about lipgloss, nevermind that she was able to steal the spotlight and disrupt the vibe as effectively as Kanye was. Which is all that really happened here, in terms of offense. Meanwhile, Kanye's Scary Black Man is of course some kind of a threat to Taylor Swift's pristine white womanhood. Harry Allen's Media Assassin has a bit on this, as well as screencaps of some among the the mountain of racist tweets that immediately clogged the tubes of Twitter post-outburst. At this point it is the ugliness of the angry reaction that is of interest to me. Of course a swarm of assholes of Twitter don't represent everyone who thought Kanye was tacky (he was tacky,) but racism is a lot like roaches--for every white person who angrily drops the N-word in public, there are thousands more that remain hidden. Post-racial America my ass.
Among those who are not so slur-happy, why exactly are people so mad? Are you Taylor Swift's mom? Then why do you care? I guess I understand if you're a big fan, but more than a day after the big event I'm still seeing a lot of people who I'm sure don't (or didn't, perhaps) give a fuck about Swift or her music covering Facebook with their disgust at Kanye's "inappropriate" behavior. I can't relate to that. From where does this deep disgust spring? As my partner responded to a friend of his who was offended by his status message ("is glad Kanye did it") "I don't want pop stars to be 'appropriate." So what's left to be mad about, to feel invested in?*
Honestly, my worry is that Kanye and his near-empty bottle of Hennessey aren't doing too well. This was a poor career move, and one he seems to sincerely regret. That concerns me. He's a great talent and I'd hate to see him go into a self-destructive spiral of one kind or another.
Let's also not forget that, ill-advised as his sharing may have been, Kanye was right, Beyonce's video is amazing. She absolutely deserved to win.
*::cough::white supremacy, cult of true womanhood::cough::
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1 comment:
i saw the interaction youre talking about. no, i dont think he did the worst thing in the world. i think it is being talked about cause these are celebrities and people like to talk about celebrities.
however, i interpret it differently from the way you see it. i think, perhaps, kanye west was the one who was being racist. i believe he felt that a white woman received an award that a black woman should have.
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