Kanye West Is Doing It

If you were at all keen on Kanye West, I hope you stayed away from Facebook and Twitter for the past week. Every third status update revolved around how evil West was for taking time away from Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, and the comments attached to these posts always carried something to the effect of "WHAT A JERK I HATE HIM!"

And I understand the feelings behind this, but I love Kanye West.

For the sake of getting it out of the way early, I'll mention upfront that I don't care about the VMAs or Taylor Swift. You know who had the best music video of the year? Dinosaur Jr. You know who deserved to win instead of Taylor Swift? Whoever actually directed and produced the video that her song played behind.

This doesn't mean that she didn't deserve her time to shine-- it isn't Swift's fault that the VMAs need recognizable faces to deliver speeches, and it's clear that J Mascis won't ever hit the spotlight again the way he did when his band was at the height of their fame with "Feel The Pain," and MTV has to reflect that in their awards shows.


What this means is that I don't find West's interruption to be an open sore on the face of MTV the way the rest of my peers do.

Still, it's rude as hell. We have our new King of All Rock Stars.

A few years ago, Spin Magazine declared Marilyn Manson to be the last American rock star. We had lost our Motley Crues and Diamond Daves, but we still had Manson, and he was going to be the hero who decided to take a helicopter ride to a super-model's house at 4 a.m. He was going to show up to every press event drunk and pass out with his hands on an interviewer's breasts. He was going to marry and divorce the same woman four times over the course of a year.

The problem with this is that Manson is too obsessed with how he is perceived. During interviews, he's always sure to make shocking comments apropos of nothing. Sometimes he's happy that the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, sometimes he stops the interview cold to usher in whoever he's dating and then proceed to make out with that person in front of the interviewer. He wants the attention and never stops trying to attain it. Axl Rose didn't become a recluse because he wanted the paparazzi to camp outside of his mansion; Ozzy Osbourne didn't drink Nikki Sixx's urine with the intent to publish a book about the event later. For a rock star to be truly interesting, he has to say and do things that happen because he just has some inherent feeling that he must say and do them.


The problem with such wild spontaneity is the consequences. When Vince Neil went on a weeks-long bender, his adventure ended in the deaths of three people. Neil delivered a public apology, but at the end of the day, everybody had to remember that three people had died.

When West loses his mind, the only damage done is inflicted upon West. And the apologies are the best part. After the Taylor Swift incident, West exclaimed that he felt "LIKE BEN STILLER IN "MEET THE PARENTS" WHEN HE MESSED UP AND ROBERT DENIRO ASKED HIM TO LEAVE." In another blog apology, West expressed regret over his actions, followed by this statement, addressed to Swift: "YOU ARE VERY VERY TALENTED!!!!!!! I GAVE MY AWARDS TO OUTKAST OVER ME WHEN THEY DESERVED IT OVER ME... THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!!!! I'M NOT CRAZY YALL. I'M JUST REAL."

In the process of apologizing, West implied that Swift should have given her award to competitor Beyonce because Swift should have recognized that the video made for her song was inferior to the one for Beyonce's. BRILLIANT YALL. Even in his apologies, he can't help but put her down.

West is also head and shoulders above his peers because he is a loud personality in music when loud personalities are diminishing in number. Thom Yorke of Radiohead does not want to be cool and believes that he is not accepted by those who are, nobody really knows what the guys in Daft Punk look like, and if a member of Nickelback was to sit down next to you on the Metro, you wouldn't know him from your plumber. These are the biggest bands of our generation.

Kanye West's explosions are fascinating, Kanye West's attempts at redemption are fascinating, Kanye West's periods of relative silence are fascinating (like today, when he used his blog to post five pictures of high-design chairs and then delete three of them). Kanye West is our rock star. Kanye West is doing it.