Kanye West is all over #musicmonday. I want Kanye West to go away.
Can that be all? Am I done for the week?
My frustration with Kanye has grown in direct correlation with his most recent ascendance. If you drew a graph with my Kanye frustration on one axis and Kanye’s popularity post-2009 on the other, it would be a straight line with a slope of positive one. Y=X.
I am a lifelong contrarian, an “I decided in kindergarten that I didn’t like pizza because it was everyone’s favorite food and I continued to insist that I didn’t like pizza until college when I realized pizza is actually both delicious and necessary” contrarian, and pop music was an early target of my obstinacy. I haaaaaaated Ace of Base. And Mariah Carey. I actually Sharpie-markered a t-shirt at camp one year that read “I like Manson, not Hanson”—I was super popular at that camp dance, I’ll tell you what. So now you know how old I am, and also that it’s possible I’m fed up with Kanye because I am easily fed up with the things that everyone else likes.
It’s possible, though, that Kanye West is actually really freaking annoying.
We all know that in September of 2009, Kanye wreaked major havoc on the MTV Music Video Awards and the world of internet memes when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to proclaim that Beyoncé was more deserving of the award at issue. He was appropriately criticized and responded with appropriate chagrin and while his outburst was classless and distasteful, forgiveness requires that the forgiver acknowledge that an action was wrong, so yeah he was wrong, I suppose I forgive him and most of the rest of the world appears to have done the same.
But then there’s his internet presence. Kanye West’s two official websites give me the fantods. I’m exploring them for the first time as I write this column, and I find them impossible to navigate, overly full of pop-up media, and devoid of useful information. I know that complaining about a website makes me a grumpy “get off my porch” person and that the law of the Internet clearly states that anything someone hates, someone else loves (I’m looking at you, Foursquare Twitter update haters—just ignore that particular Tweet from me, ok?), but I crave function as well as form and fail to find the former (that’d be function, not form, despite the word “form” being in “former”) in these two (2) official websites.
Also, I fail to find the allcaps shouty text that the Internet has led me to believe dominates Kanye’s blog. Whither the allcaps? All I’m seeing are Interpol videos (what? why?) and obscene pictures of expensive cars, houses, and women.
Mostly, though: Twitter. Kanye joined Twitter earlier this month, and Twitter feeds everywhere were immediately filled with folks retweeting Mr. West’s odder 140-characters-or-fewer communiqués. Retweets don’t really do this Twitter feed justice, though, because the true oddity lies in the juxtaposition. Only on Kanye’s Twitter feed will you see “Do you know where to find marble conference tables? I’m looking to have a conference… not until I get the table though” followed immediately by “Yo why people gotta make they internet passwords so damn complicated???” And only a celebrity of Kanye’s profile could so completely blow up the internet by announcing the release of a new song every Friday until Christmas.
OH my GOD is that annoying. Not only is Kanye not going to go away, he’s going to recur every Friday until Christmas. He’s like a chronosynclastically infundibulated Twitter specter who will haunt my feed with terrible hip-hop for the rest of the year.
I realize I have made it through this entire column merely complaining, without really explaining why I find Kanye annoying. I think it’s a lot of things: his apparent revelry in being a tastemaker, the fact that he seem to think adding one non-hip hop artist to a song makes his music indie or underground, the perpetual God talk mixed with the crassest commercialism…and this: “Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh? I put the pussy in a sarcophagus.” That is an actual line from today’s #musicmonday favorite, “Monster,” which Kanye dropped on Friday and which features Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Bon Iver, and Nicki Minaj. WHY DO PEOPLE LISTEN TO THIS NONSENSE?
My #musicmonday pick: Listen to this nonsense instead, if you want something to dance to that involves indie darlings: War Again, by Balkan Beat Box
Note: Yes I referenced both David Foster Wallace and Kurt Vonnegut in a post about being a contrarian. WHATEVER. Some things get stuck in your consciousness, you know?
