New Article: Kanye West Goes Full FOX News on TMZ, Mayhem Ensues
David Shasha
Kanye West Goes Full FOX News on TMZ, Mayhem Ensues
I have addressed the ongoing Kanye West meltdown in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/TOVM95aFwTA
As the Trumpworld controversy that he generated was cresting, the YEEZUS decided to visit the TMZ newsroom and “explain” himself in even greater detail, which generated even more controversy and hand-wringing due to his comment that 400 years of Slavery was a “Choice” by the Slaves:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kanye-west-slavery-tmz_us_5ae8c54ce4b00f70f0ecc118
Here is the full video of the TMZ broadcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWJBWU7asEg
Amazingly, TMZ newsroom gadfly and one of its producers Van Lathan exploded and began to take apart the YEEZUS in ways that we have not previously seen in our Idiocracy Poptrash world:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/02/entertainment/van-lathan-kanye-west/index.html
The TMZ circus was an even more bizarre display of Kanye’s shockingly idiot mien and unhinged craziness.
Here is a handy review of the matter from The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/arts/music/kanye-west-charlamagne-interview-tmz.html
A couple of days after the TMZ debacle, NYT music writer and degenerate Hip-Hop apologist Jon Caramanica twisted himself up into a pretzel in an attempt to explain the situation:
He starts off the article with a paean to West’s iconoclasm and his “Artistry”:
Speaking truth to power has long been central to how Kanye West navigates his art and his business. He lambastes the executives who don’t grant him full creative and financial freedom. He calls into question the empathy of a president on live television. He lays bare his emotions in ways that disrupt tidy narratives about celebrity comity. He is a lit match in search of a fuse, setting fires that people (largely) cheer for.
In point of fact, West began his career with a deeply Anti-Intellectual stance as he named his first albums “The College Dropout” and “Late Registration”; titles that obliquely attack the professional standards of his own mother Donda who was a College Professor of English Literature and a model of Intellectual attainment in the African-American community.
She was a respected educator and a Civil Rights activist:
http://legacy.newsok.com/obituaries/oklahoman/obituary.aspx?n=donda-c-west&pid=98147273
Needless to say, her son has taken a very different route to public fame and fortune.
His signature YEEZY sneakers have transformed the market:
Sadly, they are priced for the 1%:
https://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/07/11/yeezy-shoes-price-ranked-resell/
And then, of course, is his marriage to the Poptrash icon Kim Kardashian:
It is indeed a marriage made in Trumpworld Heaven!
Caramanica repeats the jaundiced view in the Hip-Hop world that Kanye was a revolutionary force who has just now lost his way:
These are behaviors, statements and sentiments that potentially pose the largest existential threat ever to the Kanye West empire. And so what’s played out over the past two weeks is a kind of psychological tug of war, with Mr. West reinforcing his most unsettling positions while, all around him, what amounts to a collective global rescue effort for his mind and soul (and, in truth, his legacy) is playing out in real time.
The seeds of this moment are traceable to the final months of 2016, the last time Mr. West was so public, and one of the most troubled periods of his life. Within a period of weeks, his wife was robbed, his tour was canceled, and he was hospitalized. On “TMZ,” he said that during those months, he developed an addiction to prescription opioids.
That year concluded with his Trump Tower meeting with the President-elect, a vexing public position for someone who’d always agitated on behalf of the dispossessed.
The idea here is that we have a “new” Kanye who is different than the “old” Kanye.
It is therefore interesting to see how Caramanica characterizes West’s strong identification with Donald Trump:
But in Mr. Trump, Mr. West recognizes himself: a natural disrupter; a person so secure in his gifts that he doesn’t trouble himself with facts (or much believe in them); someone who sees generating passionate dissent as a sign of success, not as an indicator of a shaky premise. “I can tell you that when he was running, it’s like I felt something,” Mr. West told Charlamagne Tha God in an interview posted Tuesday. “The fact that he won proves something. It proves that anything is possible in America.”
But that kinship mistakes cynicism for earnestness, volume for accuracy, popularity for morality. Not all disruption is the same.
Corporate Hip-Hop loyalists like Caramanica are stymied by what Ari Melbler has rightly shown to be a settled process: the swagger and vanity of Rappers identifying with Trump and his vulgarity, misogyny, and his crass materialism. There seems to be a refusal to see West as historically consistent with this settled doctrine and accepting that the new pushback against Trump and his deplorable mission is the innovation.
The delusional West believes he is emulating John Lennon by demanding that we all “love” one another and that he can say whatever stupid ideas come into his deranged mind because he is a true “Artist.”
His megalomania and delusions of grandeur are nothing new; they have been an essential part of his marketing strategy for a very long time. He does in fact believe that he is an extraordinary person, a deep thinker whose every utterance should be pored over with the greatest care and respect.
Money is indeed a tremendous aphrodisiac; a drug that can transform people into frightening ogres.
The YEEZUS has doubled-down on his deep love and respect for Trump and shocked people by saying that Slavery was a “Choice.” And just for good measure he repeated the Trump canard that we must listen to all sides in the battle over Racism and Fascism. All the participants are human beings worthy of respect.
Author Roxane Gay spoke for many in her angry tweet:
https://twitter.com/rgay/status/991415066649071617?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I don’t have the energy for nonsense but Kanye saying slavery was a choice reiterates my previous statements about how dangerous his trite, shallow ramblings are. He is not a free thinker. He is a free moron who doesn’t read. Do not @ me.
Perhaps realizing what a moron he is, and how his unhinged remarks might hurt his financial bottom line, West tried to walk the “Slavery was a Choice” comment back:
As I said before, the Right Wing extremists are thrilled over these developments.
And you can add radical wingnut Ben Shapiro to the growing list of Kanye admirers in wacko Right Wing world:
West proved that he is what I wrote in my original article, but what I learned from the bizarre piece of TV history was the existence of someone named Candace Owens who is apparently a prominent African-American Right Winger and Trump Supporter who also appeared in the unhinged TMZ program:
http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/kanye-hung-out-with-right-wing-freethinkers-this-weekend.html
Ms. Owens mouthed the usual FOX News orthodoxy about Black people killing each other and then blaming White people for their problems and how Trump has cut Black Unemployment and is their savior.
All of this is very surreal and disconcerting.
It has now become quite clear where Kanye West fits into our socio-political system, as he has fully entered the free-for-all radical Conservative FOX News world and its blind loyalty to Trumpworld.
He is a true Hip-Hop icon.
David Shasha
The Battle for Kanye West Is Happening in Real Time
By: Jon Caramanica
But in the last couple of weeks, as Mr. West has begun his return to public life after a quiet year, the roles have switched: He is the power, and speaking truth to Kanye West has become the norm.
This has manifested in many forms. T.I. recorded a song with him directly challenging Mr. West’s embrace of President Trump, including wearing a Make America Great Again hat. The radio personality Ebro Darden pushed back forcefully against Mr. West’s support of the black conservative pundit Candace Owens. On “TMZ Live,” Van Lathan, one of TMZ’s producers, berated Mr. West full-throatedly for his recent behavior, including his statement on the show that slavery was “a choice.”
[What Kanye West said about slavery, Barack Obama and mental health.]
The seeds of this moment are traceable to the final months of 2016, the last time Mr. West was so public, and one of the most troubled periods of his life. Within a period of weeks, his wife was robbed, his tour was canceled, and he was hospitalized. On “TMZ,” he said that during those months, he developed an addiction to prescription opioids.
That year concluded with his Trump Tower meeting with the President-elect, a vexing public position for someone who’d always agitated on behalf of the dispossessed.
But that kinship mistakes cynicism for earnestness, volume for accuracy, popularity for morality. Not all disruption is the same.
In two interviews released Tuesday, with Charlamagne and “TMZ,” Mr. West emphasized the importance of “free thought” and “free love,” trying to contextualize his acceptance of Mr. Trump as part of a broader philosophy.
But what really emerged throughout the day were other, more vulnerable notions: “unsettled pain” and “HSP,” which stands for highly sensitive person, a term he returned to several times with Charlamagne. Mr. West was defiant in defending his positions, but he also presented as someone fragile and in need of protection.
The interviews offered competing versions of lucidity. The conversation with Charlamagne, filmed two weeks ago, was an extended sit-down that showed Mr. West at his most reflective. He began by addressing the difficulties of 2016, including how his music failed to thrive on the radio. He spoke about feeling wounded by two elder figures, Jay-Z and Barack Obama, who he said had let him down.
The Charlamagne interview was visually tempered, filmed largely in a white room with a later part filmed out in nature, as the sun was setting, draping the pair in darkness. The overall effect was calm, earthen, soothing.
By contrast, the “TMZ” appearance was jolting, with Mr. West — unconcerned with camera angles, directing his conversation in multiple directions — smearing his reality atop the highly structured show’s foundation. In a way, it served as evidence of his argument — his free thought too liquid for the rigidity of the show. It was a kind of thrilling fourth-wall breaking, the physical manifestation of Mr. West’s trying to operate in an alternate reality of his making.
Time and again, he referred to our society, our world, as a “simulation.” Mr. Lathan pushed back vehemently: “The life that I live is as a real person, an actual person,” he said.
Mr. West contended that the artist’s responsibility is only to himself, not to any greater ideology or other people. One of the most dispiriting moments of his “TMZ” appearance came as Ms. Owens was being given room to espouse her controversial views on police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Mr. West sat next to her, head down, fiddling with his phone, seemingly uninterested in the minutiae. (He woke up when Ms. Owens insulted Chrissy Teigen, John Legend’s wife and a close friend, interrupting with, “I appreciate your free thought, but …”)
It showed him as a vessel, not an agent, and also less interested when not the center of attention. This isn’t free thought so much a disengagement from thought. (Mr. West is planning to release an album in June, he has said — perhaps it is titled “Gotta Hear Both Sides.”)
This passivity parallels what’s been happening on his Twitter feed, where he has been posting elementary misreadings of American political history, screengrabbing text conversations that rebut the inaccuracies. Watching this play out in real time recalled reports about the early days of the Trump presidency, when competing factions would sneak provocative articles onto his desk in hopes of swaying his opinion and triggering his pugilist instincts.
Seeing Mr. West treated like a pinball, or a carrier pigeon, is uncomfortable. At one point during the “TMZ” conversation, when he was speaking about the importance of class (as opposed to race), Ms. Owens watched him and smiled, like a teacher enamored of a protégé.
Mr. West’s recent commentary, from the absurd notions about slavery to what feels like parroting other people’s talking points (“Obama was the opioid to our pain — he pacified us”), has left fans to parse what difference if any there is between aligning with hateful ideology and merely speaking without much forethought (or sometimes post-thought). In Mr. West’s telling, these provocations demonstrate a willingness to think and say something that others wouldn’t dare. As ever, he finds glee in believing he knows, and can say, a thing no one else does.
But for Mr. West, that untethered glee is jumbled up with untethered hurt. Earlier on Tuesday, he posted on Twitter, “We need to have open discussions and ideas on unsettled pain.” Mr. West has always been an artist who deals with pain in primal fashion. It’s not a coincidence that, in the middle of his “TMZ” performance, he announced, “This is the most confident I’ve been since my mom passed.” (Donda West died in 2007, a day after undergoing multiple plastic surgery procedures. On Twitter, Mr. West announced that his forthcoming album cover would be a photo of the surgeon who performed those surgeries.)
Is this the manifestation of love or something more sinister? Only Mr. West knows. Though his methods may undo him, he is striving to bring people into conversation on terms of his own comfort.
At the end of Tuesday, he posted a photo on Twitter of several people seated around a table with the caption “energy meeting. Beings from all different backgrounds.” And he showed Charlamagne a 300-acre plot of land he bought with plans to build a community on it, a place where another reality might supplant the one he’s currently railing against. A place where he is the truth and also the power. A place into which he might disappear, by choice or otherwise.
From The New York Times, May 3, 2018