I’m a sucker for stuff related to Kanye West’s Twitter presence.
So this video that has been doing the rounds gets stamped “worthy of posting” and now, sits amongst the other webtritus (thanks Arthur for the term) posted here…
It’s been everywhere already, but I think I saw it first at ChurchCreate.
I confess, yesterday, while sitting in Greek and waiting to hear which way the independents would swing (in favour of democracy or broadband flavoured pork) I was relying on Twitter. Mainstream media is great for fact checking and objectivity – Twitter carries the can for immediacy (you don’t have to have your stuff approved by an editor). Because most of Australia was glued to live coverage anyway the pressure for news sites to post the info first was pretty low. So 1 point for Twitter.
By my count twitter is up 2 points currently – because they boast another scoop on mainstream media – the stream of consciousness rants and thoughts of one K-West. They’re needlessly and pointlessly interesting. In the last couple of days he posted a stream of stream of consciousness (a river of consciousness perhaps) thoughts that cobbled together (let Gizmodo do it for you) amount to a lengthy apology to Taylor Swift for last year’s Grammy interruption, and an apology to his fans who had to leap to his defence as a result.
An excerpt:
“The media has successfully diminished the “receptive” audience of KANYE WEST. Taking a 15 second blip, the media have successfully painted the image of the ANGRY BLACK MAN, The King Kong theory. I’m the guy who at one point could perform the Justin Timberlake on stage and everyone would be sooo happy that I was there.
People tweeted that they wish I was dead… No listen. They wanted me to die, people. I carry that. I smile and take pictures through that. I wear my scars. It’s almost like I have to where a suit to juxtapose my image and I won’t lie: IT WORKS!
I wrote a song for Taylor Swift that’s so beautiful, and I want her to have it. If she won’t take it then I’ll perform it for her. She had nothing to do with my issues with award shows. She had no idea what hit her. She’s just a li’l girl with dreams like the rest of us. She deserves the apology more than anyone.”
Aww. Shucks.
You might remember Tea Party Jesus, words from members of the new “conservative force” in American politics in speech bubbles on pictures of Jesus. Well, Jesus Needs New PR has gone one better. Kanye West Jesus.
Further proof, if required, that Kanye is not the messiah, just a very naughty boy with a palpable messianic complex.
Kanye West doesn’t really do interviews. He doesn’t like journalists much. But his recent foray into Twitter has created some interesting opportunities for journalists to quote “on record” comments from Kanye. Here, Slate takes his comments on Twitter and builds an all access interview around them.
The summary of the method of putting this interview together is as follows:
“West has agreed to speak candidly to me on a wide variety of subjects, to run his mouth but remain pithy at the same time, and to grant me virtually round-the-clock access to his life—no publicist popping his head in and telling me there’s five minutes left. As conditions go for writing a profile, these are extremely favorable. No, I don’t get to ask any questions, but I do get a constantly updating record of West’s thoughts, whereabouts, cravings, jokes, meals, flirtations, bon mots, and on and on. In the face of a mountainous info dump like West’s, isn’t the basic work of profiling—building from the raw material of everything someone says and does toward a more focused sense of who they are—as relevant as ever?”
Here’s a sample of the “interview”…
“Flying back from Silicon Valley to New York, West wanted to show me images of some recent kingish purchases he’d made, along with various treasures he had his eye on. It was a giddy tour of ancien régime-looking finery that didn’t end until well after the plane had landed. There were two golden goblets—thin-stemmed and etched with an intricate floral pattern—that West said he planned to use for drinking water. He was particularly excited about a bowl that squats regally on a gold base. The bowl is made of milky, hand-painted porcelain, with two grippable gold lions curling up its sides. “I copped this to eat cereal out of,” he said, adding that he’s been fantasizing about buying a horse. It’s hard to say exactly how much, if at all, he was joking.”