It’s been awhile since we’ve had a good, old-fashioned Kanye rant to talk about…at least…one that is significant enough to qualify as “different”. There’s a Kanye rant just about every day in some form or another, so as a writer, you sort of get spoiled for choice, and start to only really sit up and pay attention when it’s a particularly good one.
And that has just happened in the form of Kanye’s appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show.
Welcome back, old friend.
West, who was a guest on the Ellen Degrees show, brought the crazy front and center once again in what was actually a not-veiled-at-all plea for money. You’ll all remember when Kanye went on Twitter asking Mark Zuckerberg for something like 50 or 100 million to help finance his insipid fashion line. Funnily enough, on the show, Degeneres pointed-out to West that in the future, pleas for money from Zuckerberg should probably be posted to Facebook instead of Twitter, for reasons that are apparently obvious to everyone except West. West spouted his usual brand of overly-emphasised nonsense-as-profundity in a rant that lasted nearly a full eight minutes. Here are some highlights.
I understand Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Twitter, even though I have had dinner with him and his wife and told them about how I wanted to help the world, and he said he’d help me, and blah blah blah. That’s how it feels though, it’s like the pursuit of happiness, it’s like you’re trying to sell this bone density machine, you know in that movie. … I feel that if I had more resources, I could help more people. I have ideas that can make the human race’s existence within our 100 years better. Period. F–k the paparazzi, whatever perception you have of me, starting with the truth, started with what everyone’s thinking, start there, put some dope s–t with it.
It’s a little like listening to a child talk about the time machine they made in their bedroom out of those little cardboard toilet paper roll bases and the box from their Nintendo game system, isn’t it? West came off as surprisingly more likeable than I would have otherwise believed, but no less delusional than ever.
Picasso is dead, Steve Jobs is dead, [Walt] Disney is dead. Name someone living that you can name in the same breath as them. We’re one race, the human race, we’re a blip in the existence of the universe and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. It’s like I’m shaking talking about it, I feel I can make a difference while I’m here, I feel I can make a difference through my skill set.
While West does have a degree of musical and songwriting talent, that certainly can’t be denied, I, like so many of you, am not completely convinced that he is as profound as he thinks he is.
And yet, we keep giving him airtime to impose his “ideas” on us.
This is a common phenomenon, as it turns out. In December, The Washington Post did a piece titled Why People Think Total Nonsense is Really Deep, and it explains quite well why people may be so drawn to Kanye’s “ideas”.
The precise reasons that people see profundity in vague buzzwords or syntactic but completely random sentences are unknown. Some people might not realize the reason they don’t understand something is simply because there is nothing to understand.
So it would seem. What impresses me most is that Kanye’s “ideas” have already found what it probably their best medium in his music. His fashion line is about as interesting as watching the paint on a dance dry, and his other “ideas”, as evidenced by his appearance on the Ellen show, are unintelligible at best. Kanye does make some good points, most of them on social issues, but his inability to rein it in or organise his “ideas” in any sort of cogent way sort of takes the wind right out of his sails.
I’m sitting with [President Barack] Obama, and Leo [DiCaprio]‘s talking about the environment, and I’m talking about clothes, and everyone looks at me like, that’s not an important issue. But I remember going to school in fifth grade and wanting to have a cool outfit. I want to take away bullying.
I can only imagine what the atmosphere at the table must have been like. POTUS would be politely and graciously lending his erudite ear to Leo’s teachings about the environment, and Kanye bursts-in with an ill-timed, manic fashion sound byte. I’ll bet his “genius” really topped off the meal.
