It is hard to take this Kanye West episode seriously as it involvesA) The VMA’s
B) Taylor Swift
Stuff like this happens every year at the VMA’s just to grab headlines. Past VMA's featuring a slovenly Britney Spears performance, a Tommy Lee and Kid Rock fist fight, and Li'l Kim fresh out of prison still clad in her orange jumpsuit hardly make the VMA's seem like a forum for civility.
Also, Kanye West is prone to say things he should not. This is well documented. The man calls the former leader of the free world a racist and hardly gets half the facebook status attention he gets now after saying Swift's video was not quite as good as Beyonce's. This is who Kanye West is and this why we love him. If Kanye West didn't have such an overinflated ego and weren't perpetually making bad life decisions then what would his songs be about? Shopping at K-Mart instead of Louis Vuitton? Meeting a nice woman and building a swingset so that all the Li'l Weezys he plans to raise have a place to run around? Nobody wants "Jesus Walks" to be an actual Christian rap song. Kanye West is so appealing because he is such a caricature of the rapper persona. He is the embodiment of all of our selfish instincts and reminds us that maybe we are fairly responsible people after all.
No matter how you feel about the song, I think most people would agree that "Put A Ring On It" was a better video. If you saw the thing happen Beyonce looked downright pleased to have Kanye call her out until she realized that everyone was booing and THEN she started acting like it was some sort of travesty. And after seeing Taylor Swift’s live performance, cooing intimately in a subway as if her song about an unrequited crush was actually a truly emotionally jarring tale of heartache, it seemed like she needed to be taken down a peg anyways.
Let’s get over Kanye West interrupting award ceremonies and get back to what’s really important: interrupting health care reform town hall meetings.
