My daughter Kaye has recently discovered Kanye West . . . nope, not in a particularly good light. She hasn’t really listened to much of his music as she’s pretty much the opposite of a fan of the genre (once in a while we hear a good example but for the most part she finds it discordant). We watched the long version of his recent Phoenix piece and while the costuming and sets were amazing, the music was too disjointed for her tastes. Not saying that she wouldn’t enjoy some of his work and in double fairness she found something interesting in the piece as she insisted on watching the entire video and it’s very long so there were some bits that she did indeed like. However, she did say she couldn’t understand why he makes so very very much more money in the music business than someone like S.J. Tucker whose music she adores (yes, she is a big fan of the Sooj).
We’ve been watching the Taylor Swift specials on her tour recently and so the Kanye connection is fresh in the mind.
Evidently, that connection is still fresh in everyone’s mind as the West got pissed when the Today show played a clip of the incident while asking West about it – segueing from the discussion of Bush and his comments about West’s negative remarks about him being a low point of his presidency.
Honestly, I never even considered Kanye’s interruption of Swift’s award being about race – positive or negative – I just thought it was about his passion for Beyonce’s work and his dismissal of Swift’s rather than having anything to do with the race of the players. I didn’t realize that some folks saw West’s defense of Beyonce as standing up to racism or that others saw his attack on Swift as showcasing his racism. I just thought he was being rude at an awards show because the person he wanted to win didn’t win and he felt the person who did win was undeserving. I saw it more as personal ego than anything else.
Well, after what he believed to be being ambushed, West has pulled out of the Black Friday concert for the Today show . . . possibly hurting his new CD sales potential, big time . . . and he’s tweeted about it. The Today show defends themselves by saying the sort of thing he’s accusing them of as an ambush is actually standard practice (which it is, although some might say ambush is standard practice too). Of course, West knew that they would ask about Swift since he knew they would ask about Bush . . . he had hired a media damage control consultant specifically to prep him for this interview and as that guy quit out of frustration, one can assume that West was given advice and chose to ignore it then lost his composure when he should have kept his kool.
West did tweet that while he was upset, he accepts the apology from the Today show folks . . . the one he expects them to make soon.
Since there is a LOT of money at stake for the concert appearance, I suspect West’s handlers will get him back on board and performing to sell that product and the Today show probably wants him back to do it too . . . it ain’t news, it’s entertainment so all will likely be forgiven . . . but . . . for a brief moment, Kanye West was doing a real life impression of Will Ferrell’s character from LAND OF THE LOST with a resounding “Matt Lauer can suck it!” (that’s a quote from the movie, folks).
See http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/thatsreallyweek/114176/nov-8-14-kanye-west-takes-on-today-in-latest-feud/ for more.
– Brian
