Kanye’s been relatively quiet lately, seemingly letting publications champion
The College Dropout’s 10-year anniversary and touring the nation.
But, of course, the silence was bound to be broken, and at a tour
stop at Penn State, Kanye went all Kanye on stage. Between the hooks for
“Testify” and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” Ye ranted and raved about hard
work, and two of his more recent nemeses:
“Ten years of this shit! If I go to a radio interview, shut the f*ck up!
Shut the f*ck up! If you on your talk show at night time, showing a
picture of me walking with my girlfriend… shut the f*ck up! Ten years!
Weeks in the studio! Every night, 5 AM. Working hard on that sh*t. This
ain’t no joke… we think about Shakespeare, we think about Beethoven.
What can ya’ll play on your way to school, on your way to work?”
Then he started calling out names:
“What the f*ck you do? They gon’ say I’m screaming, so
lemme say it in a very nice, calm way so that you know I’m not upset:
what the f*ck did you do? … What have you done with the past 10 years of
your motherf*cking life? Charlamagne, Sway? F*ck you did?”
And the crowd goes wild.
Look, we’ve all
been here before with ‘Ye, Sway and Charlamagne;
the content of Ye’s message is no different than it was when Sway
didn’t have the answers. But this time, there’s no way for the two
journalists to defend themselves. They probably received the message
more or less the same way that we did: through tweets, texts and/or
emails.
Couple this with the way that Drake was totally willing to bark back at
Rolling Stone for “misquoting” him,
and we would appear to have a generation of rap stars who think that
journalism equates to free, positive publicity. Sorry, guys, but that’s
not how this works.
Just because you’ve dropped some gems over the years doesn’t mean you
can choose how you’re received by the media. You make a video like
“Bound 2,” people are going to snicker from the sidelines. Ditto with any contradictory statement that Drake’s made over the years.
Dahh, well. More than any other genre, rap is about the personalities
and storylines at work behind the music. That can be frustrating as
hell sometimes. But we’re lying to ourselves if we don’t admit that
Kanye just made our Friday a bit more interesting.
