The Apollo Theatre still has an executioner who will shoo you offstage in the middle of your act if it’s found wanting. It’s far from an original observation that primarily black venues are more demanding of technical excellence than primarily white ones. The single biggest piece that’s been brought up, over and over again, in the past few years? Black Excellence vs. There’s a lot of voices-lumped under names like “Black Twitter”-who have begun to consistently speak out to fill in the missing pieces from stories like the Kanye West Saga, to poke holes in pat narratives like “Kanye West is an egotist” or “Kanye West is a maniac.” Social media has changed the game a lot in the past six years.
Why the suddenly swelling ranks of volunteers to fight in defense of the West? (Sorry, I had to.) These stories have defended him as an important black American voice, and told white people to shut up about it already. Only a handful of critics tried to halfheartedly defend Kanye in 2009 in 2015 I’ve seen multiple nuanced thinkpieces about how he has a point. Back then, Pink bluntly called West “the biggest piece of shit in the world” and got a lot of virtual high-fives Garbage’s Shirley Manson tried to repeat this act in Beck's defense and got more of a mixed response. It’s never really about the last thing he did, it’s about the thing he did before-the (sigh) 2015 Grammygate incident-and whether that thing reminds you of something else he did before (the 2009 VMAgate incident), and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.Īnd yes, it’s hard to hold back commentary about someone who yanks the mic away at an awards show to contest the results, who makes pronouncements like “ I will go down as the voice of this generation,” who titles an album punning his name and “Jesus,” who compares making social change to fixing his wife’s pants.īut the tone has changed since 2009, when West grabbed the mic from Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs. So it was strange- though not surprising, for Internet junkies-that Kanye West came in for an avalanche of criticism for doing what was basically a competent, if flawed, music video that was as good or better than any other musical act that night.īut this is par for the course with the ever-rolling tide of Kanye West hot takes. There was a lot to criticize about the "Saturday Night Live" 40th anniversary celebration-Jerry Seinfeld’s #SorryNotSorry joshing around about "SNL’s" 40-year history of whiteness, cringeworthy reminders of the show’s tendency to run dubiously funny gags into the ground, and the mystifying continued relevance of Sarah Palin.
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