It has been five entire days—nearly a decade in blog years—but Taylor Swift still has yet to tweet about the incident at the VMAs.
She may be the only one: Twitter exploded seconds after it happened, and even Barack Obama has weighed in on the matter. His opinion of Kanye—the self-proclaimed “voice of this generation”—is probably in concert with the rest of ours.
“He’s a jackass,” our president told ABC reporters before his formal interview began.
A run-down for those who have been living in seclusion at Walden Pond: At the MTV Video Music Awards, auto-tune auteur Kanye West grabbed the microphone from the 19-year-old country music prodigy Taylor Swift—the best-selling artist with astoundingly platinum records and astoundingly platinum hair—after she went onstage to receive the award for best video by a female artist. Kanye’s rant has already gone from a shock to a YouTube meme to a blog headline to a print headline to ubiquitous to old.
“I’m gonna let you finish!” Kanye said to Taylor, before declaring: “But Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!”
The hip-hop mogul, who basically reinvented the term “braggadocio,” had picked on the squeaky-clean country singer (albeit the country singer who outsold every other artist in 2008, including Kanye), and instantly, a firestorm had erupted.
I’ll be the first to admit how trivial and inconsequential such a news bit can seem, but the story still has a hold on media outlets and social networking services.
Two of the sharpest minds at The New York Times—David Brooks and Gail Collins—took their sparring positions on the newspaper’s Web site Wednesday, using the “Swiftgate” saga as a jumping-off point for a discussion of broader national issues.
My fellow Bethesda, Md. resident David Brooks—who says he is “heavily invested in Ms. Swift’s welfare” and (rightly) praised “Love Story” as one of the greatest pop songs of the past few years—said he was “grievously affected” by Sunday night’s incident, and went on to discuss how it is undoubtedly a harbinger of the apocalypse, at least for “the republic.”
“Normally I reject declinism,” Brooks said. “But seeing Ms. Swift up on stage at the MTV awards, speechless and shocked, has quite obviously shaken me to my core.”
His segue from Kanye’s crucifixion of our sweet-voiced ingénue to hard-line policy issues seems a bit of a stretch, but the very invocation of the incident (and the obvious affection he feels toward Swift’s pitch-perfect pop songs) indicates that the collision of these icons of pop has created a miasma so captivating that it begs to be used as a platform for political symposia.
Collins infuses the Kanye-Taylor spat into a conversation about the almost-as-recent Joe Wilson-Obama spat (though she can’t match the genius of the YouTube video mashup, with Kanye’s voice heard disrupting the congressional chambers). She calls both of the verbal interruptions “impolite,” but reminds us that at least Joe Wilson prompted some right-wing nuts to parade through Washington asking for Obama’s “real” birth certificate. Kanye, on the other hand, has seen little to no support.
The reactions are still mounting. Former president Jimmy Carter went out of his way to call Kanye’s behavior “completely uncalled for” at his annual town hall meeting at Emory University. The Brooks-Collins chat has nearly 450 comments online. I even asked Duke’s one claim to hip-hop relevancy, Mike Posner, if he would weigh in on the matter—on Twitter, of course. But his tweet back to me was a bit short on details: “@NFreeman1234 no comment.”
I’ve read hundreds of news items about this “minor” incident, in publications as different as The Atlantic (“It just seems like at 32 you should be past upstaging people who are barely out of high school”) and US Weekly (“CHACE CRAWFORD GIVES TAYLOR SWIFT POST-VMA ‘PEP TALK’”). The story, even days later, still has its grip on disparate corners of the Internet.
The reason for the attention is not hard to grasp: Kanye’s antics are reliably entertaining, and Taylor is a victim with whom no one can help but sympathize.
Let me illustrate it this way: There is a world of difference between Kanye’s blog—which could pass for a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Caps Lock and Society” (“I HAVE A F—ING LIGHT SHOW DUMB ASS, IT’S NOT CALLED GLOW IN THE DARK FOR NO REASON”)—and Taylor Swift’s Twitter. Like her songs, her tweets are personal but universal, so charming she convinces you that the clichés are new again.
And it’s a shame her account is still silent, five days later.
Nathan Freeman is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.
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