This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
And Finally Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #49: Kanye West v the media (but not Britney)
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 21 January 2011
Poor old Kanye, he just can’t do anything right, can he? Not even be nice to someone and poke fun at himself at the same time.
Last Friday, when Britney Spears’ ‘Hold It Against Me’ beat his collaboration with Jay-Z, ‘HAM’, to the top of the iTunes singles chart in the US, West tweeted: “Yo Britney, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you be number one, but me and Jay-Z’s single is one of the best songs of all time! LOL”.
I hope I’m not offending anyone when I say that any person who didn’t get that this was a play on his now legendary interruption of Taylor Swift’s MTV VMA acceptance speech in 2009 is a massive idiot. No? Right, good, everyone got that. I’mma let me finish.
Britney’s manager, Adam Leber responded to West, saying: “Thanks for ‘letting’ us be number one. Much appreciated”. The fact that he put inverted commas around “letting” does suggest that he wasn’t taking this in quite the jovial spirit it was intended, but I’m sure Adam Leber isn’t a massive idiot, so it’s probably just a grammatical tick that can be easily explained away.
Whether Kanye read Leber’s tweet as hostile, or even saw it amongst the bombardment of replies from massive idiots, isn’t clear, but he later tweeted: “On a serious note, I’m truly happy for … Britney Spears… No hate in 2011!”
So, there you have it. Kanye West made a joke, some massive idiots got the wrong end of the stick, Kanye turned the stick around for the idiots and everyone was happy. Well, everyone except Kanye, because over the weekend he discovered that various websites were reporting that he’d engaged in a “Twitter war” with Britney.
The claim that this was war originally came from UsMagazine.com, it seems. Though faced with the same jovial quotes I’ve just republished for you above, the website had to add in a portion of West’s 2007 MTV VMA outburst following Spears’ terrible performance of ‘Gimme More’ to make it all seem a bit more war-y.
Upon discovering the same report republished on MSNBC, Kanye actually did get angry. This is good news because Kanye West is much funnier when he’s angry and not telling jokes. He loaded up Twitter once again and ranted: “I thought LOL signified a joke… I didn’t get the ‘2011 LOL doesn’t signify a joke any more’ memo… LOL or something else, I guess”.
He continued: “Just saw that MSNBC said I tried to start a Twitter war with Britney. This shit takes the air out my lungs sometimes from blogs to news reports… enough already! All I do is focus on my work … There’s a new lie everyday… a new media spin … I’m one of the most considerate people in real life. Maybe over considerate. Over caring. Overly real”.
Yes, Kanye, that’s your problem, you’re too bloody real for your own good. Oh, but he’s not finished: “There is no astronaut training for celebrity… even though this whole life is so outer space! I was actually surprised that a record as raw as ‘HAM’ could make it to number two on iTunes. How can you ‘let’ someone be number one?! That was the whole joke! I know intelligent people know this, so bear with me. When I said the comment about Britney I was giving her props for being number one, not dissing her at all! But stop making it seem that my aim is to hurt or down people! That’s just not my style!”
Forgetting that brevity is the soul of Twitter, he went on: “As pop stars we’re all in this shit together! We on the inside of the TV! If the media wants to make a story, just say I have atrocious spelling and terrible grammar. If you don’t give em a story, they just make one up. I’m just trying to focus and stay creative! Keep bringing dope shit to the world!”
He didn’t actually finish there, but let’s pretend he did. I think we’ve got all the salient points. If not, here they are again in summary:
1) Kanye West is a big joker
2) Kanye West doesn’t like the media
3) Kanye West gets annoyed too easily
4) Kanye West is too real
5) Kanye West wrote a song called HAM
6) Why aren’t we making jokes about that?
7) It contains the line “I’m about to go ham”
8) “I’m about to go ham”, for crying out loud
9) That is fucking hilarious
10) But it doesn’t tie in as well with the title of this column as Lady Gaga’s beef carpaccio dress
