It might be only natural that, as I prepare to enter Clemson again in the fall, my thoughts turn back a little to 2006, when I started my undergrad career as a guy pursuing an English degree for some damn reason (I hope I have a little more specific reason to pursue a master's, mostly "I hate customer service jobs and would love to avoid having to return to one anytime soon"). Back then, Facebook was for college kids only (you had to prove you were enrolled in a college that accepted having the site on its computers. My, how things have changed), and when I logged in for the first time sometime in the spring of 2006, after sending out random "friend requests" to people I barely knew from all my classes, I started looking at the groups. I am a born joiner, and I enjoyed scrolling through the list of groups about God-Knows-What (Britney Spears was kind of a trainwreck at that point, so a lot of the groups were about her being a shitty parent or something). But the ones that stuck out were groups about gold diggers. Because you know they ain't messing with no broke...
Kanye West is a bit of a joke nowadays, at least in the circles I run in (note: I don't really run in too many circles, mostly keeping in touch with friends online and making pithy comments on their pages), but back then he kinda lived up to the hype. I remember first hearing "Jesus Walks" and thinking it was awesome, and then "Gold Digger" blew up. Fast forward nine years later, and West is married to an honest-to-God gold digger, Kim "I'm famous because of a sex tape" Kardashian. Bet he didn't see that coming!
I recently read Come Together: John Lennon In His Time, about (well) John Lennon, specifically about how he used his Beatles fame to promote causes that he believed in, especially in the politically divisive early 1970s (Nixon tried to run him out of the country, on the recommendation of segregationist and "secret black child-fathering" senator Strom Thurmond and noted cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover, because Lennon was viewed as "corrupting" the youth of America). John Lennon and Yoko Ono turned their lives into performance art, most famously during their "bed-in for peace" campaigns when they invited the world's press to their honeymoon suite and then talked about the need for an end to the Vietnam War (journalists went because they thought "John and Yoko in bed" meant all kinds of things that it didn't, at least not while they were around to film it). Whatever else you can say about the Lennons, theirs was a marriage based on mutual love and a shared enthusiasm for causes that tried to make the world a better place.
If anyone can find a cause that Kim and Kanye are passionate about besides self-promotion, they are either a genius or fooling themselves. They are the John and Yoko of our time, however, in that they're annoyingly omnipresent thanks to social media (like...Facebook). They have a child together (who I think is a fake, or at least I hope so: I can't imagine either parent taking time away from looking at themselves in the mirror long enough to be there for their "child"). They got "married," because that's what Kim does. They will probably get a divorce in time for the next season of that stupid show that is on the E! Network (and which I know about because my sister watches it and clips of it figure prominently on The Soup). South Park took down Kanye quite a bit with the "Fish Dicks" episode, but it seems like they're unassailable and impervious to shame. Which is a shame, actually.
Because Kanye West (goddammit) is a pretty good musician. He *is* an artist, as this and quite a few of his hits can attest (except for the one about "since OJ had on Isotoner," that was just terrible). He has an impressive body of work without having to surrender his essence to the clutches of a reality-TV whore who quite honestly has nothing going on behind those hollow, soulless eyes. Oh Kanye, why?
I'm not going to shed too many tears over "Kimye," however. Those two arrogant fuckers deserve each other. And for Kanye's sake, I hope he really did holler "we want pre-nup." Because in two or three years, he's going to be looking for any loophole he can find to avoid paying child support. I bet the damn kid ain't even his, but he won't know that until North West's eighteenth birthday. You lie down with the Devil (or Kim Kardashian), don't be surprised when you get up with fleas, STDs, and several pounds lighter in the wallet area. You should've listened to your own damn song, you arrogant bastard...
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