Uh oh they're mad at me.
Kanye West fans and MAGA chuds. The most useless cross-section of Americans.
On Friday I was preparing myself some Bagel Bites when a thought popped into my brain. In my lifetime I’ve seen Kanye West transform from the most provocative mainstream artist to a boring millionaire, scraping the bottom of the cultural barrel for relevance. I don’t know if it’s Kanye himself who has gone off the deep end or whether the world has changed around him and his failure to keep up has rendered him irrelevant. Maybe a bit of both, but regardless, a rapper in a MAGA hat is the most desperate image I can possibly imagine. I condensed this thought into a semi-coherent tweet and put it forth into the world, then I went back to scalding my mouth on freshly microwaved mozzarella:
When I checked back on Twitter a while later, the cross-section of MAGA zombies and Kanye fans had found the tweet and—this may surprise you—they disagreed with me! The tweet bounced around and the overwhelming influx of shitty responses rendered Twitter virtually unusable for the day.
A lot of it was your standard 4Chan Pepe/Joker fare. A lot of it was tired memespeak personally attacking me, shit like “hoes mad” and “blue check cuck” or whatever. A lot of it was anti-Semitic which is weird because I’m not Jewish. I got the same dumb Family Guy/50 Cent/Sonic gifs over and over from users named @JAKE0101989801 and @BILL29828110. I’ve seen more anime avatars than I care to ever see again in my lifetime. But overall, it amounted to a refreshing swim through the cesspool of bile that festers under the internet.
Normally my timeline is just people arguing about things like the best Japandroids song (“Younger Us”), but occasionally I do get these peeks into the seedy underbelly of the world wide web, like the river of pink slime that runs under NYC in Ghostbusters 2. It’s always so boringly predictable.
First, you get people asking “uhhh who tf are you?” and “why are you verified?” (For the record, my Twitter account was verified because The General from the auto insurance commercials is my father. Show some respect for our brave troops.)
Then you get “but Dan, you have to sEparAtE ArT fRoM tHe ArTiSt.” Right, but in the case of Kanye West, there is no art anymore. It’s just antics. It’s just him being pals with Trump, buddying up with every dark money dumbshit in a Brooks Brothers for Boys suit, and tweeting Bill Cosby apologist sentiments. All that’s left this time around was a Gospel record.
(Side note to self: Pitch a sketch to SNL that goes like this:
[OPEN ON GAME SHOW SET]
ANNOUNCER: “It’s time to play… Art! From! Artist!”
KENAN THOMPSON: Welcome to Art From Artist, the game show where contestants see if they can separate art from artists to win cash and prizes.
SHIA LABEOUF DOING AWFUL MIDWESTERN ACCENT: Oh golly let’s start with R Kelly for $400, don’tchaknow.
OK Dan this is a good start, take a 3-hour nap and finish the rest later. Maybe work in a Kevin Spacey lightning round?)
Then you get the “you hate that Kanye is a free thinker, you want him to think exactly like you” types. I had about ten thousand people telling me how butthurt I am that an artist would have “different political opinions” than me. Nah, sorry. When someone chooses to side with an administration that has demonized people for their mere existence, that’s not a difference of political opinions. That’s you openly supporting the rise of fascism, and there should be ZERO tolerance for that. “BuT ThAt mAkEs *YoU* tHe InToLerAnT oNe.” Nah, sorry again. Any person, famous or otherwise, wearing the official hat of bigotry should expect to be met with resistance. If that makes me intolerant, wonderful. I don’t care. I have no interest in tolerating bigots.
Ultimately, though, this new Kanye West album is its own hilarious punishment. I truly can’t think of anything funnier than Kanye diehards force-feeding themselves a GOSPEL RECORD to prove how devoted they are to him. Just a bunch of Ohio State frat dudes named Brad, sitting in their dorms shoveling Bible verse after Bible verse into their ears, wearing $1,300 sneakers that look like microwaved Peeps, and saying, “Oh, uh.... hell yeah, this slaps! This is extremely my shi—I mean my stuff. I’d rather go to church than have sex in the prime of my life, for sure. Epic Jesus bop, sir.”
So congrats, Kanye fans, on your journey into the fun and exciting world of Christianity. And thanks for the bounty of replies on Twitter! All your messages calling me a gay faggoted retard have shown me the loving power of CHRIST! It’s funny—I remember ten years ago, Kanye called himself “the voice of a generation,” and I guess he is. This generation is just monumentally stupid.
So aaaanyway, I thought that’d be the end of my foray into Trump/hip-hop twitter until two days later when I saw a video of a YG concert where he pulled a dude on stage, told him to say “Fuck Donald Trump” into the microphone, and when the dude refused, he tossed him off stage. LOL good. I wish every single Trump supporter could be individually humiliated in public by artists they admire like this. Every TV show, movie, and video game should begin with the main character pulling a Trump supporter’s pants down while the rest of the cast points and laughs at them.
This prompted me to Have Another Thought and I tweeted out the following:
This one went much, much more viral and brought out even more dumbshit opinions, chief among them being that this kid (funny how it’s always a “kid” when it’s a white dude!) should be allowed to enjoy a concert he bought a ticket to and not have to “play politics.” Again, this is not a matter of difference of political opinion. YG asked him to stand against the man who has mainlined white supremacy into America and the Vanilla Ice lookin’ motherfucker pled the fifth. So he was promptly told to get daaaa fuk out. Simple as that. I’m sure the dude will have a young conservative YouTube show called some shit like “Free-Think Fam” on the Talking Points network in no time.
But the most puzzling part of this is: Why would you go see YG, an artist whose most famous song is called “Fuck Donald Trump,” and be conflicted in this situation? That’s like Andrew WK pulling you up on stage and asking how you feel about partying and you saying, “Hmmm I’m not sure lemme get back to you re: the whole partying good vs. bad situation.”
But it was even more frustrating that the YG fan was a white dude, who gets the luxury of abstaining from “playing politics.” He gets to enjoy the art made by minorities while also refusing to stand against an administration committed to dehumanizing them. Or, as one person in my replies put it:
OK, so THEN I really thought that’d be the end of the conversation about when it’s OK and not OK to publicly shame someone, but then this morning I awoke to see that the two braindead dumbshits who host MSNBC’s Morning Joe actually DEFENDED Donald Trump after he was booed by a stadium of people at the World Series last night a.k.a the only cool thing that has happened in sports. They called the crowd’s chants of “lock him up!” “sickening” and “unAmerican.”
These are TV hosts who make an extremely good living talking about the daily atrocities and crimes committed by this President. Then the man steps into a public space, everyone tells him to fuck off (which is fairly generous, considering), and these morning show morons think it’s somehow wrong?
"We are Americans and we do not do that. We do not want the world hearing us chant 'Lock him up' to this president or to any president.” — Joe Scarborough
Yeah, we wouldn’t want the world knowing that our citizens stand against the actions of our bigoted president. It’d be much better if other countries assumed all Americans support our unintelligible racist leader and we got our food spit on whenever we traveled internationally.
Truly and sincerely, fuck Joe Scarborough and Mika Whateverherlastnameis. This desperate clinging to a bygone fantasy era of bipartisan civility is only going to strengthen the right. Say what you will about those fuckers, but the reason they’re effective is that they are united in a single belief: Hatred. Blunt sloganeering is the only language Donald Trump understands, and it should be used against him at every chance, without a shred of remorse.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of TV hosts sucking major ass, fuck SNL’s Michael Che for taking the premise of my aforementioned joke about Kanye becoming a grandma and churning it into whatever bewilderingly transphobic dogshit comedy this is:
I wouldn't be too upset if kanye burned the roof of his mouth by way of eating a bagel bite