It’s not news to anyone who knows of Kanye West that he has a history of being a douche. Shit, we have a whole list of reasons why he’s a douche, and that was written before he took to the stage of the VMAs to ruin Taylor Swift‘s acceptance speech for her Video of the Year award. Now, one year later, Kanye is again the subject of media criticism—this time for apologizing for that very incident, in a lengthy stream of 140-character Twitter updates. And I think it kind of sucks. I’m finding myself on the verge of sitting in front of my webcam, mascara streaking down my face, imploring you all to “LEAVE KANYE ALONE!”
I admit, I have a tendency to bristle at public apologies of this nature as insincere attempts to regain public favor. I’ve also noted the fact that Kanye recently came out with a new album. At the same time, the stream of tweets so genuinely displayed a dude with a giant ego problem trying really hard to work on his ego problem, that I have to believe it’s mostly from the heart. If it was meant purely as a PR stunt to gain back public favor, it certainly misfired, anyway. All I see are tweets and blogs about what a douche he is…for apologizing. You people are harsh, and I say that as someone paid to say really mean things about outfits just because famous people happen to be wearing them.
Was the apology awkward and unintentionally funny in parts? Oh, hell yeah. In fact, if there’s a job that would drive me to heavy drinking, I think it’d be “publicist for Kanye West.” There’s the all-caps blog rants, the brash public acts like interrupting telethons to announce that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, or to inform the MTV viewing/voting populus that Beyonce deserved to win Video of the Year. The guy cannot shut his mouth, so giving him a Twitter account is kind of like giving Mexican food to someone with Crohn’s disease: there’s gonna be some explosive diarrhea.
But imagine for a second the most embarrassing, asshole thing you ever did while drunk. Now imagine that you did it on live television in front of millions of viewers. Your drunken gaffe became the butt of every joke on every late night variety show for months. It was a meme, for chrissakes. Can you imagine how awkward your apologies might be when addressing such an incident? Remember, you didn’t just embarrass yourself. You embarrassed yourself and a couple other people on national television, then had that incident repeated over and over on every broadcast and cable channel for weeks. Imagine how much you’d feel the need to apologize, not just to the people you immediately offended/hurt/embarrassed, but to every other person who saw you behave like such an ass.
Imagine your character and worth were judged by most of the public based on this one incident, and no matter how much remorse you expressed, no one would let you live it down. Wouldn’t that suck?
Kanye may be a douche, but I think he’s trying really hard not to be, which is more than I can say for most douches. Give the dude a break.
About Snarky Amber
