How Kanye West Broke the Internets

Did you know that Kanye West likes this chair? Or that his shoes are Dries? Or that he thinks you should keep good friends around? What about that he needs a flight to Brazil as soon as possible? How about that Skal means 'toast' in Swedish?

This collection of random-synapse-firing-manifest-in-text are extracted from Kanye West’s newly established Twitter feed. They all came within a 12 hour time frame, some only seconds after the other, and are only a small sample of his general activity. What’s most surprising here, though, is that it took so long for this union to develop.

Twitter is a platform for people who like to see their imaginary audiences come to life. Kanye West is a person whose imaginary audience is so endless, so grandeur, that platinum records, arenas filled with fans, and the mishap-hungry media outlets aren’t enough to sate his desire to be paid attention to. So, he turns to the only other place where people are willing to listen- all day long – to his shameless flaunting and hardly insightful commentary on, well, nothing.

I’m not preaching—I have a twitter too. And, if I really didn’t like it, I could just stop following him. What is interesting here, though, is how Kanye’s twitter feed so definitively closes the verdict of whether or not Kanye is an act. For some time, Kanye held an almost Andy Kaufman-like position in the eyes of the media. How can someone be so insightful and eloquent in one moment and then so brash and shallow in the next? Did he really write his blog post in all caps? Did he really just say the President hates black people? Did he really just rip a trophy from a 90-pound girl?

Kanye West is a creature of impulse. And our impulses follow our egos in a vicious cycle until one of them is checked against the other. His impulsivity probably has a lot to do with what makes him so popular (it definitely has a lot to do with what makes him hated). There is a certain intuition at play when Kanye West makes music, and its his impulsivity that tells him when to pull the trigger on a song, when to let it go, and when to make it better. It’s this same impulsiveness, coupled with a desire to be heard and an odd lack of self-awareness present only in his character and not his music, that makes Kanye West Twitter’s new darling. So sort like everything else with Kanye, when he tells us that suits are an expensive addiction, we have to just think of his music and say, ‘Whatever.’

--Igor German