"‘Are you OK mate?’ I tweeted
to Kanye West last night.
He’s not really my ‘mate’, I guess.
But I’ve met him a few times, and
get on very well with his wife Kim Kardashian.
The reason I asked such a simple public question was because
I follow him on Twitter and he appeared to have taken sudden and dramatic leave
of his senses.
It was the nearest thing to verbal
social media diarrhea that I’ve ever witnessed.
Tweet after tweet after tweet burst
out of his feed, the mood and tone of Kanye’s thought process swaying between
blind rage, sneering insult, and finally pure viciousness.
He slayed Khalifa for everything
from his music and fashion to his weight, wife and young son.
There was just one problem.
Kanye had got it all horribly wrong.
His ire was sparked by a tweet from
Khalifa which said: ‘Hit this kk and become yourself.’
Kanye, who dated Khalifa’s estranged
wife, the model Amber Rose, for two years, assumed this was a derogatory
reference to his own wife Kim.
It wasn’t.
It was a reference to cannabis.
More especially, Khalifa’s own strain
of cannabis, Khalifa Kush, which he has been very publicly marketing for some
time.
But in the very singular,
self-absorbed world of Kanye West, there is only one ‘kk’ that matters and it’s
Ms Kardashian.
This is not the first time Kanye’s
gone berserk, of course.
He’s an unpredictable, emotional, spontaneous maverick who often does and says things before his considerable brain has properly engaged. It’s what makes him one of the most compelling and engaging stars in the world, and I for one, greatly enjoy his talent and his erratic behaviour. But as I was chuckling away at this Twitter tantrum, he suddenly wrote something which made me stop laughing. It wasn’t the ‘you let a stripper trap you’ jibe about Amber Rose, distasteful though that was. She can look after herself as she made very clear by the eye-wateringly explicit tweet she fired back at Kanye last night concerning his alleged sexual proclivity. (Amber Rose filed for divorce from Khalifa in 2014 but it was never finalised and there have been numerous rumours recently that they are reconciled).
No, it was Kanye’s next tweet: ‘I know you mad every time you look at your child that this girl got you for 18 years.’ Soon followed by this: ‘You wouldn’t have a child if it wasn’t for me.’ And then this: ‘I own your child!!!!’ That child, Sebastian Taylor Thomaz, is two years old. I’ve no problem with a couple of famous rappers going after each other in public. But I have a big problem with one of them using an innocent two-year-old boy to do it. Especially when the perpetrator is himself a very protective father of two young children. Kanye was not, as some instantly and sensationally assumed, suggesting with the phrase ‘I own your child’ that he’s the boy’s father. He was sneering that if he hadn’t split from Amber Rose, then she wouldn’t be with Khalifa and there would be no child at all. But that perhaps deliberate ambiguity may be lost on many.
After 30 minutes of abuse spewing his way, Khalifa finally tweeted ‘KK is weed fool’ to Kanye. At which point there was a temporary cessation in hostilities, presumably as the dime slowly dropped all over Kanye’s gold jewellery-laden head. When he returned to Twitter, his tone was dramatically different. ‘I love Wiz,’ he declared. Something which wouldn’t have been immediately apparent from the apoplectic cyperspace onslaught he’d been waging against him just minutes before. ‘I love all my brothers, and all the people, and I love the world,’ added Kanye. ‘All I want is peace and positive energy.’ Riiigght. Again, not an immediately obvious mission statement from a man who had just tweeted, ‘Don’t ever ever ever come out the side of your mutherf***ing neck bro or bruh’ at his new great love. Kanye then announced he had deleted all his insulting tweets. ‘It’s all about positive energy, blessings blessings, positive energy blessings,’ he explained. ‘I’m happy that I now know that KK means weed…please excuse the confusion….’
Hmmm. Not so fast, Mr West. I can excuse almost all your excess. I even laughed my head off when you ambushed Taylor Swift on stage to ruin her big moment at the VMAs, not least because you were right that Beyoncé should have won Best Female Video that year. But I can’t just laugh off the way you dragged a little boy into your war with a love rival. Just as I loathe and detest parents who use their children as battering rams against each other in divorces, so I loathe and detest big stars doing the same to score cheap points in Twitter feuds. I’ve always thought that Kanye West is a pretty classy guy beneath all the bluster; a stupendously gifted musician, snappy dresser, brilliant entrepreneur, evocative speaker, incurably romantic husband and doting father. But by targeting young Sebastian in such a despicable manner, I lost a lot of respect for him. It was a pathetic, petty and woefully insensitive thing to do.
I hope Kanye wakes up today after a thoroughly disturbed sleep, reflects on what he did, and makes a full and sincere apology to that boy, and to his father Khalifa. He won’t want to; Kanye is about as big on apologies as Donald Trump. But it would help restore the damage that his indefensible comments have caused, not just in the moment but forever. Those deleted tweets have all been screen-shot for posterity, meaning that when he’s older Sebastian will inevitably read them and wonder what exactly the legendary Kanye West meant when he said he ‘owned’ him? Kanye, I know you genuinely believe you are the Muhammad Ali of the music business, Greatest of All Time.
Not least because you reminded us of this very fact in the middle of last night’s rant. But last night, I’m afraid the only title you won for yourself was a rather simpler one, comprised of two words ironically also beginning with the letters ‘KK’. King Klutz."
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