Beyond stale

It's times like these that I'm glad I don't have time to watch television. I had heard of the Kanye West incident once in the past week but had no idea what happened till I read through the previous blog posts. It's interesting how racism suddenly becomes "flavor of the week" for the media due to incidents like the Belleville School Bus beating and the Kanye West debacle. Seriously, things like these are childishly handled by the media and some of the posters on Youtube, just take a look at the inflammatory remarks made there about the news coverage of the bus beating (Chad's post has the link I'm referring to).

Kanye's remarks are exceptionally irritating, since he's being rewarded for his "look at me!" behavior at the awards show in the form of increased publicity and invites to talk shows. Although interestingly enough, even our President doesn't believe what Kanye did was appropriate. The fact that the Associated Press asked Obama such a question kind of makes me wonder if its related to my flavor of the week theory in the beginning of my post.

To tie some of all this media nonsense into class, the Kanye West remarks seem to be some sort of self-appropriation, for lack of a better phrase. He said something out of line and most likely was NOT racially motivated, then spins the backlash into heightened publicity despite the fact that his remark may have been merely a playful joke- his name is all over the news, radio and magazines as a result. Even Swift is supposedly getting extra attention out of all this.

The only thing I can do is sigh and move on.