Kanye West
Kanye West (born June 8, 1977) is an American rapper and record producer who used to work on records for Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Ludacris, and Janet Jackson. His four albums have received many awards including many Grammys.
West likes to sing as well as rap. The problem is, he can’t sing. Auto-Tune to the rescue! Auto-Tune is an audio processor created by Antares Audio Technologies, which uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise off-key inaccuracies and mistakes. R&B singer T-Pain used it a lot, for example.
South Park spoofed him in episoed 1305: Fishsticks.
Hurricane Katrina
On September 2, 2005, during a benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina relief (A Concert for Hurricane Relief), West spoke alongside actor/comedian Mike Myers. West went off script, saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
MTV Controversies
On November 2, 2006, when his “Touch the Sky” failed to win Best Video at the MTV Europe Music Awards, West went onto the stage as the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for “We Are Your Friends” and argued that he should have won the award instead.
On September 9, 2007, West suggested that his race had to do with his being overlooked for opening the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in favor of Britney Spears; he claimed, “Maybe my skin’s not right.”
The Taylor Swift/Beyonce Incident
On September 13, 2009, during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while Taylor Swift was accepting her award for Best Female Video, West went on stage and grabbed the microphone to proclaim that Beyoncé’s video for “Single Ladies”, nominated for the same award, was “one of the best videos of all time”. (When Beyoncé later won the award for Best Video of the Year for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”, she called Swift up on stage so that she could finish her acceptance speech.) West was criticized, even by President Obama, who called him a jackass.
The incident also caused an internet meme using the “let you finish” speech in other settings. West would later apologize (multiple times)
We Were Once A Fairytale
The Spike Jonze-directed short film We Were Once A Fairytale stars Kanye West and is pretty weird.
It involves odd things like vomiting pink flower petals and demon creatures living inside abdomens. Oh, and a drunk Kanye. It drags (the beginning is nothing more than a drunk Kanye embarrassing himself) until about the 7 minute mark, then it gets interesting.
Ah, a star confronts his demons. (or just that one demon)
