What If Kanye West Complained and No One Listened?

It will be no surprise that my lady and I did not watch the Grammy Award ceremony on TV this past Sunday night.  I pretty much do not know who any of the performers are, I certainly don't know any of the songs or albums that were nominated, and I'm not much of a fan of award shows where an industry pats itself on the back for merely existing.  Meh.

However, the networks and the major websites have an obligation to feed the insatiable appetite of their audiences.  So for one news cycle of maybe 37 hours and 15 minutes, they talked incessantly about what happened at the awards ceremony.  This is typically confined to which celebrity wore the most (or least) outrageous attire on the Red Carpet; which celebrity wore the most wonderful (or worst) attire on the Red Carpet; which celebrity showed the most (or least) of their anatomy on the Red Carpet.  You know, that sort of thing.

Rarely is there much flap about who actually, you know, won the awards; certainly not as compared to the Who Wore What (and, among the cognoscenti, Who Wore Whom) topics.  There is, however, occasional flap about someone doing something or saying something on stage.

Now, let's understand that this is a classic FTM situation, and we follow the money by seeing who has something to sell.  And that someone appears more often than average to be Kanye West, who is apparently some kind of performer, married to the equally-talented Kim Kardashian.  A few years ago, West was apparently incensed because the performer Taylor Swift had won some kind of award at some kind of awards show that West thought would have been better presented to someone else.  He interrupted the presentation, then figuratively (or maybe literally) grabbed the mic, and sounded off in the middle of the ceremony about how the award should have gone to whomever his favorite was.

On Sunday, good old West was at it again.  According to the next day's screaming headlines, some one-named performer I was not familiar with won a Grammy in some category.  As it was being presented, West ran partially up on stage as if to parody his own rudeness of the past, stopped in mid-offense and returned to his seat.  The Actual Winner stopped and repeatedly called him back up, presumably knowing that giving West the mic again would make for better drama, but to no avail.

However, after it was all over, to no one's surprise, someone did a brief interview with West and his equally-talented wife.  West complained that Beyoncé Knowles, rather than the actual winner, should have gotten that particular Grammy.  His actual words were "... if the Grammys want real artists [sic] to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us [sic]. We ain't gonna play with them no more [sic]. Beck [apparently the name of the winner] needs to respect artistry and he should have given his award to Beyoncé, and at this point, we [sic] tired of it."

He didn't exactly explain who "they" are (the 2nd and 3rd "sic") nor who "we" are (the 2nd, 3rd and 4th "sic") and I really don't know.  My guess is that by "we" he either meant black people (e.g., he and Miss Knowles), since the two winners he didn't like were white, or "real artists", by which, well, I have no idea what he meant.  In fact, I'm having a hard time caring enough to finish this piece.

But yes, I have a point.

After his illiterate rant above, West followed with ... "We not playing [sic] with them anymore.  And by the way, I got my wife, I got my daughter and I got my clothing line (italics mine).

And there, friends, is where the old FTM rule made itself intensely clear.  Kanye West couldn't possibly care less who wins the Grammy for, well, whatever they didn't give the Grammy award to the person whom he says should have gotten the Grammy award.  No, this literary genius and his equally-talented wife have a clothing line, and by making all too sure that the topic of his clothing line showed up in the classless rant during and after the ceremony, we would theoretically remember his clothing line.

So here goes.  Kanye West, whoever you are, let me suggest a better solution.  I put a link to your clothing line right here, so that people with great taste in essay-writing will know exactly where to go to find your clothing line, and can spare you having to embarrass yourself and your equally-talented wife by doing stupid things at awards ceremonies.

There.  Everyone can now find your products.  Just sit back and enjoy the show from now on.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton