The old joke goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice, practice, practice!”
Ask Kanye West how you get to the VMAs, however, and he will probably tell you to stay home and enjoy some Cool Ranch Doritos.
In a typical move, the egomaniacal rapper skipped rehearsal for the MTV award show Sunday afternoon because “I’m Kanye West!”
In fact, that’s exactly how President West began his annual six-minute State of the Kardashian address onstage at Madison Square Garden, where his world-renowned self-obsession was on shameless full display.
“They tell me, ‘Don’t compare yourself to Steve Jobs, don’t compare yourself to Walt Disney,'” he said, clearly about to ignore the sage advice of the omnipresent They.
“My role models are artist-merchants!”
Sorry, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.: If you haven’t got merch to sell, there’s no room on Yeezus’ dance card for you.
‘There’s less than 10 [artist-merchants] that I can name in history: Truman, Ford, Hughes, Disney, Jobs, West.’
- Kanye West
“There’s less than 10 [artist-merchants] that I can name in history: Truman, Ford, Hughes, Disney, Jobs, West,” he said, equating himself with giants.
Of course, Kanye’s “Life of Pablo” and that flour-sack clothing line are surely as influential and praise-worthy as the iPod, “Fantasia,” the Model T and President Truman’s sensational line of skincare products.
West, riffing off-the-cuff like Trump on the stump, attempted to strike a more measured, humble note than his past onstage attacks. He called a beaming Chance the Rapper “the future” and said he wants Beyoncé to “win everything,” yet his narcissist tendencies still won out.
In a move of total tackiness, the vainglorious rapper connected the violence in Chicago to his “Famous” video beef with the absent Taylor Swift. “Last week, there was 22 people murdered in Chicago,” he said. “People come up to me and say, ‘Man, that’s right! Tell Taylor!'”
“I love all y’all,” he continued. And just when the audience expected Yeezus to come clean and acknowledge the triviality of his self-love and tiresome Twitter feuds, he pulled the spotlight squarely back to King Kanye.
“That’s why I called her!”
Some people never change. And Kanye only gets worse.
Check out some of Kanye’s most infamous rants: