Kanye West Is Running Out of Platforms — and He Knows It
Kanye West is a public man in the age of Instagram. He doesn’t want to be on MTV, he’s not looking to be an MC on Jimmy Fallon, and he’s certainly not looking to tour. And yet he has a very powerful platform right now: the platform of being the most prominent West supporter in the world. We’re talking about Twitter, and the “power” the Twittersphere wields.
When West first emerged onto the Twitter scene, he didn’t have a lot of followers and he didn’t have a lot of followers because he didn’t have a lot of content. West has been running his mouth since his last albums debuted in early 2011, constantly bashing other rappers like Drake, 50 Cent, and Lupe Fiasco — which, as you can imagine, made him a regular target for other rappers.
But, like most people that are famous or rich (and I mean rich here, not just famous) they don’t need to be popular. They need a platform. West didn’t have one, yet the Twittersphere was still interested in what he had to say. The first tweet West posted had over 4,000 retweets, and he was on the rise, but the momentum stalled — and then started to fall.
In the weeks following his most recent “Power” album dropping, West was consistently getting into arguments with his fans (mostly women) about whether he was a “b***h.” He defended himself by saying that his albums aren’t a “faggot” album or a “rap album” — and that this is the way that hip-hop works. West does have a point. No artist today is a blank slate, and his albums aren’t rap albums or hip-hop albums — they’re albums that are made by someone who took years to curate them.
This argument (that West and Drake can’t really be considered “hip-hop”) is made so often that even Kanye seems to recognize it’s a tired old narrative. During the release of his newest album, “The Story of O.J.,” Kanye sat down for an interview with MTV and admitted that he was a “b***h” and that he was “a racist.” He also said he wanted to stop being the most popular rapper