Kanye West: Analyzing a Pop Culture Icon March 2017 | страница 28

POP CULTURE
BY LAURA RUIZ & DANIEL NÚÑEZ
TAYLOR SWIFT
DRAMA
The controversy between Kanye West and Tay-
lor Swift started when she won the MTV Music
Award for the Best Female Video category and
West decided to interrupt her speech to talk on
Beyoncé’s behalf (2009). His behavior became a
trending topic on social media. Even the presi-
dent of the United States voiced his opinion on
the incident, and called West a “jackass”. After
all the social pressure, he finally did apologize
to Swift, but the damage was already done: he
became the guy who had ruined “poor Taylor
Swift’s” moment.
It took some time for his public persona to
bounce up from this incident. Taking up a fight
with pop’s golden girl Swift, had put him in a
difficult place. Plus, his sales had been dropping
for quite some time by then. However, he did
something unexpected: he went after Swift again
and claimed he was actually helping her, making
her more marketable and boosting up her sales.
Their encounters seemed to have died off by
2016, but then “Famous” came by, and disrupt-
ed the apparent truce. The whole argument dealt
with authorization issues: did he or did he not
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have her permission to write about her on the
song’s lyrics. At this point, Kardashian felt the
need to put a stop to it and to the damage it was
doing to him, but mainly, to the couple’s brand-
ing. Her response was quick and had a huge im-
pact, an example of how well the Kardashians
know how to extinguish potential fires.
If the first time attacking “an innocent” Swift,
made West an unlikeable person, the second,
in turn, made Swift look fake. Likeability is an
important factor on celebrities’ influence, but
even more important than that, is their alleged
honesty, and West has high grades on the latter.
He did however felt the need to change his tar-
get, even when they never shared audiences, the
people who responded to him arguing for social
causes would probably not have taken well on
his trolling of a young girl –even if she is a priv-
ileged, white, rich one-.
After the incident, he went through an image
rehab courtesy of the Kardashians, based es-
pecially on humanizing him, a factor that had
been absent from his marketing strategy since
the beginning. West’s latest appearances on the
reality show and his alleged mental breakdown
have given him a break of his “genius” self, and
a chance to reinvent himself –yet again- as an
actual human being. At least the world can
thank West for not letting life get dull.