President West

At 1:00 PM (PST) on Thursday, February 11th, a crowd began to file into Madison Square Garden to watch the grandiose reveal-turned-album-release-party of Kanye West’s Fallout-chic Yeezy Season 3 fashion line. The rest of the world rotated on. The few thousand people in the Garden, and the large handful that bared through the buffering of the Tidal’s live stream (it apparently worked fine at 240p — who said 90s nostalgia was dead?) had an, by all accounts, entertaining preview of an album that most certainly was scrapped in that form minutes after the floor was swept. Most of the universe outside freelance writers and teenagers able to skip 4th period English however, have responsibilites and stuff to handle post-lunch on a weekday. For the first time in a long time, I turned my phone off in the middle of the day.

Live-tweeting pop culture events is a phenomenon that used to be limited to one or two pessimists in my feed, cracking jokes like a witty friend at a party. Its since (by either my choices in who I follow or a shift in Twitter etiquette as a whole) become a overwhelming experience where the only cure is to disappear from the Internet until the quiet comes again. Without context, i.e. if you’re not sitting directly in front of a TV with your phone open on your lap, it’s an numbing, annoying spectacle that dominates the internet. Between the regular qualified candidates for tweetstorms like award shows and sports championships, the addition of election year debates has turned live-tweeting into a near daily blight.

Kanye hasn’t released an album in the midst of a presidential election since his debut — The College Dropout came out February 10th, 2004 (less than a month after the “Dean Scream”, which set the precedent for media coverage of politics in the 21st century). The landscape has changed decidedly from then, both in the way political campaigns are run, how an album release is expected to be, and how both those things are covered by the media. Pop album releases in the latter half of the 2010s are nothing if not the following: viral, shareable, surprising, and a containing a spectacle never before seen. Political campaigns must be: viral, sharable, meme-worthy, quotable, and controversial.

Last August, when Kanye accepted an award from Taylor Swift at the MTV VMAs, he ended his rambling, near-incomprehensible speech with a laser-focused punchline:

“And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”

It was hilarious, a perfect mic drop at the end of an awkward make-up with Swift and MTV after a handful of inane controversies. But almost immediately, Yeezy broke kayfabe. His wife, Kim Kardashian, said on Ellen that he was “serious” and was excited to redecorate the White House. Then, in an interview with Vanity Fair Kanye said he was “definitely” thinking of running, simultaneously endorsing Ben Carson, a man who the just days earlier proclaimed that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to be president.

A few months later, Donald Trump is still leading polls as the potential presidential nominee for the Republican Party. On the very same day Kanye declared “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” on Twitter, Trump called Ted Cruz a “pussy” at a rally in New Hampshire. Between the two, there is a shared understanding that the best way to build a following — to build a breathless audience — is to say the most outlandish garbage possible, backtracking only when it can provably drop poll numbers or album sales. 
It’s a joke, that much like Kanye’s presidential aspirations, has gone on for far too long.