What will Kanye be known for? Music or Scandal?
In our current media landscape, consistency and predictability are factors that are rare to come by. It seems everyday that I check the news, something that should be on the Onion has snaked its way into our unfettered reality. Despite the ever-changing news that we experience on a day to day, one thing has not changed. Celebrities do dumb things, and us non-famous consumers really love to read about them. Whether it be the Adam Levine cheating scandal, or something more classic like… anything Michael Jackson did. A celebrity that isn’t at all unfamiliar with scandals is Kanye West. Whether it’s an announcement for a campaign for presidency, or the whole Pete Davidson thing, Kanye loves to make a scene. All of those other scandals pale in comparison to his recent one, as it seems like he’s decided to make it a mission to spew the bile that is antisemitism from his massive platform. With all of these in mind, I want to see whether Kanye’s scandals or his music have garnered more attention. I will be using page revisions and page views to visualize this.
First off, I wanted to look at page revisions. This may seem like a statistic that doesn’t fit when looking at the amount of attention that Kanye’s actions have garnered, and while page views are a much more clear metric for attention, I think that page edits still fit for a different reason. Wikipedia pages require editing when something monumental happens with the person, such as death, or newfound success, or new scandal. When these events happen, the more attention they garner, the more people there are trying to edit the page of the individual involved in the event. For example, the two days with the most revisions on Kanye’s wikipedia page are September 30th, 2005, which was the day of Kanye’s infamous “imma let you finish” takeover of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs. There were 427 revisions that day. The day with the second most revision was October 31st 2021, which was the day that Kanye held his “Sunday Service” event, which was the release of new music that was live streamed, which had 325 revisions. So in a general sense, out of the two largest revision events on Kanye’s Wikipedia page, the scandal wins out.
Before we move on to page views, I think it’s worth looking at the third and fourth highest revision counts to see if the trend of scandals beating out music continues. The third highest amount of revision was when Ye tweeted that he was making an album with Kid Cudi, which hit 316 revisions. The fourth most revisions in a day was on March 31st 2007, with 309 revisions, which seems to be about the Kanye Hurricane Katrina controversy. So there seems to be a pattern in these revisions, alternating between music release and controversy.
Moving on to page views, I will also be looking at the days on which the most people looked at Kanye’s Wikipedia page. The day with the most views was July 5th 2015, which was the day that Kanye announced he was going to run for president. Once again, this is an example of Kanye getting heaps for attention for something that’s not music. The 2nd most viewership was on October 26th 2022, and this day is smack dab in the middle of the recent antisemitism tirade that Kanye is currently on, specifically the day that he was escorted out of Sketchers headquarters. In fact, the top eight (8!) days with the most viewership are about scandals, including Kanye changing his name legally to Ye, a twitter tirade at Wiz Khalifa, a visit to Trump, etc.
The reason behind these viewership discrepancies seems pretty clear to me. The people who care about new Ye music are Ye fans. The people who care about the drama that Ye is causing are anyone who sees the headline. As sad as it may be, people love to watch a car crash, and Ye has been a popular one to watch recently. As for what he will be remembered for, I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, but it will probably be his music. If the frequency of his controversies show us anything, it’s that people forget things incredibly quickly. In the midst of his worst controversy now, it will be very interesting to see if this goes away like all the others.
