Is Kanye really too good for Twitter?

Lame trend alert: celebrities claiming they've got better things to be doing than to be on the Internets.

As is the case with most trends, Kool Keith was up on this a good 10 years before it was all trendy. On one of those god-awful albums he put out back in the late '90s/early '00s, he rapped, "I'm not sitting behind no computer - I'm going to Bermuda!" And that was back when there was hardly shit to do on the Internets. Not to sound like someone's grandpa, but back in those days, you had to stroke it to tiny thumbnail images of naked women. Because it cost like $20 to view the full size version. And who had $20 back in 1999? If I did, I probably would have drunk myself to death.

But I don't want to let you guys in on more than you need to know about me...

These days, you hear this anti-Internets bullshit all the time on the Stern Show: Artie Lange claims he has no idea how to turn on a computer and check his email. Which I don't find hard to believe, since he's an older, lower class white person, and you see how many people still buy country music on CD. Stern himself recently joined Twitter, but he's yet to do anything worthwhile with it. As is the case with Kanye's blog, it's never clear who's really updating it. And it's mostly just a list of topics they're discussing on the show, as if anyone who'd follow Stern on Twitter wouldn't already know, or couldn't just check the Sirius site.

In the (more obviously) hip-hop world, you mostly hear this bullshit from some of the biggest artists. Rapper who struggle to move units, i.e. almost all of them, stay using Twitter. But Kanye West, who even managed to sell upwards of two million copies of the abortion that is 808s & Heartbreak, posted a rant on his blog the other day talking about how he's got better things to do than use Twitter. You can tell it was him, because the grammar was all fucked the fuck up. And in the excerpts from the interview in the new XXL, Eminem talks about how he never reads blogs, because he couldn't stand to read what people say about him.

Oh, really?

Now, keep in mind, I can think of a few things I might do, if I had the means to not have to spend so much time on the Internets. Namely, dropping loads on beautiful women. Arggh! But then what would I do for the other 23+ hours a day? Something tells me that, if I had enough money to where I didn't have to use the Internets again, if I didn't want to, I'd probably still spend a few hours a day online, looking at pr0n (which I'm sure I'd still enjoy), reading blogs, checking out new music, and what have you. Meanwhile, what are these guys doing that they don't have time to be online? Kanye West goes around and overpays for faggy clothes, and Eminem, if his new album is to be believed, pops Vicodin and strokes it to Hannah Montana. Which I may or may not have done this week as well. But that's neither here nor there.

The larger point I wanted to make, even though it seems like I don't have one, is that the idea that the Internets are filled with people who can be easily dismissed as "just some guy on the Internets" no longer holds any weight. These days, people who aren't on the Internets are in the extreme minority. And I'm not even sure if they're really not on the Internets. The only rappers I can believe don't have the Internets are G-Dep and Ras Kass, and even they're on Twitter. (Or are they?) It could be that guys like Eminem and Kanye stay online (you guys know my history with Kanye), they just want us to think they don't, because they don't like the idea that the TIs don't run shit online, like they do in the mainstream media. Which, oddly enough, is all the more reason for people to want to talk shit about them on Twitter.