Has the Kanye backlash gone too far?

Leave it to Mos Def to cause me to question my whole perspective on shit.

Yeah, his rap career has been in a more or less steady state of decline since the 1990s, which is almost two decades ago at this point, and yeah he got pwned by Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. Lest we forget, Mos Def is the one who invented the term tall Israeli. Or, if you want to be technical about it, Mos Def called Lyor Cohen a tall Israeli, and I pioneered the use of the term as a more general catchall for the people who really run the music business.

I was over at Vlad TV just now, seeing if they'd posted any more videos like this one, and I caught this clip where Mos is coming to the defense of Kanye. He was doing a show in Baltimore, and he mentioned that the next song he was about to do was produced by Kanye (like Rhymefest does before he does " Brand New"), and the crowd erupted in boos. It was kinda amazing to see, having taken shots at Kanye since before it was all trendy. And it made me wonder if this was fallout from the Taylor Swift incident, or if this was just a group of salty underground heads who can't stand Kanye, i.e. my kinda niggas. No fishsticks. Kanye's whole thing used to be that he was the only rapper obsessed with material bullshit who still appealed to the underground crowd. Remember, he was the only ninja with a Benz and a backpack?

Mos Def was like, "Hold on a sec! It's not like he slapped the bitch. All he did was voice an opinion that you were at home agreeing with. It may not have been at the most appropriate time, but it's not like he didn't apologize." Keep in mind, I'm paraphrasing here from memory (my mind is sharper than a motherfucker, despite my lifestyle), but that's more or less what he said verbatim. He really did call her a bitch. Then he went on to compare the outrage over Kanye's stunt at the VMAs to the relative lack of outrage over Joe Wilson calling Obama a liar during the joint session of Congress, and that preacher who threatened to kill Obama, which I know they played on Stern a couple of weeks ago. Though for what it's worth. Though for what it's worth, I'm sure a huge crowd of black people would be unruly to say the least, if Joe Wilson for whatever reason decided to appear in front of a huge crowd of black people. I don't even like Obama, and I'd slap the shit out of Joe Wilson on GP.

Mos Def might have a point. I can't cosign the part about Beyonce having a better video than Taylor Swift, because I don't like women with huge thighs, and I don't like Beyonce's music in general, and I've yet to see the video for "Single Ladies." Plus, I heard one of the dancers in it is a tranny - or might be, like that track athlete from South Africa. And Taylor Swift was probably still in grade school when I was in college, when my knowledge of country music was at its peak. (Fun fact: Country videos are full of smokin' hot, Midwestern-looking women.) But Mos Def was right about the fact that Kanye didn't slap Taylor Swift or anything. He thought Beyonce got robbed, and he went onstage and said it. Isn't that what hip-hop should be about, expressing your opinion, even if it upsets the tall Israelis? Why should I be against Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift any more than I'd be against KRS-One interrupting Kanye himself, except for the fact that the latter could never happen?

I'd almost jump to Kanye's defense myself, except that I don't like the way he went around apologizing. He apologized to Taylor Swift once on his blog, then he did it again, then she went on TV to say he hadn't apologized to her in person, so he called her up and apologized. And I don't know if I can respect a man who apologizes to a woman three times and he never even had sex with her. Once is bad enough. If two apologies don't work, you might as well just slap her. She obviously thinks you're some sort of monster - go ahead and give her a good reason to. No but really, Kanye could have played the aftermath of this incident better than he did. Especially since there's growing evidence that MTV may have put him up to it. I heard on the Stern show the other day that the VMAs had their biggest audience since 2002, despite the recession. I finally got around to catching one of the umpteen reruns the other day, and I'm not sure if MTV went back and did some editing, but the camera angle seems to perfect for this to be a genuine, ODB-style stage crashing. And I read the other day on Drunken Stepfather that Kanye and Taylor Swift have the same agent.

You see how pissed off people are about this shit. Anytime you've got mofos at a Mos Def concert pissed about what happened to a teenage country singer, you know this shit is widespread. This might be one of those crimes white people can't let go. Like OJ. They buried his ass under the jail, just for trying to get his shit back. They wouldn't even let him make any money off that book about how he would have killed Ron and Nicole, if he did, in which case he wouldn't have needed to get his shit back in the first place. See, that's how they do: they make it so that you can't make any money, then they bust you for stealing. In this case, some shit that already belonged to you. Kanye's got a tour this fall with Lady Gaga, and I'm already hearing stories about dates being canceled. If MTV really did fuck him over like that, he needs to let the world know. It might save him from ending up in jail or some shit. You know he has a tendency to flip out on the stalkerazzi. He got off easy last time, but that was before he interrupted a white woman while she was trying to talk.