The night Kanye West almost died

Who else saw, last night, that RIP Kanye West was a trending topic on Twitter, and checked TMZ to see if it was really true?

I fell victim to this hoax, when I got home from the BGM. The first thing I do when I go online is check Twitter, to see what's going on in the world. Even before I check a real news site, like CNN or whatever. I figure, if it's important enough, it'll be a trending topic. Otherwise, I'll find about it later on, when I'm digging through Google Reader, looking for things I might be able to write about and what have you.

Seeing RIP Kanye West as the #1 topic on Twitter was a trip, since one of the main uses of Twitter is to find out when someone famous (or in many cases, marginally famous) has died. The last several times I've found out someone famous died, it's been on Twitter. Finding out Michael Jackson bought the farm this summer (and then immediately goofing on it, natch) was like the modern day equivalent of finding out, during Monday Night Football, that John Lennon had been killed, back in 1980.

Alas, I consulted TMZ, and I didn't see anything about it, and so I figured it couldn't be true. Oddly enough, I didn't even bother to check any other sites, before I cracked open some Yellow Tail and went about my business. No Oliver Stone. It just goes to show TMZ's status as a news organization these days. If I'd consulted Google News, the search engine that indexes a shedload of other news sites, I might have seen where a number of sites apparently fell for this hoax. I saw just now where Fox News was running an RIP Kanye West headline. I might have been reaching for a bottle of J. Roget, rather than Yellow Tail, even though I don't have a bottle of J. Roget handy. I might have to rectify this, the next time I'm in a grocery store.

They say the success of the hoax may have also been fueled in part by the controversy re: some video he put up on his site the other day and then mysteriously pulled. What kind of dumbass puts something up on their site and then pulls it down, as if people won't realize it's been censored. Um, never mind. Anyway, the video in question was another short film he did with Spike Jonze, director of Where the Wild Things Are. (Do I need to see that?) I never did get around to watching it myself, even though I probably should have. Spike Jonze also directed that video for "Flashing Lights" with Rita G, the Internet hoo-er with the improbably perfect natural rack. If you want to see something, try to find video of her appearance on the Stern show. I believe this was before he went to Sirius, but I know it's aired, uncensored, on Howard TV. Maybe someone has uploaded it on one of these pr0n tube sites.

You'll recall that there was another "Flashing Lights" video that was damn near as awesome, if not quite as... erm, jiggly. In it, some modeling chick sleeps all day, then goes out to a club, gets wasted, tries to walk home and ends up getting rape-raped. (If only she'd driven!) I remember writing about it here, at the time. I speculated that the model in the video may have been a surrogate for his fiance, Whatever Her Name Was, whom he'd recently broken up with, and whom he'd go on to write the album 808s & Heartbreak about. A while later, I searched for this version of the "Flashing Lights" video, to make sure such a video really existed (and to relive the magic), and I couldn't find it. And I'm taking the fact that I couldn't as proof that it really was a violent rape fantasy involving his ex, and someone told it probably wasn't a good idea for him to have that out there.

Similarly, I'm assuming that this new Spike Jonze video had to be pulled because he didn't want people to get the wrong idea. I read, in a story on some news site about the RIP Kanye hoax, that it includes what could construed as a scene of him committing suicide: Kanye is in this club, stumbling around drunk, like he was at the MTV Awards, and one of his songs comes on. He announces to the crowd that it's his song, but no one seems to give a shit. (Must have been something off 808s & Heartbreak.) Then he has sex with a woman (really?), and vomits. (Because it was a woman, natch.) Then he stabs himself in the stomach, Elliott Smith-style, and pulls out a rat, which then kills itself with its own knife.

Which brings up a number of questions. First of all: The fuck? Second of all, was this created before or after his little stunt at the VMAs? I'm thinking it was probably before, since Jonze has been busy the past few weeks with promo for Where the Wild Things Are. Wonder Bros spent a lot of money on that movie - which is a kids movie, lest we forget. They can't have its director off somewhere directing Kanye Wests weird, violent pr0n fantasies. (Not to pass judgment on another man's weird, violent pr0n fantasies.) Maybe Kanye realized what a douche he was, and the direction his life was headed, and was inspired to make this film. But then his life actually did start to imitate this art, with the incident at the VMAs. And who knows, maybe he really did try to kill himself, or at least contemplate it, and that's why he had to go on time out.

At any rate, I doubt this hoax would have been nearly as successful, if it didn't seem at least somewhat plausible.