JackRiddler wrote:.
Okay, c2w? convinces me the other way!
Which is easy, since I have no idea who this Taylor whoever is, could not identify a track by the Kanye fellow,* and never watched one solitary minute of the MTV awards in my life, I doubt even inadvertantly. I didn't see this utterly legendary and all-important incident last week, and although I've read about it, I still haven't clicked on the youtubes.
So really, in saying anything about this stuff, about which I do not careexcept for my usual hope that it turns out to be a narrative of capitalist marketing run amok that I can cite as an example while sneering at the suckers who actually follow such crap, I am totally talking out my ass!
Which doesn't bother me, because I'm only playing around in a discussion thread about media-hype bullshit, with people I do actually like (the members of RI, that is).
All that being said: the prima facie matter of an agent shared by Kanye and $.50 having earlier admitted that he orchestrated a bogus conflict between them (thus: it doesn't matter what an agent's usual function is, because in this case he's already participated in the "creative" side of marketing, and may have a drive to do so again), followed by another super-hyped conflict the next year between Kanye and another one of this same agent's clients.
I'm not sure where this, from your earlier post, originated, but....
If you remember, a year ago there was a beef between 50 Cent and Kanye West right before their albums dropped. 50 Cent said he would retire if Kanye sold more albums then him because Kanye’s music is garbage. Later both artists admitted the “beef” was staged to promote their album releases.
So Kanye and Wirtschafter have faked a controversy in the past to help promote another artist who he represents.
...first of all, I don't actually see Wirtschafter admitting that he was involved in faking a prior controversy. I see someone, I don't know whom, drawing that inference.
Second of all, even if it were an admission rather than an assumption, it wouldn't be an admission of Wirtschafter and Kanye having faked a controversy in the past to help promote another artist whom he represents, for the following reasons:
(1) His partner in the putative admitted controversy-faking wasn't Kanye, it was 50 Cent.
(2) It wasn't really a controversy. As in (note irony quote marks in hed):
Kanye West outselling 50 Cent in 'feud'
By Todd Martens, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 12, 2007
It looks like 50 Cent might be retiring at the ripe old age of 32.
The Queens, N.Y., rapper announced a few weeks ago that if his new album, "Curtis," did not outsell Kanye West's new collection, "Graduation," during their first week in stores that he would call it quits as a solo recording artist.
Well, both albums hit the shelves Tuesday, and early results suggest that 50's sales aren't as big as his words.
"If 50 is true to his word, we won't have any more 50 Cent albums," Carl Mello, a director of buying at the East Coast music retail chain Newbury Comics said.
Mello said "Graduation" was outselling "Curtis" by 200 copies at the 27-store chain. headquartered in Brighton, Mass. "If you look at 50's whole brand, with all the G-Unit people, they haven't done anything that's excited people in a long time."
At Amoeba Music in Hollywood, store music buyer Kristen Frederick said: "For every 50 Cent CD we sell, we sell two Kanyes."
That can't be pleasant news for 50 Cent, who touched off quite a tempest last month when he told the website SOHH.com: "If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on Sept. 11, I'll no longer write music. I'll write music and work with my other artists, but I won't put out any more solo albums."
50 Cent has been locked in feuds through the years, but even he has been candid that this time he was merely stirring the pot. In an interview with KROQ-FM (106.7), for instance, he chuckled when asked if there was any bitterness behind his words.
The stunt has certainly caught the attention of the media and landed 50 Cent and West on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which has them posed like glowering heavyweights at a boxing press conference.
50 Cent has history on his side. West, 30, has strong critical acclaim and robust sales, but his numbers have lagged behind 50 Cent's. West's 2005 album, "Late Registration," sold more than 900,000 copies in its debut week, while 50 Cent's "The Massacre" topped 1.4 million its first week in stores.
It looks as if neither of the hip-hop heroes will come close to their past retail fireworks, a situationdriven by the realities of CD sales in the diffused marketplace of 2007.
An Amazon.com spokeswoman said the site will be tracking sales for each album via a pie chart on its music page all week. At midday Tuesday, West was outpacing 50 Cent more than 2 to 1.(more similar blather at link
(3) Even as a transparent, for-lulz-only PR stunt non-controversy, it was much too mild really to be described as a beef. Which is traditionally a bitter personal dispute following upon an explicit or implicit threat that's serious enough to provokes pretty much everybody in the hip-hop community to stand up and say whose back they got, leading to either (a) several years of all-star underground mix-tape name-calling that eventually grows wearisome or professionally inconvenient or both, thus ending in a truce and probably a studio collaboration; or (b) a violent turf war with gang connotations that calls for heavily armed round-the-clock security on both sides, that might end in a hale of bullets, or might end in a shoving match in a nightclub, or might simply play out in private on a long-term basis without ever really ending because it's serious criminal shit and therefore not the kind of thing one really advertises.
In any event, it's not exactly like Fitty's threat to retire if Kanye outsold him could really be construed as any kind of threat to Kanye. So it wasn't a fucking beef, real or fraudulent. It would, however, be fair to describe it as a transparently mild and for-lulz-only faux diss.
(4) As far as I can tell, there's not only no reason at all to think that Wirtschafter has faked a non-controversy with Kanye before and no very clear reason to think that he faked a non-controversy with Fifty Cent before, there's not even a particularly convincing reason to think that
anybody conspired with anybody else to fake that particular non-controversy before the fact. It strikes me as equally likely that Fifty Cent just happened to be talking fake-y, self-aggrandizing shit during an interview, which is totally in line with his persona and known tendencies, thereby spontaneously creating a proximate occasion for first-rate professional spinners of media to do their jobs. Everybody knew that
The Graduate was going to blow up before it came out. Or anyway, I knew it, and I wasn't making any effort to stay
au courant with such things at the time. So it seems pretty safe to assume that professional publicists and hip-hop stars weren't exactly unaware of it. And if they were indeed professionals, they'd also be aware of how incredibly high a bar you'd have to clear to get either artist the cover of
Rolling Stone on merit alone for either of those records, since Fifty Cent's wasn't particularly newsworthy although he was a well-known quantity from a magazine editor's perspective (in summary, something pretty close to: "Fitty = sexy connection to Eminem, + sexy backstory of having been shot nine times, + had a ginormous crossover hit on a prior release < still a whole lot less than the famously pathetic newsstand numbers for issues with a black male face on the cover, absent the kind of moronic propping I understand, like maybe boxing gloves and another artist whose not yet face-recognizable enough to hold the cover on his own or something like that. God, I am so smart.") And Kanye's wouldn't have been regarded as news from a magazine editor's perspective, more or less because that's what it was. (In summary, something like, " "Gold-Digger" = huge crossover sales < It isn't any part of my job to look forward, I'm only interested in the well-worn ruts of the past + black men on the cover certainly don't move magazines any better when they're not yet household names than when they are.") And....You're just going to have to take my word for it that while there really aren't any professional spinners on the planet earth who are good enough to use their familarity with that mindset to devise and execute a scripted stunt from scratch that was designed to exploit it, there are maybe six of them who are more than capable of playing the junk hand that life deals them all the way to the jackpot on a pretty regular basis. Every single one of whom is a powerhouse publicist and not an agent. Because those are powerhouse-publicist gifts, not agent gifts.
Why would Kanye being so prosperous and all that go along with the hairbrained scheme that ends up making him look like an asshole? Because he said yes to the proposal, which sounded like fun on paper?
No. He's hostile to the media, as well as to most people outside of his very immediate circle. And except for the Golden Globes for a few years in the mid-to-late '90s, televised awards shows aren't really anybody's idea of fun, owing to their being unbelievable fucking tedious to sit through in person. At best. Sometimes actively punishing. I mean, think about how dull they are on television, for pity's sake. Then try imagining that you can't move around or talk on the telephone, or forget where the cameras are and how you have to hold your head in order to photograph well from that angle, and that on top of all that and more, you don't have anything to look at or anything to fucking do at all during the commercial breaks except sit in your moderately comfortable seat worrying about your make-up. It would not have sounded like fun to him on paper, in sky-writing, or in any other medium. It would have sounded like work. Because that's what it would have been, and that's what it is.
This is speculation about motive, in advance of establishing whether it was a fix, and therefore irrelevant. I doubt that it will hurt his sales or the future course of his career. The way these things usually go, in another 2 years it will be forgotten to most and become an aspect of his endearing bad-boy legend to his followers. All publicity short of a criminal conviction is probably good.
Well. He's certainly better positioned to live it down because he immediately moved to put out the fire by causing it to blaze along the path least harmful to him until it burnt itself out, which was totally the right way to go. And my hat's still off to whoever knew that well enough to force him to sacrifice his dignity, his privacy, and the memory of his still comparatively recently deceased mother, who raised him alone and was his closest friend and most trusted professional advisor in order to contain the damage while also -- conveniently enough-- boosting Jay fucking Leno's overnights. Which is actually a strong indicator that his long-term career strategy calls for a much larger general fan-base than he has right now. I wouldn't really expect his sales to be very significantly affected by anything that happened on the VMAs one way or other just right at the moment. His core demo doesn't really give a shit about those. Or, for that matter, about either Taylor Swift or whatever the meme-chattering legions of the internet might or might not be saying this week. Not that you'd really need that or any other particular very strong indicator to know that he's got Denzel-sized ambitions. That's pretty clearly been the general direction in which he was planning to head since his second record. There isn't really any way to manufacture that kind of popularity, it's a crap shoot. And nobody, not even Ari Emmanuel, is really crazy enough to think that he or she is a big enough swinging dick to bring it about by sheer ruthless killerdom and the power of will alone. That one's really the people's choice at the end of the day. And if they don't choose it, they just don't, there's no point in trying to force them to change their minds. That's just throwing good money after bad.
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* Should I be embarrassed? In my pathetic aging whiteboy's self-defense, allow me to claim I have a pretty good handle on rap music generally, if we limit that to the decade or so between Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" and Ice-T's conversion to hard rock with the release of "Bodycount," the attack on him by Bush, and his subsequent audition for "Law and Order." This Kanye, he is a rap musician, yes?
.
No, I don't see why you should be embarrassed at all. It's more like inside-baseball stuff than it is like hipster stuff. Particularly on the PR crisis control recognition. I mean, that's just an objectively esoteric field of practice, by definition. I mean, it wouldn't be very effective crisis control if it looked like it was just PR. And it might not actually involve any PR, in some circumstances. The first example of which that always springs to my mind being, for some reason, Eddie Murphy. (L-O-L-A.)
As I recall, Elliot Mintz just made him shut the fuck up for, like, something close to two or three years after he was moved by the goodness of his heart to give a lift to a tranny hooker while out buying magazines miles from his home at five in the morning, or whatever the really-not-doing-it briefly proffered explanation for that incident actually was. Which I don't remember in any very great detail, because no PR crisis control was in fact the best PR crisis control in that particular case. Which totally went away as a result almost to the point of never having happened, for all practical purposes. They're very evil-hearted people, those publicists, but the ones who know what evil shit they're doing really do know what evil shit they're doing. And you've kind of gotta grudgingly respect that, imo.
Yes, he is a rap musician. He's not really my cup of tea, personally. But I'd say that he is nevertheless a very real talent in his own little Kanye-West-ish way. I don't really know, but I doubt that he really does have very many peers who don't at least have some basic unenthusiastic respect for both his musicianship and his work ethic, no matter what they think of what he does with them. If he has any at all. I also doubt that he really has very many peers who don't know either that he's got issues that happen to manifest themselves in a totally egotistical-jerk-like form or, alternatively, that he's simply an egotistical jerk. Whichever of those two things he actually is. I myself have neither any idea nor any opinion on the subject, other than that the number of realistic options doesn't appear to be a whole lot greater than two.
I actually really liked one of the songs on the first record, although I can't at the moment remember which one or what I it was that I really liked about it. I do remember that I really liked it, though, fwiw.
Also, fwiw, at this point, I'd be willing to go on Jay Leno and pimp out my most intimate and closely held secrets before I'd change my mind for anything less than contemporaneous documentation of the staging plans when they were still on the drawing board. So I'm going all in. It was not staged. And that's: Was. Not.
Staged.
Are you convinced yet?
