Kanye's Beautiful, Dark Twittered Fantasy
Kanye West established his credibility as a hip-hop producer, making other people's music sound better. Then West and the limelight met, and the rest is history. Having appointed himself as a kind of cultural vigilante in previous years by calling out President George W. Bush's neglect of tens of thousands of black people stranded by Hurricane Katrina and by disrupting Taylor Swift's award acceptance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, social media offered West a platform to keep himself at the center of the national conversation in 2010. The same emotional range that has been invaluable to his music has made West, on Twitter, Facebook and his blog, a guaranteed source of entertainment and media commentary. Some of his most memorable tweets include "I'm ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone... it's like hoodies" and "Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on." So successful is West's Twitter account that it spawned a second account, with the name Kanyewestnews, while the pairing of his tweets with cartoons from the New Yorker became a viral sensation. While it's hard to read the strategy behind his Twitter campaign, it's clearly done him no harm. West's latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was released on Nov. 22 to rave reviews.