Whenever Kanye causes a stir in the media I’m one of the first to side eye and question his bad decisions but his performance at the Brit Awards has to be applauded. This is coming from someone who didn’t watch the show. But I watched this video:
West was called upon to perform last minute dot com at the Brits because Rihanna couldn’t make it. He premiered his track All Day from his as-yet-untitled seventh album. His performance has been trilled about in the popular media because ITV had to mute most of the song because he said the n-word 39 times.
That’s right, 39 times! And I’m not even mad at him, even though I hate that word with a passion. Right now I’m rating him hard because he came to London and slyly side eyed the whole award show by bringing on a long list of Grimes top performers to back him up.
The Brits typically don’t have black folks amongst their nominees so to see upwards of 30 black guys on stage was phenomenal and no thanks to the organisers of course.
It’s like Kanye was saying: “Okay you got me here last minute and you have all these guys in your own backyard to choose from. I’m gonna represent and show you something.”
And show them he did. Grime artists like Novelist, Skepta, Jammer, Krept & Konan and Stormzy were up on stage with Kanye. Artists that the Brits don’t acknowledge were up there on stage rolling deep. If Kanye hadn’t enlisted these guys Lionel Ritchie would have been the only other black performer on stage.
It was cool but it shouldn’t take a US artist to promote our own UK talent.
The Brits should be ashamed but I doubt they’ll do any better next year. And why should they when they have firmly established themselves as lacking in diversity all these years. And we have the MOBOs anyway right? And of course there’s always Red Bull doing it for the scene.
So thank you Kanye for slapping them in the face.
I’m not going to address the tweets about Kanye promoting gang culture because people suck and one person can’t change that and Twitter say’s it better than I can.
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