I didn’t think I’d live to see a more repellent piece of ‘performance
art’ than Shia LaBeouf’s #IAMSORRY stunt where he invited fans to do
what they liked to him then cried rape when a woman took him at his
word.
I was wrong.
Kanye West’s new music video ‘Famous’ is worse. Far worse.
It features him and his wife Kim Kardashian sprawled naked on a giant bed with a bunch of other naked celebrities.
These include alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby;
woman-beater Chris Brown lying next to Rihanna, the woman he savagely
beat; and rapper Ray J who made the notorious sex tape with Kanye’s wife
Kim Kardashian, lying next to his former co-star.
Alongside them
are Donald Trump, George W Bush, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Taylor
Swift, Kanye’s ex lover Amber Rose and Caitlyn Jenner,
Or rather
it’s not actually them but high-tech waxwork models, so realistic that
you can barely tell the difference.Some, chief suspects being Kanye and
Kim themselves, may be genuinely posing, we don’t know yet.
Frankly, who cares?
The
whole thing is so disgusting it made me want to vomit, especially as
the leering camera slowly moves across each famous face and body,
pausing over various parts of their anatomies.
Actress Lena Dunham branded the video ‘sickening’, and ‘one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory.’
She also said it was emblematic of ‘rape culture.’
In a ferocious post, she wrote:
“Let’s break it down: at the same time Brock Turner ([former Stanford
University student, convicted of sexual assault] is getting off with a
light tap for raping an unconscious woman and photographing her breasts
for a group chat, as assaults are Periscoped across the web and girls
commit suicide after being exposed in ways they never imagined ... While
Bill Cosby’s crimes are still being uncovered and understood as traumas
for the women he assaulted but also massive bruises to our national
consciousness ... Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies
of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a
rager? It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.’
I heartily concur.
I
don’t give a damn what kind of sexual depravity Kanye and Kim get up to
behind closed doors, that’s their business.But I do give a damn when
they drag their twisted fantasies into the public domain like this
purely to make money and promote Brand Kimye.
Imagine how poor Taylor Swift feels?
This
is a talented young 25-year-old woman with a hard-earned wholesome
reputation who’s already been cruelly belittled by Kanye’s lyric in the
song: ‘I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that
b**ch famous.’Now she has to put up with him faking a naked waxwork
dummy of her lying next to his nude torso.
This is abuse, pure
and simple; an older man exposing a younger woman to public sexual
humiliation.Taylor’s said to be ‘hurt and angry’ by the video, and who
can blame her?If it was my daughter Kanye was violating in this
disgraceful way, I’d be round his house now with the L.A.P.D.
(Perhaps Taylor’s new boyfriend Tom Hiddleston will have his own way of dealing with such a revolting slur?)
As the furore raged, Vincent Desiderio, the visual artist whose
work inspired this debacle, described the video as ‘a feat of magic.’
He
explained: ‘What was demonstrated was the power of the artistic
imagination to transcend categorical expectations, and the fluidity of
the transfer of codes deeply embedded within the apparatus of our
preferred mediums.’
What a load of utter, incomprehensible twaddle.
It’s not art at all, it’s just a click-baiting piece of crude-cynical marketing.
The creator, of course, has got exactly the reaction he hoped: the whole world’s agog with gossip about his so-called ‘art’.
So, congratulations, Kanye.
We’re all talking about you again.
And
you’ll love that, given you’re the living, breathing embodiment of
Oscar Wilde’s maxim ‘If there’s one thing worse than being talked about,
it is not being talked about.’
But this time, most of us are talking about you in undisguised disgust.
Your Famous video is a shockingly tacky, hideously distasteful, darkly sinister porn movie, nothing more and nothing less.
Shame on you for making it and shame on your wife for so enthusiastically endorsing it.
‘She’s talented at being beautiful’, you recently claimed about Kim.
Only none of this is ‘beautiful’. It’s ugly; very, very ugly.
And it makes yet further mockery of Kim’s claims to be some sort of feminist icon.
As
with her pathetic topless bird-flipping selfies, this video actually
serves the complete opposite purpose, portraying women as vulnerable
pieces of meat for the delectation of the slathering public.
Lena
Dunham summed it up perfectly by saying: ‘I don’t have a hip cool
reaction, because seeing a woman I love like Taylor Swift (f**k that one
hurt to look at, I couldn’t look), a woman I admire like Rihanna or
Anna [Wintour], reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special
effects guy in the Valley, it makes me feel sad and unsafe and worried
for the teenage girls who watch this and may not understand that grainy
roving camera as the stuff of snuff films.'
Exactly.
Kanye West has been desperately begging on Twitter, ‘Can someone sue me already?’
Yes, they can and I hope they will.
Starting with Taylor Swift.
That
might finally make him and his smirking sidekick wife grow up and put
some basic common decency before their increasingly ravenous desire for
fame and cash.
