Keeping Up with Kanye (and Gambino, and everyone else)

— and the rest of the 24-hour news cycle in the music industry

Photo credit to Ahmad Ardity on Pixabay

It’s a sobering feeling to wake up in an Airbnb in Atlanta to a blown-up Twitter feed screaming “anyone who isn’t talking about this isn’t keeping up with the times.”

Boy, oh, boy was my article on Kanye’s recent outbursts going well.

All of the usual suspects were present. It had embedded tweets referencing other times that Kanye stirred up social media to draw attention to his latest project, album, or 30-minute Kubrick-inspired short film. It sported a discussion on how the media fallout after the fabled 2009 VMAs resembled Yeezy’s recent media coverage.

It even had connections linking back to the broader concept of being a music nerd in a ‘post music’ marketing world wherein the projects themselves are tertiary to the brand-building media spectacles that accompany them.

Trust me, you would’ve loved it.

— but then Donald Glover dropped ‘This is America’ under his R&B, hip-hop, screenwriter alias Childish Gambino and pop culture pivoted off of Kanye hard.

In the wake of Donald’s bewitching 4-minute dissertation on the current cultural zeitgeist, the world quickly moved on from any of the (deliberately) flagrant statements Kanye made on slavery. No longer were we enthralled with the TMZ footage of Ye shouting down into the bullpen of TMZ staffers blaming each and every one of them for his decision to get liposuction.

It’s almost like Gambino threw Kanye a lifeline — or, more accurately, he wrenched the pop culture camera off of an imploding artist with a victim complex and onto one with something poignant to say. (By the way, if I ever get over the sucker punch that took the ‘new’ out of what I had to say on the news, I’ll explain why Kanye was probably pissed about this, not relieved.)

The news media wasn’t about to take that laying down, either.

Complex, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Consequence of Sound all were quick on the buzzer about what Donald Glover via Childish Gambino had to tell us decidedly less-than-woke Americans.

The only outlet who didn’t drop a think piece 30 seconds after Donald did was (hilariously, might I add) TMZ. Maybe they were as frustrated about the cultural left turn as I was. After all, if an essayist talks about a rapper’s tweetstorm and no one is around to hear it (because they’re too busy watching ‘This Is America’ for a 30th time) does it make a sound?

Therein lies the crux of my conundrum. To be a successful culture writer, or a music writer, or any other kind of writer in the blogosphere, you find yourself adopting the principles of successful silicon valley startups: pivot often and quickly, and challenge expectations. At the end of the day, not all of us are cut out to be an Anthony Fantano, a music industry Youtuber, who drops everything to weigh in on a recent development in the music industry. Hell, he even snuck in vlog about Kanye’s TMZ meltdown before Gambino stole the spotlight.

Central to this struggle is the question: if it isn’t topical, is it worth saying?

My Twitter feed is still slammed with article after retweet after meme of ‘This is America.’ Next week, we might be talking about Cardi B’s sociopolitical commentary instead. Maybe David Byrne of Talking Heads fame will drop an entire album of Janelle Monae covers. At that point, the only coverage of Glover’s breathtaking project will be articles entitled something like “Donald Glover Tried to Warn Us — And Nobody Listened.”

Then, it will be up to the journalists and editorialists of the world to flock to the new hot topic. That topic, supplanting whatever was in the spotlight before, will be picked apart and analyzed. Some writers will choose to tell us how to think about it. Some will tell us what this lyric means, or that imagery represents.

Or, like me, they will be writing about missing the starting gun on the race to virality.