I don't know if you knew this or not, but Kanye West wrote a "book." I put "book" in sarcastic, douchey, Internet quotes because I don't know if something is technically a book if it's 52 occasionally blank pages with gems like "Get use to getting used!" taking up full pages. (As a quick sidebar to people who publish crappy, poorly-written books, I'd like to point out that my book, Holla Atta Bitch: The Gentleman's Guide to Snaggin' Skanky Blonde Hoodrats is still shockingly without a publisher. I await your fat bag of money with a dollar sign.)

Now, as we all know, Kanye isn't a stranger to out-of-the-ordinary decisions. There was that indecipherable

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rant from a while back, and his inexplicable decision to stop making award-winning rap albums in favor of a shitty, auto-tune-saturated sonic disaster. Kanye does weird stuff.

The thing is, I thought a lot of Kanye's strange, quirky behavior was all a part of his act. His brat-sent-to-bed-without-dessert reactions to Grammy snubs, his bizarre videos, the fact that he blogs in ALL CAPS; I assumed it was all his "bit," you know? He clearly wants to go down in history as some kind of unpredictable, eccentric genius and, hey, he probably could've gotten away with it. The history of pop music is littered with odd, eccentric lunatics that are now considered geniuses, and Kanye just wanted to be one of them. If he can convince people that he's got Prince-levels of eccentricity, more power to him.

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Zzzzapp! Zzzzapp!

But now that I'm seeing this ridiculous book of what he perceives to be Confucius-esque witticisms, I'm not so sure. It's not enough that he's written a crappy book--he's gone on record as saying that he's a "proud non-reader" who doesn't see the value in books. Now, I'm not an accomplished author or anything (until Holla Atta Bitch goes platinum or whatever it is that books do), but I think the first rule of book-selling is "Don't tell your book-buying audience that reading books is stupid and worthless."

Which leads me to my concern: What if Kanye isn't an eccentric genius and, worse, isn't even trying to feign eccentricity? What if Kanye didn't spout off a bunch of quirky, polarizing diatribes because he wanted to go down in history as a creative genius, but because he is, in fact, a complete fucking moron? The question we have to ask, then, is "What if Kanye West is retarded?" and everything Kanye's ever said and done takes on an entirely different context when you view it through this new lens.