How Kanye West Became a Verb
Everyone remembers the 2009 VMA Awards as they would remember an extremely bad birthday party. Kanye West’s brazen and aggressive interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech, which merited national attention, inspired an insurmountable amount of memes, and ruined his already iffy reputation. Taylor Swift even “swifted” Kanye by writing a song about the incident (yes, she too is regarded as a verb in her own right.) In short, to “Kanye” is a pop culture reference that is widely alluded to by all.
Just last month, Beyoncé lost “Album of the Year” at the Grammy’s to Beck (who?) and Kanye West decided it would be neat if he recreated his stunt by “jokingly” starting up the stage to interrupt Beck’s speech and then cheekily retreading. His attempt at a ‘meta’ moment doesn’t read as tongue-in-cheek as he hoped it would. Once again, he trampled on yet another respected artist’s glory because he felt as though the world was dying for his opinion.
This type of asinine and immature behavior has become expected from West. When a celebrity repeats an action enough times, that action takes over their brand. They become a caricature of that action and their every move is scrutinized with that action in mind. And with that, they are canonized into the “verb hall of fame”: they become living, breathing grammatical devices that can morph from the present participle to the past participle and provide plenty of context to a sentence. If someone were described as having “Kanyed” a situation, you would immediately understand the unpleasant connotation: the definition has been programmed into our brains by the insane amount of discussion his actions have instigated.
It’s a fascinating dynamic, one that can only occur in the realms of stardom. That is why celebrities should, nay, must be careful of how they present themselves to the world. They have power, sure, but the world has the even greater power to turn their name against them.
The “Verb Hall of Fame”
- Taylor Swift (v.) to air all of your dirty laundry via means of artistic expression, may that be a song, a script or an angry Facebook status.
- Chris Brown (v.) to be extremely violent or hostile towards women: the antithesis of feminism.
- Britney Spears (v.) to spiral out of control in a careless and horrifying manner. Synonyms: Lindsey Lohan, Jessica Simpson.
- Oprah Winfrey (v.) to hide lavish presents under people’s seats Antonym: Dr. Phil.