Member-only story
He Got in One Little Fight
Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Everyone remembers where they were when a “notably intoxicated” Kanye West stormed the Grammy’s stage in 2009 to declare the whole awards show racist. Snatching the spotlight from a notably uncomfortable Taylor Swift, West declared Beyonce the true winner of the VMA award for Best Video.
The episode was enough to land Kanye West, who had been, “photographed on the red carpet before the show, drinking cognac straight out of the bottle,” in rehab for alcohol addiction.
Over a decade later, however, and the Grammys are almost universally acknowledged as racist. Though he was lampooned and condemned at the time, the Kanye-as-bellwether isn’t the first time artists have forced society to confront uncomfortable truths long before society was ready for it.
When Sinead O’Conner dramatically tore up a photograph of the Pope during her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, the resulting controversy all but ended her career. The sexual abuse crisis O’Connor was protesting with her act of shocking defiance would, some years later, shake the Catholic Church to its foundation. The fallout continues to undermine the church to this very day, O’Connor long forgotten.
Pushing the envelope of what is socially acceptable has long been the territory…