Every Room He Walks Into

Taylor Swift is nineteen and she’s just won Best Female Video at the VMAs and she looks like she might actually cry from the happiness of it. Then Kanye West walks onto the stage, takes the microphone out of her hand, and informs the audience that Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video was one of the greatest music videos of all time. Then he hands the microphone back. Then he leaves. Taylor Swift stands there alone on the stage while the audience figures out how to feel about what just happened.

The South Park writers had already clocked him months earlier—an episode in April that called him a gayfish with such surgical precision that Kanye apparently spent weeks publicly defending himself against a cartoon’s reading of his psychology, which is all you need to know. Obama called him a jackass in an off-the-record comment that leaked almost immediately, and that might be the most genuinely bipartisan moment of the entire administration. The internet did the rest within forty-eight hours: Pokémon edits, Keyboard Cat edits, and somehow a version where Kanye interrupted Patrick Swayze’s farewell, which felt gauche given that Swayze had literally just died—but the internet has never been good at timing.

The frustrating thing—what makes Kanye more interesting as a case study than some random asshole with a stage pass—is that he’s actually talented. Not delusionally talented, not PR-talent: genuinely, verifiably gifted. The question his behavior keeps raising is whether talent works as an excuse, and watching Taylor Swift’s face in that clip, the answer is no. It doesn’t. Nothing does. You can be exceptional and still be the worst person in the room. He made both of those things true that night in about fifteen seconds, and the internet never really forgave him for it—not because it particularly cared about Taylor Swift, but because it recognized the move. Everyone has met someone who does that.