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Kanye West disowns hip hop, embraces emo

By Andy Jones
Emo Kanye

GLASGOW, UK (filed Dec. 5) – Audience members at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Center who turned up for the Kanye West concert Tuesday were shocked when the rapper walked on-stage with only an acoustic guitar.

West explained to the audience that, in the wake of his mother's death, he had given up on rap music and that he is now pursuing a career as an emo rocker. Henceforth, he will perform under the name Western Ambivalence.

He told the audience, "If it weren't for my success as a rapper, my mother would have never been able to have that surgery in the first place, and if it weren't for hip-hop culture's over-sexualized images of women, she would have never wanted to. If it weren't for hiphop, my mother would still be with us today, teaching at Chicago State."

He paused, looking distraught, before earnestly adding, "Rap music does not care about black people." He went on to explain that he'd been feeling conflicted about continuing to perform the music that, in his mind, killed his mother ever since he came to this realization, but that he only decided to experiment with emo rock last week.

"I've got an uncanny ability to cry on cue. I cried on-stage in London. I cried on-stage in Paris. Finally, I realized, man – I should do this for a living," West said, wiping away tears. Videos of his unprecedented performance last night have become immensely popular on the Internet, though most have been getting mixed reviews among the music community.

"It's really self-centered and egotistic," said Chris Carrabba, frontman of Dashboard Confessional, "even for emo." He added, "Like when he says [in the song ‘Ballinest Emo Singer in the World'], ‘I am such a good emo singer / I sing emo so good you can't stand it / I am the best emo rock singer in the history of the planet' ... the only thing emo about that song is that he cries through practically the whole thing."

"The instrumentation – just the sound of that one lone guitar – really has an indie feel to it," said Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, "but the lyrics kind of miss the mark. I mean, most of the stuff is really misogynistic ... and some of it is blatantly contradictory. For example, in the song ‘Matriculate,' he says, ‘I don't respect women / They are not real people / They only exist for my amusement / I will never love any woman.' And then the next song on the record is an acoustic version of the song ‘Hey Mama' where he says, ‘Mommy I'm [gonn]a love you till you ain't on earth no more.' I really can't understand how he doesn't see the irony in that. Except, I guess, now that she's not on earth anymore, he can quit loving her and finally be an unadulterated misogynist."