If You Are Mad at Kanye West, Then You Are Dumber Than Him, Which Is Saying A Lot, Because He's Pretty Fucking Dumb

I wasn't going to write about this. It was not my intention. I was going to briefly cover it on Twitter and that would be it. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not even watch the VMAs. I was watching the first Sunday Night Football matchup of the season featuring Green Bay and Chicago because I had bet money on the outcome of the game. I won. And then I went to sleep.

But Swiftgate '09 will not be denied. I have had multiple people respond to my Twitter posts and multiple people ask me to weigh in on the situation in this space, and since I am nothing if not wholly dedicated to you, dear reader, here we are. I will make my opinion known and am happy to do it. If you are tired of hearing about this situation, then please leave now. I totally understand. If you would like to hear one more armchair pundit contribute to the decline of our shared culture by continuing to comment on this, then let's get started after the jump!

The Blueprint 3 and Jay-Z's Musical Identity Crisis

Jay-Z has a complicated relationship with auto-tune. Ostensibly, he hates it. In fact, the first single released off of his new album, The Blueprint 3* is called D.O.A. (Death of Auto Tune). In this song, Jay-Z utilizes the pitch-correcting, mistake-erasing audio processor as a modern metaphor for age-old gripes that serious hip hop fans have about certain elements within their genre. These gripes include a perceived lack of authenticity on the part of some rappers; a move by these rappers away from a masculine gritty, hardcore sound and persona to more polished, universal ones; and a general perception that these rappers' goals are to cash in on disposable, mass-consumed hits rather than creating enduring art and social commentary.

RIP, "Swagger" 1590 - 2009

The word "Swagger," an oft-used verb and noun among speakers of the English language, died late Monday night on the popular television network NBC. It was 419 years old.

The Fulton County coroner ruled the death a homicide. "We found multiple contusions along the entire surface of the word," he said. "The injuries are consistent with those that have been found in other word homicides, most notably the tragic 'Bling' murders of aught-two. It would appear that Swagger had been wielded as a blunt object and used to repeatedly bludgeon something or someone, resulting in serious head trauma and internal bleeding to the word, which would eventually result in its death."