Beauty is Imperfection

Crawfordsville, Indiana (API) Sammy McBrayer was sitting at home last week watching YouTube when he came across a video people had been talking about at work: A clip of Kanye West at the MTV Video Music Awards jumping up in the middle of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video award and insisting that artist Beyonce Knowles deserved it instead.

“I just went ballistic,” he said. “How dare this guy who wasn’t even involved jump in and steal this woman’s moment of glory? I thought somebody ought to give him such a smack.”

But then, McBrayer said, “I looked up Taylor Swift’s song book. Now I’ve got to turn down my sanctimony a few notches. I think Kanye might have been onto something.”

And after spending a few hours delving into Swift’s career, McBrayer says he really had to put everything in a new context.

“[Swift’s music] really blows. I mean it’s really a bunch of s***,” McBrayer said. “And supposedly she sings country music? Who did the calculus on that? Doesn’t sound much different than any of the crap my 13-year-old daughter listens to. You know the thing about 13-year-olds is that they turn 14 eventually.”

McBrayer says that though he still thinks West’s move was rude, “sometimes you have to be rude to do the right thing.”

“I realize now what Kanye was doing. Sometimes a brave person has to jump in the vortex–throw himself bodily into the crossfire to protect people like me from trifling mediocrity, the stuff that kills us from within … every day.”

McBrayer asked a bunch of people to come to his house to talk about their feelings later that night, and the group soon turned into an angry mob.

“Maybe we could go to her house and remove the award from her hands by force,” said a female neighbor who asked to remain anonymous.

“Yeah,” said another. “Or maybe we could invite Kanye to our town and tell him how sorry we are that we were all so nasty to him on the Internet.”

The crowd grew unruly, and McBrayer thought it might even spill into the streets.

Few of those gathered even suggested that they were big fans of Kanye West’s music, though they conceded that at least it was original, unlike the preconceived, glozed and corporate manufactured fluff that Swift was making to pander to kids and dummies.

“You can’t help but admire him,” said McBrayer. “Even if you don’t like his stuff, you’ve got to admire it. It’s innovative and rough in the right ways. He’s an artist, and meanwhile you’ve got this little piece of jailbait dancing around in her pajamas trying to render us helpless and stun us into mute stupidity with her poison electric stinger. Why are we taking her side on this?”

Though earlier in the week president Barack Obama had entered the fray by calling West a “jackass,” many of his advisors hoped that soon the president would recant and give West a medal of some sort.

“I just feel so bad,” said McBrayer. “I mean, I know that Kanye West doesn’t know me from Adam, but I was saying so many nasty things to him in my head, and it’s just bad karma because now I know he was doing it for me. I was so wrong. I was so very very wrong.”

The crowd departed with no immediate plans to take action.

As another neighbor of McBrayer’s said, “We’ve got to let it go. After all, Kanye will probably do something else that’s dumb at another awards show sooner or later. He can’t seem to help it. We weren’t right to be angry this time. But I guess he’ll earn it back somehow.”