Last week Kanye West set social media ablaze as he careened through the Twitter streets spewing whatever detritus he could conjure up.
This immediately followed a campaign rally (yes, if you live under a rock, Kanye is running for president of the US) where he told the crowd that Harriet Tubman hadn’t freed the slaves, cried and told everyone he nearly killed his child. It has been a meltdown for the ages, and the latest in a storied history of celebrity meltdowns.
In fact, it reminds of of the time when:
Britney Spears shaved her head and then spiraled
The year was 2007, and outside of a few speed wobbles, everything seemed okay. Britney was touring the globe and had more money than anyone without an accounting degree knew how to count. The next thing we knew, we were watching clips of her shaving her own head in a salon. She followed that by attacking the paparazzi with an umbrella, and locking herself in a room with her son while the media gorged themselves on this live slow-motion car crash. At its height rumours swirled about Spears’s mental health. Was it bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or something else? We never found out. All we did know was that it culminated in Britney being wheeled into an ambulance on a stretcher, and ultimately being put in conservatorship. Last week Britney appeared in court as part of an evaluation of whether her conservatorship should continue.
Mel Gibson and the passion of an anti-Semite
Given the insane things that came out of Mel’s mouth at the time, it is mind-boggling that he was able to rebuild his career. We should’ve known back in 2006 that something was amiss when Mel was arrested, and in the ensuing police report claimed “Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world”. Yikes. We didn’t take the hint, and it was only in 2010 when evidence of a fight with his ex- girlfriend surfaced in which he told her that if she got raped by “a pack of n**gers”, it would be her own fault, among many other things. These days Mel has gone back to being the guy who makes gritty Oscar nomination-worthy films that all the manly men know and love.
Charlie Sheen extolled the virtues of tiger blood
For a good while Charlie was a hero to adolescents and frat boys everywhere. His drug-fuelled sexcapades were the stuff of legend, and he made millions of dollars playing himself in Two and a Half Men. Then the bubble burst. He was fired from the show for “dangerously self-destructive conduct”. While he was going back and forth with his employers, Charlie told the world that CBS had picked a fight with a warlock who had tiger’s blood and Adonis DNA and, in what looked like a manic episode of bipolar disorder, subsequently told NBC: “I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.” He was tired of pretending to not be special, and by Jove he was going to make sure we all knew it.
Kanye West pretty much constantly
There is a thin line between being a visionary maverick who isn’t afraid to speak truth to power and being nuttier than squirrel poo. In the moment it can be hard to tell the two apart. For example, in 2009 Kanye came off to some as a human sized sphincter when he grabbed the mic from Taylor Swift at an award show and told the audience that Beyoncé, who was nominated for the same award, should have been the rightful winner. We all felt sad and mopey for her then, but time has shown us Taylor is both less likeable than Beyoncé and had a worse album. Six years later, Kanye shook up the establishment when he appeared on a Red Cross fundraising video for victims of hurricane Katrina, and told everyone watching that “[former US president] George Bush doesn’t care about black people”. In that video he also spoke passionately about systemic racial issues that Americans are still dealing with today. At the time, though, much of the mainstream community felt this was Kanye being crazy. Until then it was debatable, but since then it has all gone downhill. Whether it was ’Ye’s now legendary concert rants, including one where he thought his friend Jay-Z had assassins out looking for him, telling TMZ that slavery was a choice, or hopping onto Twitter to ask Mark Zuckerberg for $1bn because he was more than $50m in debt. His megalomania became such a staple in pop culture that South Park parodied him in one of the show’s episodes. In short, Kanye has probably been flirting with the line of what we deem sanity for a long time. Only now, he seems to have decided to say "F the line".
