Kanye Interrupts / Imma Let You Finish

Background

At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards held on September 13th, 2009, Taylor Swift won the award for Best Female Video. However, as she began her acceptance speech, Kanye West suddenly appeared on the stage, stole the mic, and told the crowd that Beyonce’s video should have won, as it is “one of the best videos of all time.” He then handed the mic back to Taylor and stormed off the stage. Because Kanye had taken up Taylor’s time, the show cut to commercial before she could continue.

Later in the evening, after Beyonce won Video of the Year, she invited Taylor onstage to finish her speech. Kanye was reportedly thrown out of the venue. Later that night, Kanye posted an apology on his blog, written in his signature ALL CAPS STYLE:

For reasons unknown, Kanye later removed his first apology from his blog. By Monday, Kanye’s interruption was the top news being covered by every mainstream news and media outlet.

Development

Mash-up: Obama interrupted by Kanye

Early Monday morning, Youtube user freeyourpixels created a mashup of Kanye interrupting President Obama. Last week, President Obama spoke before Congress about Health Care reform. During the speech, Republican Representative Joe Wilson heckled te President, interjecting with “You Lie.”
Roughly 80 people reuploaded freeyourpixels video:

By marrying these two interruptions together into one parody video, and being the first to do so, freeyourpixels became the number one most viewed Youtube channel of the day, and the video was viewed over 1.5 million times in under 24 hours.

Obama Calls Kanye a Jackass

The Huffington Post reports that President Obama called Kanye a “jackass” in an off-the-record portion of an interview yesterday with CNC.

ABC News reporter Terry Moran reportedly tweeted the following:

"Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential."

Although this was viewed by many as a breach of journalist ethics for publicizing off-the-record remarks, it clearly serves as an indicator of the scale of this outburst.

Kanye’s Apology Turned into a Song

Kanye Apologizes on Tonight Show

On September 14th, Kanye appeared as a guest on Jay Leno and offered an apology for his outburst.

Taylor Swift Accepts Kanye’s Apology

On September 15th, Taylor Swift appeared on daytime talk show The View, where she stated that Kanye had not done anything to get in contact and apologize personally. According to a report from the Associated Press, following Swift’s appearance on The View, Kanye called her to apologize personally, which she accepted.

Video Responses

Image macros

On the night of September 13th and morning of the 14th, people on 4chan as well as other forum users began photoshopping Kanye onto dozens of backgrounds. Before long, a common madlib-style snowclone began to emerge around one of Kanye’s memorable quotes:

“Look X, I’m really [adjective] for you. Imma Let you finish. But Y is the [hyperbole] of all time.”<6>

The second trend involves a traditional four-panel comic, in which Kanye steals the mic (first panel), asks a joke (second panel), tells the punchline (third panel), and then shrugs (fourth panel).

By September 13th and 14th, Kanye image macros flowed steadily through Tumblr, and at least three new Tumblog dedicated to the new meme has been created.

• Kanyegate
• Imma Let You Finish
• Kanye Interrupted

A few Single Serving Sites revolving around Kanye’s on-stage gaffe were created:

• DidKanyeInterruptTaylorSwift.com
• IsKanyeWestADouchebag.com
• Kanye West Apology Generator

Exploitables

By September 15th, a Kanye template for the Aviary photo-editing web appled to further Imma Let You Finish exploitability:

On Twitter

Kanye was the #1 top Trending Topic during September 14th and part of the 15th.
As of 7:30PM September 15th, Kanye West was still a hot trend on Twitter, although the majority of activity is made up of those who are still just finding out about it or taking polls about it.

The night of Septeber 16th, Kanye fell to the #3 Trending topic, then down to #5.
A botnet of fake accounts began spamming away with Kanye Messages and links to bogus virus-protection software. Most of the tweets at this point consisted of a mixture of those who were looking to drive traffic to their websites. and those who had simply just found out about the Kanye meme.

Many were still creating new instances of memebrids that were already old, such as “I’ma let you finish” mashed up with “Yo Dawg”, “Patrick Swayze’s death” and “Chuck Norris.” Many tweeted as if they believed they had been the first to put these elements together, which may be evidence of a predictable thought pattern amongst the twitter users caught up in a developing meme.

By the morning of Thursday the 17th, Kanye was back up to the #4 Twitter trending topic. Ashton Kutcher, (@aplusk) had just tweeted the Patrick Swayze Funeral variant, and exposed his millions of followers to the joke well after it had first surfaced. This caused the Partick Swayze variant to experience a resurgence in popularity.

The memetic reaction to Kanye’s outburst only represents a fraction of the entire ordeal, but the spread and popularity of the Kanye parodies on Twitter is largely independent of the rest of the Kanye comments.

Search Interest

Searches for Kanye West on Monday the 14th have been the highest they have ever been for the artist, and dwarf interest in the Christian Bale rant.

Not only did this one event overshadow anything Kanye West has ever done before, but the meme proliferated the furthest and mutated the most in the shortest amount of time when compared to other Kanye-relates scandals that we’ve seen:

In the following trends we see how much of the public interest in Kanye West has had a strong correlation with the VMAs.