Every now and again, circumstances force us to plum the tawdry here in Music History Monday. Usually, those “circumstances” are a dearth of good topics to write about; today is such a day. (In fact, there is an excellent, August 30th-associated topic we could have focused on: the completion of Shostakovich’s extremely controversial Symphony No. 9 of 1945. But, alas, I wrote about Shostakovich’s death just three weeks ago, on August 9, and as this feature is called Music History Monday and not Music History Shostakovich, we’ll have to take a pass on the Shosty 9 for now.)
My typical fallback on such otherwise event-challenged dates is to find some date related craziness in the world of popular music and then extrapolate outwards, discussing other like examples that are not date related. However, we needn’t do that for August 30, because enough crazy, pop-world merde happened on this date to easily fill a post. So here we go!
(Actually, for just a moment, here we not go.
You might rightly ask, why are we celebrating – and by doing so, perhaps even in some way encouraging – the antics of pop stars here on the august pages of Patreon? For an answer, you need look no further than the troubled mind of your insecure and envious Dr. Bob. While great wealth and fame have indeed eluded me [actually, you can keep the fame, though I will take the wealth], wealth and fame have not – for example – eluded Kanye West [born 1977; a.k.a. “Yeezy”, “Ye”, “Saint Pablo”, “The Louis Vuitton Don”, and “Yeezus”], who will be discussed in today’s post. But thank heavens, Mr. West – his tremendous talent notwithstanding – is a first order jerk incapable of going very long without doing something monumentally offensive. How wonderful, then, to be able to celebrate his foibles and thus assuage my fragile ego by acknowledging my moral and ethical superiority.)
Now here we go.… continue reading, only on Patreon!
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