Kim, Kanye and the Cameo from Hell
I am very much of the mindset that there is no one right or wrong way to mourn. Grief is by definition a personal and complicated and delicate process. No one has the right to shame other people for the way they choose to mourn, or how they choose to express that grief publicly.
The same is not necessarily true when it comes to helping others with grief. If you’re trying to help your soulmate process grief over a loved one’s death you probably should not make it all about yourself and your narcissism.
That, friends, is one of many places where the increasingly unfathomable Kanye West made a mistake in the form of his 40th birthday present to his wife and the mother of his children, Kim Kardashian-West. It would be difficult for any 40th birthday tribute to top Kim Kardashian-West taking her entire inner circle to a magical private island far away from poor people in order to experience a little slice of pre-COVID-19 paradise for sheer wrong-headedness but Kanye has never been one to back off from a challenge so he easily out-did the big trip mocked around the world with his 40th birthday gift.
Always one for big gestures, Kanye decided that for his wife’s birthday he would give her something not just audacious and expensive but borderline miraculous: the opportunity to have her father, Robert Kardashian, back for two and a half magical minutes despite the famous lawyer, best known as part of the legal dream team that helped O.J. Simpson get away with the brutal murder of his wife’s best friend Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, having died from Esophageal cancer in 2003.
How was Kanye able to manage this feat? By being Kanye, of course! Kanye is magic. He can do anything. He’s literally the greatest artist in the world. He’s a real-life Jedi and nothing is beyond his extraordinary powers!
Well, that or he spent a lot of money to give his long-suffering better half (and at this point there’s no doubt that she is, in fact, better than Kanye) a gift so egregiously wrong that there was no way she would ever be able to forget it: a viscerally unnerving hologram of her dead father acting as a sort of science-fiction ventriloquist dummy for his son-in-law to put words and ideas and effusive praise into.
The warmth and non-creepiness EXPLODES off the screen.
Yes, Kanye decided to give his wife her dead father back for a few minutes using the same widely and rightly mocked technology that allowed Tupac Shakur to play Coachella despite being dead for decades. Kardashian posted the entire video on Twitter, gushing about the hologram’s realism, which would only make sense if, during his lifetime, Robert Kardashian was some manner of Force Ghost.
Also, it would be REALLY awkward if he said something like, “Incidentally, I’m up here in heaven with our beloved family friend Nicole Simpson and she’s REALLY cool about the whole “defending O.J for her murder” thing. She keeps saying “it’s all good” and “hey, everyone deserves a lawyer, even the clearly guilty. That’s pretty much the cornerstone of the American justice system so no ill will.”
To me, Kanye’s garish gift to the missus represents nothing less than the first-ever Cameo from the other side. Cameo is of course the increasingly ubiquitous service that affords fans the opportunity to buy the time and energy of their favorite celebrities in the form of short video messages purchased for prices ranging from next to nothing to a small fortune.
Are we sure this isn’t Neil Breen?
It’s as if Robert Kardashian agreed to do a Cameo in purgatory for 350 dollars and was fed a series of details about the recipient of his posthumous holographic message—she was Armenian, was studying to be a lawyer, had four children, liked to listen to doo-wop in her daddy’s (tiny) Mercedes as a child, operates several businesses and was married to a crazed narcissist named Kanye West—then badly improvised a short pep talk clumsily shoe-horning all of that information into a hypnotically awkward spiel.
The whole weird spectacle feels like it was written by a publicist whose first language is perhaps not English. At times it is is perversely bland, like when the cyber-ghost of Robert Kardashian drones, “The way you are connecting with your roots and supporting Armenia means so much to me.” It alternately has the uncomfortable intimacy of a bad-taste inside joke shared with a deeply confused world, like when Ghost Dad (the less creepy one) says that she will know he’s around when someone makes a “pee fee” or she makes one herself. I don’t even want to get into what a pee fee might be, and suggest you do not Google it either. Some things are not meant to be known, or seen, or created, like this video.
But the most embarrassing part of the video comes when Robert Kardashian stiffly declares, “You married the most, most, most, most, most, genius man in the whole world, Kanye West.” There’s no segue for this, or context, really. It’s just a digital zombie, a collection of zeroes and ones, calling his raging cyclone of bad publicity and even worse judgment of a son in law the most genius person in the world, then adding a whole bunch more “mosts” for emphasis.
In another context, the dead dad gushing about the unparalleled genius of a man his daughter wouldn’t become involved with until long after he died might qualify as a wry, self-deprecating joke about narcissism and egomania, about how Kanye wouldn’t even be able to stop bragging while delivering a creepy Cameo from Purgatory.
But at this point Kanye seems incapable of self-deprecation, which used to be his whole deal. He went from being the most relatable rapper to the least relatable, from a guy who successfully cultivated an underdog-made-good persona that made likable and empathetic to an evil, tortured genius whose emotions and motives all seem deeply unknowable, to Kanye and to a world that increasingly recoils from him in horror.
Kim had to tweet something nice about this atrocity or her husband would obviously never forgive her. I’m sure she was touched by the gesture but it probably made her feel a lot of other emotions as well. As for everyone else, well, let’s just say that it is rare to see good intentions go so astray in such a morbidly fascinating way.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here