Over the weekend, new Kanye West pictures have given more power to the internet meme ‘Sad Kanye’! Have you seen these ones? Have you seen the double date at the Waffle House with John Legend? Actually I don’t think Kanye was sad, I think he was bored.
The internet is full of these super sad Kanye pictures, every time this guy is caught on camera, he looks miserable. This weekend, pictures of West attending the Super Bowl with his wife went viral, and on all of them, the rapper has the same inexpressive, bored-to-death long face, he even looks pissed off at time. There is a sad Kanye Tumblr filling up each day with these pathetic portraits,… even when he holds North, the guy doesn’t crack a smile! So what’s wrong with Kanye? Is his life that tragic?
And then, I got the explanation, which came from Yeezus’ mouth itself, during the Fashion Los Angeles Awards last week. Kanye was presenting an awards to Mazdack Rassi, creative director of Milk Studios, and beside a few inepties about fashion, design, love and god, Kanye revealed his deepest secret:
‘Back when I was working on Yeezus, I saw this book from the 1800s and it was velvet-covered with brass and everything. I looked at all these people’s photos and they look so real and their outfits were incredible and they weren’t smiling and people, you know the paparazzi, always come up to me, ‘Why you not smiling?’ and I think, not smiling makes me smile…When you see paintings in an old castle, people are not smiling cause it just wouldn’t look as cool.’
And you have it, Kanye doesn’t smile because people back then didn’t smile and because it doesn’t look cool,… if any of this makes sense… But actually I got intrigued by this, it’s true that people on old photos never smile and why is that? So I googled the question – and I am sure Kanye didn’t bother google it because this would imply a lot of reading and Kanye doesn’t do reading. But Nicholas Jeeves did a whole study on this, and he concluded that during ‘the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment’ Ha! And Kanye certainly got that right, he doesn’t want to be associated with low life and poor people, because he is Yeezus after all.