In the ultimate act of jumping the shark since Fonzie actually jumped the shark, Kanye West all but buried his career in a pile of agonizing egotism after A) publicly humiliating sweet little Taylor Swift at the VMAs, B) issuing a half-hearted apology on his all-caps blog, and C) issuing a second apology in which he acted much like a whiny 14-year-old on Jay Leno. And while this may mark the slow and painful career demise for one of hip-hop’s most important producers, with death comes birth—in this case, the birth of 2009’s most perfect meme.
It started with Swayze. His unfortunate and untimely succumbing to cancer opened the floodgates for Twitter-based memes:
Next, reports of President Obama’s own disdain for the self-important pop starlet (he called him a jackass on tape) led to the next wave of image-based memes:
And finally, the inevitable aggregation began. Now the ubiquitous KanyeGate has taken the aforementioned and applied them to almost every memorable meme from the past two years— Xzibit, The Dark Knight, FUUUUUUUU, Advice Dog and more—creating an almost schizophrenic amalgamation that threatens to implode the very internet.
Most memes don’t last long; but Kanye’s behavior, combined with the celebripocalypse and Twitter’s domination of the realtime pop culture saga, could see this one going the distance. As far as we know, it’s the first-ever meme to be a #1 trending topic.
PS. F*ck Kanye.
