14 DAY TRIAL // Kanye West has been getting a lot of heat in recent months, more so than ever before when he went on a promo tour for a new studio album. However, it wasn’t until Arsenio Hall stood up and schooled him properly that he could say he got really “burned.”
Check it out in the video below, embedded at the end of the article, which was shot during a press junket after the Grammys 2014 announcement.
The comedian was responding to a comment Kanye made during a radio interview with The Breakfast Club, in which he named Hall as a negative example of what can happen in the industry if you have a big mouth (and no money) – especially if you’re black.
The way Arsenio sees it, Kanye needs a large helping of maturity because he’s painfully lacking in that department. Not only is he taking himself way too seriously – after all, he’s only a rapper, it’s not like he’s going out there saving lives – but he’s also trying to play the race card when there’s no need for that.
“Like usually, Kanye’s premise confuses the facts, so then therefore everything else has to be thrown up. At the end of the day he’s a musician I’m a comedian. We’re not doctors. Nobody works for Johns Hopkins… we’re not educators. And I think we take ourselves a little too serious. But that’s something that will straighten itself out with maturity,” Hall says.
He explains that he wasn’t fired because he was black and always spoke his mouth like Kanye implied, but quit. Yeezus needs to get his facts checked before standing up on that box to preach to the world.
“I don’t like to be put into those conversations, cause there’s no struggle here. My struggle was in the ghetto of Cleveland. There’s no struggle now, and nothing about what I do or he does,” Hall says.
He also takes issue with Kanye’s use of the “slave” word in his music, not just with his disappointing attempt at stirring up trouble with implications of racism when there’s nothing to justify that.
“Do you know what that word is? Do you know what that word is all about? Nobody can use ‘Slave’ in pop culture. If you’re in the music business you shouldn’t [expletive] with that word. It’s too serious an error. Too serious a problem in America,” the comedian says.
Kanye is yet to respond but you should probably not be too surprised if he does it in an all-CAPS rant on social media.
