14 DAY TRIAL // After the Grammys 2015 last month and after Kanye West’s rude interruption of Beck’s big moment, when he won Album of the Year, and the comments the former made backstage about how Beyonce should have taken home the award, Shirley Manson of Garbage schooled the rapper on the importance of humility and knowing your place in the world.
She did so in an open letter she posted on Facebook, in which she explained to him that he was the worst person imaginable to try and hijack a fellow artist’s moment only because he thought someone else should have enjoyed it.
So when Manson posted a similar letter the other day, addressed to a certain “Dear He who shall remain nameless,” everyone assumed she was talking about Kanye again.
Open letter is superb, on point
You can see both the letter and Manson’s subsequent denial that she’d addressed it to Kanye in the posts embedded below. As we speak, people and even some media outlets still believe she meant it for the rapper, even if she denied it.
If so, he must have reached out to her via email, telling her things she didn’t take too kindly, considering she ends the message with a “[expletive] you” after berating him for assuming that a musician has no other choice but to be a celebrity as well.
Manson makes a plea for real artistry, for the people who make music for the love of the art and not because they secretly dream of topping all the charts, being in all the newspapers and having hordes of paparazzi and crazed fans chasing them down the street.
“Clearly you are unable to wrap your head around the idea that some musicians actually prefer NOT having to perform on Children's TV shows,” she writes. “Who do NOT want to be gossiped about in the popularity contest columns. Who most definitively do NOT want to be chased by paparazzi and who do NOT want to put their family name to some [expletive]-y, poorly made product in order to build a ‘brand’ and who most definately do NOT want to go out every night, dressed up to the nines to the opening of an envelope.”
This is actually the segment of the letter that made people assume she was talking about Kanye: the “brand” in question must be the Kardashian brand, which he’s been endorsing since he started dating Kim Kardashian, who is currently his wife. And they both get dressed up to the nines to go for the opening of an envelope, so there’s that.
Not everything is about Kanye
In an update, a clearly frustrated Manson denies that the letter was about Kanye, adding that she’d have said so if it were, just like she did the first time. She did not delete the original post, though, which means that she’s not backing down on anything she said to that person who is not Kanye but managed to infuriate her as much as he did.
Moreover, Manson points the finger at one weekly in particular, blaming it for spreading the false story that she’d written about Kanye again. Journalism isn’t the noble profession it once was, she says.