Kanye west

Actor Will Smith delivered the slap heard 'round the world Sunday night at the 2022 Oscars ceremony, smacking comedian Chris Rock for a joke about his wife's bald head. Regardless of whether you think Smith overreacted or did the right thing, the slap was the highlight of the evening and one of the most exciting awards show moments in years. In honor of the "Smith Slap," Cockburn has compiled a list of five other award show moments featuring celebrities that deserved to be slapped. 1.

It was June 2015. Bill Maher was holding court with assorted journalists to discuss the 2016 race. The Republican field back then was attracting all kinds of ridiculous monikers — it was apparently the most plausible, most qualified field in history. Maher asked Ann Coulter who had the best chance in the general election. She didn’t say John Kasich. She didn’t fancy Jeb’s chances. Three days earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy in Manhattan, cutting the ribbon on a festival of media bafflement, disgust, and ridicule. Coulter made her prediction: 'Of the declared ones, right now, Donald Trump.' The studio audience hooted. The other panelists did a good impression of being horrified.

For better or worse, the rapper, producer and sneaker salesman Kanye West is almost certainly not running for president, as he has claimed. He is instead sidling into the mainstream consciousness just before he drops his latest album. Kanye has had an odd few years. He's come out in support of Donald Trump, made an impassioned religious album, and failed to build a complex of Star Wars-inspired domes for the homeless. A presidential run, then, feels like a natural next move. Ultimately, though, he does not seem to have even filed the necessary paperwork. This has not prevented progressives from being outraged by what they believe is an attempt to split the liberal vote and hand Trump another victory.

I hear the sound of chanting in the distance, grim and ominous. ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom ba boom, boom, boom...' Suddenly, voices cry out: ‘Je-sus walks!’ A white-robed Kanye West is surveying the geodesic dome structures that he has built across his lands. A MAGA hat is pulled over his brow and the sun glints off his oversized sneakers. Kim Kardashian stands beside him in a bodysuit that strains against her preternaturally tumid curves. Kanye announced that he was building the housing complex for the homeless in 2019.

The nation waits with bated breath for news of one of its favorite and most delicate sons, the ‘rap artist’ A$AP Rocky. Mr Rocky is held hostage by the military of the barbaric regime of an anti-Western failed state called Sweden. The Scandinavian rogue nation is widely suspected of having colluded with the military of another barbaric regime of another anti-Western failed state, Iran, which last week kidnapped an entire oil tanker under similar circumstances. Mr Rocky claims to have been minding his own business with two of his minders when they felt it necessary to kick an Afghan asylum seeker in the body and head while taking an early evening stroll in the rubble of Sweden’s Mogadishu-like capital, Stockholm.

Kanye West is perfect. Every time I think he can’t go up in my estimation, he does something more magical. Last night, having established himself as the most important political figure in the free world, he decided the time had come to find new worlds to conquer. ‘I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!’ he tweeted, out of the blue. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1057382916760707072 And this not three weeks from the Oval Office audience he gave President Donald Trump, an occasion at which he, brilliantly, chose to communicate only through free association – oscillating at a frequency barely within the realms of human comprehension.

Kanye West is getting perilously close to the most disruptive idea in politics. ‘Disruption’ has been a buzz word among tech companies for many years now, but the political world got a taste of what it means for the first time in 2016, when Donald Trump shot straight to the White House without ever having run for lower office. He cut through all the indispensible consultants and ideologues and party apparatchiks who were supposed to run the GOP, then beat Hillary Clinton by winning states no Republican had won since Reagan. That was disruption. But the forces of un-disruption are hard at work, and they're confident that the Trump demographic is dying. Trump actually did better among non-whites than Mitt Romney, the last conventional Republican, did.

Kanye West is an egomaniac. Who isn’t these days? He’s also very brave. It takes courage to wear a Trump hat to sing on Saturday Night Live. Kanye — or ‘Ye’, as he wants to be called — said he was ‘bullied’ backstage by people telling him he should take it off, and you can imagine that is true enough. The Saturday Night Live audience booed Kanye on stage, but he remained undaunted. ‘We need a dialogue not a diatribe,’ he said, not unreasonably. The SNL brigades clearly did not agree. Their idea of dialogue is just anti-Trump diatribe. Good for West; he makes the world more interesting. And for him to stand by what he thinks as the rich, elite world he belong to harangues him takes guts.

Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the confounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which rightly became the most highly acclaimed hip-hop album this century. He went on to make controversial public art with his ‘New Slaves’ video, which was projected in 66 locations around the world (called Orwellian by admirers and dumbfounded detractors).