Kanye West: Using interracial sex to sell concert tickets

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim

It may very well be time we stopped giving Kanye West attention, but what do y’all think of this NSFW graphic from his blog, promoting his upcoming Fame Kills Tour with Lady Gaga?

Check it out after the jump…

Check out the graphic in its original context – it’s actually animated. For some reason when I transferred it over the animation coding didn’t come along.

My guess is that this is Kanye creating an image that features very graphic interracial sex, in order to demonstrate how much White America doesn’t care about black people. What, you looked at the graphic and didn’t like it? It’s because you’re racist! You hate seeing a black man violate a white woman! Or something.

But this graphic makes me uncomfortable, not because it features interracial sex, but because it manages to dehumanise both the woman and the man of colour.

There is something extremely generic about the woman (who incidentally is Lady Gaga). She’s blonde, thin and wearing bright red lipstick. (I read somewhere that Lady Gaga considers herself to be “redefining beauty.” Pullease! She’s a young skinny white woman who doesn’t wear pants. I do not see any boundary breaking there.) Basically, you couldn’t define female sexuality in a more uncreative way.* And she’s covering her boob, so she is simultaneously coquettish and sexually accessible: the ultimate male fantasy. Vomit. In other words, she doesn’t seem to exist for herself; the way she’s arranged, she very much exists solely for the titillation of the viewer.

Yet the man of colour is not doing any better. You don’t get to see any part of his experience, apart from the aggressive way he is grabbing the woman’s waist and his pink tongue flicking at her ear – two visuals that both seem to animalise him. And that’s just what we need, more images of black folks looking like wild animals.

And the graphic is also just boring; it reduces the race conversation to being a face-off between black and white folks. The racial make-up of the US is sooooo much more complicated than that. I’m just tired of folks dredging up tired and inaccurate controversies in order to appear daring.

I dunno. That’s my read. What’s yours?

*Incidentally I’m not saying that real live white women with blonde hair and red lipstick have a “boring sexuality.” I just mean this in terms of this being a manufactured image, it falls flat from my POV in terms of “shockingness.”