Why Kanye West was booed on SNL
Kanye West followed his appearance on the 44th Saturday Night Live season premiere with rambling pro-Trump remarks that prompted boos in the studio. Wearing a red Make America Great Again cap, West followed a performance of Ghost Town by addressing the audience.
The remarks were not broadcast but in footage shot by the comedian Chris Rock and posted to social media, West said: “The blacks want always Democrats … you know it’s like the plan they did, to take the fathers out the home and put them on welfare… does anybody know about that? That’s a Democratic plan.
“There’s so many times I talk to, like, a white person about this and they say, ‘How could you like Trump? He’s racist.’ Well, uh, if I was concerned about racism I would’ve moved out of America a long time ago.” He added: “Now you got a situation where we need to have a dialogue, and not a diatribe.”
Later, in a string of tweets criticised on social media, he called for the amendment that abolished slavery to be scrapped, before clarifying that he wanted to see it “amended”. The initial tweet showed a photo of himself on an airplane wearing one of Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” hats.
“This represents good and America becoming whole again,” West wrote. “We will no longer outsource to other countries. We build factories here in America and create jobs. We will provide jobs for all who are free from prisons as we abolish the 13th amendment. Message sent with love.”
The rise of ‘snowflake millennials’
It is unfair to deride millennials as “snowflakes” or to criticise them as overly sensitive, self-centred or ignorant because it is their parents who are at fault, the author Fay Weldon has said. “We should stop being beastly to the snowflakes since we, their forebears, left them with such a mess to clear up and no tools to deal with it,” she said. “Today’s young grow up into a violent, angry, unstable environment, all too likely to end up jobless, homeless and childless, unlikely to reach their full potential. They are probably the most despairing generation ever conceived. The least we can do is not add to their burden by slagging them off.”
She added: “If the new millennials — at best dependent on the bank of mum and dad, at worst on benefits in a shrinking job market — should despise and hate the old, it’s not surprising.” After a series of odd jobs as a single mother, Weldon became a top advertising copywriter before moving to television drama and writing novels including The Life and Loves of a She Devil, her cautionary tale of adultery.
Her new novel, After the Peace, is the story of a child of the new millennium, Rozzie, a “sperm bank baby”. In one passage, Weldon writes of “poor, baffled, indignant, work-deprived, renting-not-owning millennials” who have been let down by their “careless, stupid, smug” parents. She said: “We brought the millennials into this rather extraordinary, slightly insane world and then they turn out to be what they are. Through the drug and money culture of their parents, we’re landed with the product of what is our fault.”
Putting spotlight on migration crisis
Visitors to Tate Modern could, literally, be left weeping when they visit the gallery over the next five months as part of a series of “stealth interventions” by the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera. Bruguera is the latest artist to be asked to fill the vast Turbine Hall space as part of the annual Hyundai Commission. Her theme is the crisis in migration. If that in itself does not make people cry with anger and frustration then the presence of an organic compound that induces tears will do. The idea, Bruguera said, is to provoke a forced empathy … a physical reaction that she hopes will trigger “a shared emotional response”. Other interventions include renaming the Boiler House building, the main galleries closest to the River Thames in central London, after the local activist Natalie Bell. She was chosen, the gallery said, “for her positive contribution to the lives of others in SE1”. Most of the Turbine Hall has been covered in shiny black material that is heat-sensitive. Underneath, at the far end, is a hidden portrait of a young man who left Syria in 2011 and found emotional and practical support through SE1 United, the charity Bell helps run.