Lindsey Lohan is in jail and Courtney Love isn’t the rantorific force she once was, but celeb-spotting Twitterholics have someone new to follow: Kanye West. West signed up all of a day and a half ago ago - he has an album out soon, incidentally - and seems to be making up for lost time. As of today, he’s published 95 tweets already - a rate of about three an hour - amassing an astonishing 277,000 followers along the way.
The legendarily narcissistic rapper is surely a perfect fit for the legendarily narcissistic world of Twitter, so much so that you have to wonder why it’s taken him so long to sign up and start furnishing the world with the details of his living room. He clearly thinks the same thing: “I think Twitter was designed specifically with me in mind,” he posted earlier today. “Just my humble opinion hahhhahaaaahaaa humble hahahahhahaahaaaa.”
It’s hard to tell whether his tongue’s planted firmly in his cheek at this point or not. Either way, perhaps, it doesn’t really matter, because the whole thing makes for perversely entertaining reading whether or not it’s playful or deadly serious. Pearls of wisdom so far include things like “I hate stickers on laptops”, “Suits is an expensive addiction” [sic] and “Keep fresh flowers in the crib”. He’s also posted photos of his new projector (it turns an entire wall of his living room into a TV), his Versace sofa (”too hood”? Discuss) and his new golden goblet set (“I hate half empty water bottles so I copped these #goblets to drink out of”).
It’s easy to poke fun - shit, that’s what we’re doing right now - but the whole celebrities-on-Twitter phenomenon is an interesting one. It’s had one curious side-effect, at least: it’s revealed what strange and vacuous lives that some of our famous contemporaries lead. A while back, The Vine went through a phase of reading NBA players’ Twitter feeds, solely for the somehow bleak and empty feeling they evoked in us: “Practice”; “Huge game tonight”; “We played real good”; “Practice”; “Practice”.
More fundamentally, one of the more interesting cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s has been the closing gap between fan and artist. For most of the 20th century, at least, “stars” were what their name suggested: distant, immutable. Obviously, there’s always been a weirdly symbiotic and ambivalent relationship between movie stars and singers had with the paparazzi and their kind - the paparazzi might drive you to distraction, but when it’s time to promote your next movie or album, you’d better hope the press likes you. (Another one of Kanye’s tweets: “We lookin' crazy fresh where's paparazzi when you need em?”)
But largely, the mega-famous lived in a rarified world, where their interactions with the public were shaped and stage-managed. If you were an avid fan, you could probably send a fan letter, to which some publicist might respond. That's not the case any more. You don't need to wait for the media to report on the details of your favourite car-crash celeb; you can log on and have them tell you themselves what they're doing. For them, it's another opportunity to build their brand and "interact with the fans"; for the rest of us, it's a perversely compelling and strange experience.
Clearly, a divide remains - although’s Kanye’s tweeting like crazy, he’s not inviting you round to his house just yet. But as of today, at least, he’s letting you see over the wall. If you climb up and take a look, you might see him “sipping Molnar Family Poseidin's Vineyard Chardonnay in the middle of the day sidebar out of gold cups for whatever that's worth”. How that makes you feel is entirely up to you.