On Tuesday night, Kanye West tweeted a photo of a computer running Safari, with a tab open to a Sufjan Stevens video on YouTube. But eagle-eyed viewers noticed that among the open tabs in West's Safari web browser were links to the torrent website The Pirate Bay. The irony of West apparently using The Pirate Bay when he himself has declared war on the torrent tracker was not lost on the public. The source says that West thought it would be funny to have Pirate Bay links appear in the photo, since he is very aware that The Life of Pablo has been illegally downloaded more than half a million times. The source goes on to note that the computer in the photo does not belong to West, who uses a MacBook. The computer in question is a Mac you can tell by the UI and window chrome, plus the fact that it's running Safari but it's connected to a Samsung monitor. I'm told that although West did take the photo and he did purposefully pull up the tabs in the image he meant the whole thing as a giant troll.
Now, maybe I don't get the joke but it isn't clear to me why the Pirate Bay links in question were associated with Xfer Records's Serum, a $189 piece of software co-founded by EDM artist Deadmau5. Wouldn't it have been funnier if Kanye had been downloading his own album? Steve Duda, who cofounded Xfer Records, wasn't laughing either. "It's obviously not a joke, as I don't deserve to be the target of a joke, it makes no sense," he told Mashable. "The browser tabs were probably an oversight, and while I expect it wasn't Kanye's personal action (more his producer/engineer, you can see ProTools to the left of the browser window), calling it a 'joke' feels like a poor lie, and if somehow true, is poor taste." It's also not clear why West was looking at what appears to be the product page for Serum as well as a Music Radar touting Serum's virtues. To an outsider, it sure looks like someone Googled some stuff about Serum, pulled up the product page and then decided to see if the software was available on The Pirate Bay. Deadmau5 responded to West's tweet Tuesday, calling the aspiring fashion mogul a "dick" and pointing to a (since removed) GoFundMe campaign to raise $180 so West could purchase the software legally. West then responded to Deadmau5 on Twitter Wednesday, making fun of the EDM god's mouse-eared headgear. It's impossible to ascertain whether West was actually trolling, or if he just didn't realize that the world could zoom in to see his open tabs.
0 comments:
Post a Comment