Kanye West is definitely one of the great tastemakers in music today thanks to his expansive listening habits. Otherwise Top 40 kids scrunched their eyebrows tight when The Haxan Cloak's Excavation rumbled on the speakers before his Yeezus tour dates, and Gesaffelstein can't get any press without his work on "Black Skinhead" being mentioned. The rapper doesn't just stick to the underground of course...he's done a whole album with Jay Z and recently released a single featuring Paul McCartney. And then it turns out that many of his fans have no idea who the former Beatle is.
Seriously?
It's tough to say. Several publications have given reports consisting of tweets where the user suggests that this McCartney guy is going to be huge. But can the reports be trusted? For the most part we vote "no." Many of the posts cited strike us, someone with a very dry sense of humor, as dry humor. E! and other media seem to have taken the bait however.
One very obvious example is a tweet from Desus Nice, a less than mainstream but still fairly prominent comedic name who hosts a podcast for Complex. He tweeted that "Kanye has a great ear for talent. This Paul McCartney guy gonna be huge." E! lists the tweet among many as part of its righteous outrage but didn't research the source...Nice's program is almost nothing but pop culture commentary and he most certainly knows who's in The Beatles.
Most of the tweets featured follow a similar format—obviously comedic attempts—despite the writers' lack of celebrity status.
Follow-ups to all the accounts quoted in the articles seem to suggest that the writer, while not a Beatles fan per se, knew who the biggest living musician was. We can all calm down now.
