Ok, now you're entering the realm of delusion.
You'd have to be homeless, no...homeless and living in the woods to escape the news story of him interrupting Taylor Swift at the MTV awards.
Did you forget the big deal people made out of him pretty much calling George Bush a racist? Not to mention the time Obama called him an asshole. lol, the guy can directly be linked in the media to two different presidents.
This isn't even including his #1 albums and the hits he's had. I'm not gonna say he's more popular then Brittney(yet), but to say "Most people wouldn't recognize Kanye if the tripped over him on a sidewalk":bizzaro:
Are these the same people that wouldn't recognize Taylor Swift, Beyonce, or Jay-Z? Cause Kanye's linked pretty heavily to all 3 of them...
I couldn't name one song by any of the artists in this post. I could probably hum a few Beyonce ones because the girl who used to live next door to me would blast them out at 7:30am every day but I couldn't tell you what they were called.
That's another reason why most of today's acts are going to struggle for immortality, it's very easy for people to insulate themselves from popular music now.
Back in the 1980s when I was growing up there were only a few ways you could listen to music. We had 3 and a half TV channels and only one radio station playing pop music. On TV we had half an hour of Top of the Pops on Thursday and another half hour of The Chart Show on a Saturday morning. I was a bit too young to watch The Tube or The Old Grey Whistle Test but in hindsight I wish I'd made the effort. If you wanted to listen to anything outside what was being offered by the media then you had to go out and spend money on records and that ate up a big chunk of your money back then.
Consequently everyone listened to the same thing whether they wanted to or not. Everyone from toddlers to great-grandparents knew all the hits and all the stars. Take Michael Jackson for example; I've never been a fan of his, never bought one of his albums and, as far as I can remember, I've never gone out of my way to listen to one of his songs. Yet recently I filled in on bass for a band and had to learn three MJ songs. I found that I knew the structure and changes of all three songs instantly; I had one play through them all and then played them on stage with no problems. All his hits are deeply ingrained in me because there was no way to avoid them back then.
Nowadays there are so many avenues available for finding and listening to music that everyone can pretty much tailor their soundtrack to suit their own tastes
Compare the 80s to my life now: the only time I ever switch the radio on is to listen to Test Match Special; I hardly ever watch TV and when I do it is never anything contemporary music based; I haven't got children and none of my friends or relatives listen to chart music. This means that there is no possible situation where I will find myself knowingly listening to the artists you listed. I have heard his stuff obviously, in pubs or in shops, but when I hear music like that I will just filter it into one of two categories:
Shit or
Not Shit. If it's
Not Shit then I will try to find out who the artist is, if it's
Shit then I just let it drop out of my brain. The fact that I've never come up with Kanye West in my
Not Shit research despite his apparent ubiquity probably means that he keeps falling into the
Shit category.
Thinking about it, I actually have three categories
Not Shit,
Shit and
So Shit It Can Only Be Black Eyed Peas. That's another way to live forever I suppose, to be so catastrophically bad that you will always be remembered as a benchmark for just how shit music can be.