I Am Better at Something Than Kanye!

"Do you know any famous people now?". This is the kind of question you ask a mediocre band from the sticks that you're covering for the school magazine. The kind of question you ask when your only interview research has been a quick poke around on Wikipedia at 3am. This is not the kind of question you ask Rihanna for an expose in Interview magazine. Scratch that. It is the kind of question you ask the Barbadian bombshell if you're Kanye West because, frankly, if you're Kanye, you can get away with just about anything.

This article was initially meant to be a puff piece. A witty web item chronicling the worst of celebrity interviews but, in giving Mr. West's interview my undivided attention, something more profound bloomed from my rather inane intentions. Kanye's piece on Rihanna from the usually intrusively candid, well-researched Interview taught me something that I know will serve my confidence well for the rest of my journalistic career: I am better at something than Kanye West.

I know that information is hard to digest. Yeezy is, after all, the man that bought us arguably the best pop song of the past five years (Love Lockdown, in case you even needed to ask), the sweetest kicks of the decade (what self-respecting individual wouldn't want to get their feet into a pair of Air Yeezys?) and the most awkward awards show moment, well, ever. But what Mr. West's interview with everyone's favourite Barbadian Rihanna taught me is that, although my sweetest kicks are a pair of well-worn Crocs, I can interview better than Kanye!

Kanye West has reached that rarefied echelon of celebrity where he can make an A-grade dick of himself and actually come out of the scandal stronger and infinitely cooler than before. Presumably, I will never be able to change my Facebook user picture to an illustration of myself having sex with a mythical creature. Doing so would attract the disdain and ridicule of acquaintances, distant relatives and that girl from primary school that I only added because her ugly boyfriend and rosacea made me feel better about myself. Kanye, on the other hand, can slap a painting by a divisive contemporary artist of himself making sweet love to a phoenix on the cover of an internationally distributed album and reap the praise of critics everywhere.

MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY

But tonight, dear reader, I and many other writers can sleep sound in the knowledge that, although we may not be blessed with the killer rhymes, sweet designer threads or bootylicious babes of the self-professed "soldier of culture", by God, we can conduct better interviews. At the very least, we sure as hell wouldn't ask Rihanna, "Have you been in fake movies before? You said this is the first real movie.".

And never let it be said that Kanye doesn't have a deeper side. He certainly wasn't afraid to probe beneath the icy, manufactured celebrity veneer to search out the 'real' Rihanna: "Do you have a vulnerable side? Because in a lot of the sin