Isn\u2019t it funny how sometimes the dumbest people say the smartest things?<\/p>\n
Take rapper Kanye West for example. This Grammy award-winning rapper made a complete fool of himself last summer at the MTV Music Video Awards, when he interrupted singer Taylor Swifts\u2019 acceptance speech with a drunken tirade about how Beyonce deserved the award for Best Video.<\/p>\n
I bet if you\u2019ve never listened to one of West\u2019s CDs you might think he\u2019s a complete idiot, but that couldn\u2019t be any further from the truth, and it took two guys that didn\u2019t know their multiplication tables to show me that.<\/p>\n
Those two guys were in my 10th <\/sup>grade math class. They clowned around the entire hour, made fun of other students and when it was time to turn in homework, they copied off others.<\/p>\n One day when my teacher left for a restroom break, one of them turned on the TV to BET, where a music video titled \u201cAll Falls Down\u201d by Kanye West was being played. Since those two were usually loud and obnoxious, I was surprised when they fell silent to focus on the video. Then one said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to listen to this (expletive), he\u2019s the (expletive) truth.\u201d<\/p>\n So I listened and was amazed at these thoughtful rhymes West rapped:<\/p>\n \u201cI say f**k the police, that\u2019s how I treat \u2018em\/We buy our way out of jail, but we can\u2019t buy freedom\/We\u2019ll buy a lot of clothes, but we don\u2019t really need \u2018em\/Things we buy to cover up what\u2019s inside.\u201d<\/p>\n I was shocked that those two guys, who wore some of the nicest clothes I\u2019ve ever seen, agreed with West\u2019s thoughts on culture and it made me look at them differently. Months later West pulled off something unprecedented: He made a hip-hop song about Jesus that got played on the radio and he did it by using reverse psychology in his rap.<\/p>\n \u201cSo here go my single dog radio needs this\/They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus\/That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes\/But if I talk about God my record won’t get played, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n With those rhymes, West identified himself as one of the most powerful voices in music and taught me that there is something to be learned from everybody, even an eccentric rapper and two \u201cdumb\u201d kids.<\/p>\n As Thomas Dewar said, \u201cminds are like parachutes \u2013 they only function when open.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Isn\u2019t it funny how sometimes the dumbest people say the smartest things? Take rapper Kanye West for example. This Grammy award-winning rapper made a complete fool of himself last summer at the MTV Music Video Awards, when he interrupted singer Taylor Swifts\u2019 acceptance speech with a drunken tirade about how Beyonce deserved the award for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[468,1040,1402],"class_list":["post-4428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news","tag-kanye-west","tag-open-minded","tag-samuel-huist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-19q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4428"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4460,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions\/4460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}