Kanye West - BRITS 2015

Arguably one of Kanye West's most well known and controversial modern performances was his appearance on the 2015 BRIT awards. He chose to, rather than appear on his own and sing his music, appear on the awards show with a large number of men, some of who are the biggest names in the up and coming hip hop and grime scene such as Stormzy, Skepta and Krept and Konan. They appear dressed all in black and with may of them wearing caps or with their hoods up. This image that they promote would fit with their 'criminal' representation that goes with artists of their genre and skin colour. The flamethrowers that light the stage adds to the violent and fear inducing performance.

By choosing to do this, and actually being able to do this, shows the influence and power that someone with such status has over big companies such as ITV (who host the BRITS) as not everybody would be allowed to do what he done. In the performance, Kanye uses the 'N' word at least three times. This is in no way a support of racism or slavery but in fact the word has become a colloquialism against racism and from Kanye West is it almost satirical due to his many comments upon slavery and black history in song such as 'New Slaves' and 'Blood on the Leaves'. 

As the Daily Mail reports, the performance left 'Taylor Swift and Lionel Richie open-mouthed', this description of the performance is, I assume, negative yet open-mouthed can be just as positive as it is positive and the way the Daily Mail has presented it in an ambiguous way regarding the opinions of other artists leaves it open to interpretation from the audience. However, by including that 'viewers complain[ed]' about the fact that ITV had to mute the audio just shows how popular his fan base can be that they cause newspaper headlines purely over their collective voice on Twitter.

A very dominant ideology that people often throw about too much is freedom of speech, therefore by ITV muting Kanye's performance some were understandably concerned. Yet, through the focus of exercising free speech many forget about the responsibility that comes with it and Kanye West does not appear to be bothered about his responsibility to middle aged, ITV viewers who expected a quiet night in listening to Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith.