Isn’t 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’ acceptance speech with a drunken tirade about how Beyonce deserved the award for Best Video.
I bet if you’ve never listened to one of West’s CDs you might think he’s a complete idiot, but that couldn’t be any further from the truth, and it took two guys that didn’t know their multiplication tables to show me that.
Those two guys were in my 10th 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.
One day when my teacher left for a restroom break, one of them turned on the TV to BET, where a music video titled “All Falls Down” 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, “You’ve got to listen to this (expletive), he’s the (expletive) truth.”
So I listened and was amazed at these thoughtful rhymes West rapped:
“I say f**k the police, that’s how I treat ‘em/We buy our way out of jail, but we can’t buy freedom/We’ll buy a lot of clothes, but we don’t really need ‘em/Things we buy to cover up what’s inside.”
I was shocked that those two guys, who wore some of the nicest clothes I’ve ever seen, agreed with West’s 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.
“So 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?”
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 “dumb” kids.
As Thomas Dewar said, “minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.”