Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa's impossibly dumb Twitter fight, explained
Decades from now, when historians go back to analyze this thing we call Twitter, they'll be able to point to one day that simultaneously exemplified the apex and the nadir of the medium: January 27, 2016, when an almost impossibly dumb tweet-feud broke out between rappers Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa.
The trouble began around 13 hours earlier, when Khalifa tweeted some fairly benign thoughts about the new title of Kanye's upcoming album, WAVES, arguing that Max B — a hip-hop artist currently serving a 75-year sentence for murder — is the true "wavy one." Seven hours after that tweetstorm, Khalifa tweeted this:
It's here that Kanye took objection — interpreting "kk" as a veiled reference to his wife, Kim Kardashian. He responded with his own long, angry tweetstorm, full of shots at Khalifa and his ex-wife, Amber Rose, who previously dated Kanye:
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Khalifa quickly responded:
This might sound like an unconvincing dodge. But Urban Dictionary — surely the most authoritative source for such things — backs Khalifa up: The sixth most popular definition for "KK" is "Khalifa Kush." Khalifa Kush even has its own page on the marijuana review site Leafly, which calls it a hybrid with notes of "sour lemon and pine" that was bred specifically for Khalifa.
No matter. Kanye, perhaps sensing his mistake, pivoted by starting a hashtag for Khalifa's cool pants:
Kanye went on for another 19 tweets, and you can check them out here if you care, but trust me — it didn't get any better than that.
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Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.
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