Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa's impossibly dumb Twitter fight, explained

Rap stars spar on social media.
(Image credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images for iHeartMedia)

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:

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Scott Meslow

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.