Missed Kanye twitter rant last night?

WHEN KANYE WEST rants, we all win.

When Kanye West rants directly at another artist, though? That’s when Twitter itself wins.

In particular, that’s when Twitter finds a decent use for its storytelling tool known as Moments. The social-media platform launched the function last October. It was, the company said, a means of distilling Twitter—to give you the feel of following all the relevant stories going on without actually, y’know, following all the stories going on.

Every day, people share hundreds of millions of Tweets. Among them are things you can’t experience anywhere but on Twitter: conversations between world leaders and celebrities, citizens reporting events as they happen, cultural memes, live commentary on the night’s big game, and many more. We know finding these only-on-Twitter moments can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t followed certain accounts. But it doesn’t have to be.

Sounds good, right? Problem was, Moments started as a notification-spamming annoyance, spiked to be a punchline, and then plateaued into mere irrelevance. On any given day, tapping that Moments tab—steeling yourself all the while—would deliver to your waiting eyes such smash hits as News Headline, Straight-Faced Sportsball Recap, and Not Particularly Funny Person Talking About Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. What it didn’t deliver were those things that were truly peculiar to the medium: Story Time Twitter, Crying Jordan, pro wrestling GIFs being used in creative ways.

Then Kanye got mad.

We’d be remiss here if we didn’t at least give some context, so here goes. Kanye’s got an album coming next month. First it was going to be called So Help Me God, then he changed it to Swish, then yesterday he announced that he was changing it to Waves. (“This isn’t the album of the year,” he tweeted. “This is the album of the life.” Gotta believe in yourself.)

The thing is, that word has more of an intellectual-property debate going on around than most other slang terms. Harlem’s rap game Salvador Dali, Max B., popularized it in the mid-’00s, and it slowly morphed from a catch-all adjective of dopeness (“wavy”) to a noun representing any creative movement. (“Movement” was also a thing for a while, but what it possessed in grandeur it lacked in agility. Movements are stolid and institutional. Waves are forces of nature!) Max B. partisan Wiz Khalifa—who, lest you forget, has a child with Kanye’s ex-girlfriend Amber Rose—didn’t love that Kanye was using the word for his album title, so he tweeted something about it. Subliminal shots fired, whatever, move on. But then, mere hours later, he tweeted something about weed.
This, for Wiz, is like your tweet about a bad commute, or your excitement over the Deadpool trailer. It just is. At a cellular level, Wiz Khalifa is like 37% weed. But he also has his own strain, “Khalifa Kush.” There’s a song about it. He refers to it as “KK,” and because he’s 37% weed, he does that a lot. But hey, guess which woman Kanye is married to also has those initials? LET’S GET READY TO TWEETSTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORM!

So Kanye goes off. Like, off. And in doing so, he actually stumbled into a really nice workaround for the open-ended tweetstorm problem that forces people to use “(1/?)” to label their narratively linked tweets. He fired his joints off like commandments.

If you don’t want to hear Charlton Heston saying that in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, then we can’t be friends.

At any rate, Kanye talked about Wiz. He talked about Wiz’s pants. He talked about Amber Rose. At some point, Wiz Khalifa pointed out that he was talking about weed, not Kim Kardashian, and eventually Kanye deleted his rant and replaced it with a more heal-the-world message. (Which is really too bad for all of us, but that’s what shift-command-4 is for.) But Twitter, against all odds, finally had something worthy of the term “Twitter Moment,” and they wasted no time in jumping on it. “Why are Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa arguing on Twitter?” their headline blared.

Thankfully, they didn’t answer their own question, which is why pieces like this one now exist. But more important is the fact that something real happened, and they were there for it. The spirit of Twitter was finally distilled: megalomania that you can’t help being entertained by.

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From Wired.com