A bemused Rebecca Moore wonders what's the attraction of this celebrity couple
A few years ago I arrived at my best friend’s home only for her to immediately hurry me into the living room, thrust a glass of white wine into my hand and excitedly declare: ohmeegaad, the Kardashians are on! You don’t mind if we watch, do you?
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, so I shook my head, sipped the wine and succumbed to the most mindless half hour of my entire life.
Having not long returned to my home town after a year or so travelling – in which television and celebrity shenanigans had been completely off radar – I was aghast at what was unfolding before me. I felt like a soldier returning from the horrors of war, to a country I had nearly died defending, only to find everything I held dear had been uprooted and violated regardless.
OK, that could be overstating. But I certainly felt betrayed by my home people: how could my best friend enjoy this? Perhaps we weren’t – as we had once exclaimed – sistas from another mista, after all. We may as well have been strangers. What had happened to civilised society?
Don’t worry, I said to myself, it’ll pass. I leaned back, gulped my wine and waited for it all to be over.
Fast forward to 2014 and everywhere I look I see Kim – famous-for-botox – Kardashian. And then always just over her shoulder, there’s Kanye West, that denizen of polite society. Nobody seems to remember the Taylor Swift incident in which he jumped onstage at the MTV Awards to tell the world that the poor young love (awkwardly clinging to her award live on stage behind him) didn’t actually deserve the accolade as much as his good friend Beyonce who was sitting aghast in the front row.
Frankly, the man becomes more like a parody of a human being every time I see him, which is, increasingly, far too much.
I’m beginning to hope that he is indeed an elaborate joke, in the same way that Ali G was.
These two personalities simply can’t be real human beings. Here is a man who can rap a love-song with such banal lyrics as “Baby, we should hit the south of France, so you could run around without them pants” and the toe-curling “I put an angel in your ultra-sound” as a way of referring to the couple’s child with a straight face.
However, I realise I am increasingly alone in this opinion on the pair. Recently, I spoke with a young girl who absolutely idolised the Kardashians, Kim especially. “She’s just so perfect,” the deluded girl purred in response to my questioning why anyone would wish to be KK. “She’s so beautiful – she’s had the perfect amount of cosmetic work: preventative and certainly not overdone.”
The woman is 33 and has had the “perfect” amount of cosmetic work? Forgive me if I’m wrong but surely at the age of 33 the perfect amount of cosmetic surgery should be ZERO – unless of course you are the lovechild of Quasimodo and Cher in which case you could be forgiven for succumbing to the scalpel for a little timely touch-up.
I don’t know quite what it is that offends me about this couple but I do know is that I feel sorry for anyone who wishes to be just like them.
Not because that would require being deluded and materialistic, no.
But because here are people who have no qualms having a camera crew invade their privacy, who have no shame that the main reason for Kim’s fame stems from a “leaked” sex-tape and awkwardly-angled selfies, and who – most offensively of all – believes that it’s perfectly fine to rap France with pants as a declaration of true-love.
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