Kanye vs Taylor: Why are we such suckers for low-grade theatrics?

Oh great, here we go again. Kim Kardashian West, famous for being famous and wife of the slightly deranged rapper Kanye West, posted a video on Snapchat on Sunday.

It features Kanye West looking suspiciously like a normal person, speaking candidly with pop and country sensation Taylor Swift over the phone. It's from a while ago, and he's asking for her blessing. A song called "Famous", from his last album, The Life of Pablo, has a line which goes: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous."

She appreciates him asking, and sounds totally fine with it as a tongue-in-cheek sort of compliment. The word "bitch" doesn't make its way into the edited video so we don't know whether Kanye mentioned that part or not. Swift has since put up an Instagram post declaring that he didn't.

The whole thing has been going on since early this year. Some people (on the internet) are firmly on Swift's side, admonishing Kanye for his offensive, misogynistic words, which were followed by the bizarre video for "Famous", featuring nude wax figures of Kanye, Kim, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, George Bush, Bill Cosby, and a host of others lying in bed together, sleeping.

"A comment on fame," in his words - but she becomes the unwitting victim.

Others are treating the Snapchat video by Kardashian West as redemption for Kanye, a victory for truth, given how Swift's story has altered slightly following the video. An article on Vox refers to Swift as "cold-blooded", "shrewd", "savvy", and basically outs her as a manipulative liar. Isn't this all a little bit odd?

I get that it's human nature to pick a side in such serious conflicts that have far-ranging implications to our collective future. Team Kanye or Team Taylor are legitimate concerns; who knows, they might even be running for POTUS in a few years. But hello, let's not pretend to be so personally affronted by all this.

Pop stars aren't real people. They're caricatures, created in boardrooms by marketing geniuses - emotionless robots designed to provide us with passing entertainment. They'll release an album from time to time, and a tour to promote it. But ultimately, they exist mostly to just exist - on Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, in gossip columns of glossy magazines, and in our minds at all times.

They have pre-planned "feuds" and "b**fs", which eventually turn into "sagas" and "grudges" to keep them in the public eye. Everything is crafted with a striking degree of cynicism to get attention. The facts - is Kanye the bully here, tormenting Swift since 2009? Is Swift changing her story conveniently to swing the media narrative in her favour? - are something no one cares all that much about.

I'm being disingenuous of course, but it's a status we have voluntarily bestowed on them. We love it. It's moved beyond the point of guilty pleasure; in this case it's pure, guilt-free vicarious enjoyment at the expense of two talented artists who also happen to be great at marketing their celebrity status.

The fact that an Instagram video of Taylor Swift's brother, Austin, chucking Kanye's line of shoes, called Yeezy Boosts, a pair of which costs $950, into the trash after "Famous" first came out became news is only because we allowed it.

After a point, it becomes less important if something is done with or without irony. We revel in every public meltdown with glee because that's just the world we live in today. It's us, the consumers, who feed on this frenzy that allows it to get out of hand. We go on endlessly about a goofy laugh by Rahul Gandhi, or Arvind Kejriwal getting thwacked across the face yet again, or the prime minister getting the name of a country wrong by mistake, and then we whine about political theatre. This is much the same.

The pop stars may well be monsters, but we are the Dr Frankenstein character here. The stunts become such an integral part of the pop music circus that we start treating the artists as cartoon parodies to get faux-angry about. The art takes a backseat to the circus around it because we let it, and then we complain about it (like I'm doing right now).

It's a chicken-and-egg thing now, where I think blaming the artists is a cop-out. Swift or West being clever enough to capitalise on the interest in their personal and public personas, as a means to reach out to bigger audiences, make more money, and become more recognisable, doesn't diminish our role in the creation of this grand charade.

This could have been a great conversation (still can be) - about how black artists in the public eye are treated, about the underlying strain of misogyny in popular music or hip-hop. Despite all his claims, is Kanye legitimately a role model? Is Taylor Swift's idea of feminism a little dicey and self-serving? A question I'm personally wondering about is: Should we take lyrics in songs at face value in the first place, even if they're horribly offensive?

It's art, and should be treated as such, or at least analysed taking into account all the layers that could potentially exist behind the lyrics of a song (a case in point being "Rape Me" by Nirvana). But then, West didn't call me "that bitch" in his song; I don't have millions of fans; I haven't faced sexist abuse online and in the real world all my life. So it wouldn't be right for me to make an assertion either way.

But these nuanced discussions are inevitably stashed away on pages three, four, and beyond of a Google search. It's because they lack the fizz, the masala. So let's just accept it for what it is - low-grade theatrics - that we can't do without. It's a consensual act of public farce and long may it continue.