You gotta be careful what you read late at night because when you’re sleep deprived anything, no matter how preposterous, can start to make sense. So the other night when I stumbled across an article that suggested that Jay-Z is devil-worshipping member of the Illuminati, all I could think was, “Well, at least that explains why he’s never made a protest album!”
Similarly, it was about 3:30 in the morning when I first heard that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates had been arrested. “Well, at least now he’ll be famous,” I thought. I was right too. I just didn’t know how right at the time. The good professor got bagged because some loony neighbor mistook him and his driver trying to pry a stuck door open for a couple of robbers. After the cops arrived and it was determined that the home in question was indeed Gates’, neither party could leave well enough alone and Gates was busted on a disorderly conduct rap. When President Obama suggested that the arresting officer acted “stupidly“, the case went national.
I slept through the MTV Awards and woke up at about 2 AM to the news that during the show, hip hop superstar Eminem had been hit in the face by the butt of Sacha Baron Cohen-formerly the star of Borat, now the star of Bruno. Em had just released his album Relapse that despite good sales, had all the buzz of a dead bee. “Good move,” I remember thinking about Em’s situation. “That’ll quiet the noise that you’re homophobic and you’ll be a hot topic of discussion for another week or two.”
But let’s say I’m not just a bitter old cynic-we all know I am, but let’s say I’m not. Let’s say none of these moves were contrived and that they were all genuine. The question then becomes which would you emulate to experience a similar level of success?
In short, if you could achieve all the fame and fortune that you ever desired, which would you rather do: devil-worship, get arrested, or take a same-sex butt in the face?
