Albany Times Union
April 18 2015
Kimye’s trip yields a call to conscience
Posted on April 18, 2015 |
By Rex Smith
Truth be told, I am one of those clueless people who can’t keep
celebrities straight. This is not something for a journalist to brag
about, but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that as
I started to write this piece, I confused two huge celebrity couples.
It was Beyonce, not Kim Kardashian, whose pregnancy announcement, at
the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, set what was then a Twitter record,
of 8,868 tweets per second. That’s way more than Osama bin Laden’s
death and the tsunami in Japan recorded.
Beyonce is married to hip-hop musician and entrepreneur Jay Z, not to
hip-hop musician and entrepreneur Kanye West. She is a superstar
singer, not a – um, whatever it is that you might call Kim Kardashian.
What does she do, anyway?
And it was Kimye – the cute mash-up name for the couple whose toddler
is named North West, not Blue Ivy – who stepped boldly into
international politics last week. In fact, Kardashian emerged as voice
of conscience, a description rarely applied to a reality TV star,
which I guess is her occupation.