Mr. West! Mr. West!

So I went to the Kanye West show that MTV Canada put on last week. The good folks at MTV were nice enough to give me a ticket - it was a small show - five hundred people, maybe a few more - at the Masonic Temple here in Toronto. They taped the whole thing for a future broadcast, but I have to admit that I wasn't so sure that the whole thing was going to be any good. You know, getting the big star to come in for a launch party, I expected a few songs and a quick exit.

I was a whole new level of wrong. KW brought it for close to two hours, and what was so amazing about the whole thing was that there was almost nothing in the audience to feed off of. He had a tiny audience, many of whom were unfamiliar with any song that didn't have "Gold Digger" in the title.

Still, song after song. There were a few hiccups, and a few false starts. But for the most part, I was watching someone who is better at his job than most of us will ever be at ours.

Best part of the whole evening was something that I had heard was happening at other shows. He played "Gold Digger," introducing the song as something for "all those people who haven't bought the albums." Nothing if not self-aware, our Kanye. When it came to the chorus, though - you know the part of the song where "Gold Digger" is rhymed with "broke n-word" he played the clean version, where he just says "broke, broke" instead of anything more inflammatory. At the end of the song, though, he turned to the audience - remember, this is 500 white people who are all somehow connected to MTV (hardly the most diverse crowd ever) - and says, "All you white people in the audience, this is your only chance to say (bad n-word that I really don't want to write). go ahead and say it, but this is your only chance. Don't want to hear you saying this when you leave the concert and telling people Kanye West said it was okay."

He then went on to do the "unclean" version, with 500 mostly-white Canadians singing along and gleefully yelling out a word that normally none of us would even whisper. It was strange and amazing and quite incredible. It would have been better had the audience been more mixed – I think there is a sort of immersive point he is making about integration that gets lost if the audience isn't a little less homogeneous – but if nothing else, it was a lesson in the way that a crowd of people will do things that an individual never would. Or in the way that we will all do anything for Kanye West.

Yeah, yeah, we're selling out MySpace, too.

But I refuse to feel guilty about it.

Y'all know MySpace - the big social networking site that also acts as a marketing platform for, well, everyone - right? If you don't, you can check it out: people and bands and now everyone else create homepages and link to a network of friends. I'm on it; as are some of my friends; and some of the bands that I like, too.

Increasingly, the Fox-purchased behemoth - it went for something like a floppity-jillion dollars just a few months ago - has been used by non-musicians to market their products. It's another example of the way that young people don't differentiate between their consumer choices, their cultural choices, and their social choices - it all gets rolled up into one.

So since MySpace has billed itself as being an advertiser's haven, we thought we would use it, and have created a campaign for BBCKids called "Rated K" that we're pretty happy with. The client didn't have a massive budget, but did have a real commitment to doing something interesting and relevant (yay!) and let us bust a move on this one. Part of what we're doing is creating MySpace pages for each of the shows that we want to highlight, like this one for Little Britain.

What's amazing is how quickly MySpace has gone from being this sort of authentic, user-created and user-managed website to a massive corporate shill. It's not that I mind - I'm a just amazed, in that five or six years ago (at the height of No Logo mania) there would have been a massive backlash to this sort of direct corporate involvement. Now there isn't, and I am glad about that: truthfully, I think this is far more authentic, far more real, and makes the involvement of marketing in culture more overt, which is how we need to treat it. Yes, this is a marketing program, and yes, this works best for cultural marketing (as opposed to a detergent brand, say - no one wants to be connected to Tide's MySpace page). But if you like Doctor Who or Hollyoaks, you want to be connected to them, even to their marketing initiatives (just as young people have always wanted to be connected to the bands that they love: what is 60s-era fanclub membership but a beta version of being connected to a band's MySpace page?). This just seems like a more authentically responsive connection to marketing, as it continues to live in our culture and play by our culture's rules. If it's good, why not endorse it? That sentiment is light-years removed from where we were at the turn of the millennium, where marketing was bad, period. Like most other things, it's just a tool, and blaming the problems of business or the problems of consumer culture on marketing makes about as much sense as thinking we're all immune to it.