Kanye West Shows Up At Occupy Wall Street Long Enough For The Internet To Freak Out About It

By Maura Johnston Mon., Oct. 10 2011 at 4:45 PM

Categories: Kanye West, Occupy Wall Street, Russell Simmons, This Is The News

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Harry Siegel

Protestwear by Givenchy.

Liveblogging the news that Kanye West was going to bring all his power to Occupy Wall Street, first broken to the world in a tweet from Russell Simmons, after the fact:

3:45 p.m.: Runnin' Scared's Rosie Gray informs me that Kanye is at OWS.

3:46 p.m.: Let the retweeting commence.

3:47 p.m.: Let the worrying commence.

3:52 p.m.: Rosie gets the green light to head down there.

3:56 p.m.: Trending topics in my personal Twitter feed: Curiosity about whether Kanye views himself as the 99% or the 1%; reworkings of the lyrics to "Power" and "Gold Digger"; more worry.

4:02 pm.: And just like that... he's gone.

4:12 p.m.: Rosie returns. M: "What should we post?" R: "I guess that he was there for a few minutes? And chatted with Russell Simmons? And apparently he wore a gold grill." (Also Givenchy.)

4:15 p.m.: Oh would you look at that, Simmons' web site GlobalGrind has the exclusive. The official statement:

"It was amazing to see how people loved seeing Kanye West at Occupy Wall Street. His music and his art has always been about the voice and the power of the people. Kanye just wanted to come down and experience the growing movement that has opened the eyes of many around this country and around the world of the struggles of poor people. The energy at Liberty Plaza was electrifying and the momentum to get the money out of politics is growing quickly."

And there you have it. Your move, Thom Yorke!

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