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I Trolled a Group Trying to Stop Kanye West from Playing Ottawa

Seriously, Ottawa—what's up with you guys?

Kanye West performing at the Museum of Modern Art, because if Ottawa doesn't want him there are plenty of places that do. Photo via Flickr user Jason Persse

This post originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The sleepy government town of Ottawa awoke Monday to some decidedly cosmopolitan news: Kanye West had been added as the undisputed headliner of their annual Bluesfest outdoor music festival.

The event has been broadening from its blues roots for a decade, boasting recent headliners like Skrillex, Iron Maiden, Girl Talk, Kiss, LMFAO, and Lady Gaga alongside festival mainstays like Tragically Hip, Weezer, and Black Keys (who seem contractually obligated to play any music festival you'll ever attend in perpetuity).

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The Bluesfest lineup is sort of what you want a mass-market music festival to include: a weeklong menu of artists and styles staggered over ebbs and flows of elation, disappointment, discovery, and bros vomiting into their food truck butter chicken.

Except, of course, for hippity-hopper Kanye West.

It wasn't long before the internet's ultimate tool of flaccid discord—the closed Facebook group—was summoned to shake Bluesfest organizers to their senses: Kanye West can't be allowed to mar the festival's lineup of chaste, ego-less performers chosen for their adherence to the event's unshakable orthodoxy to the blues tradition. There was still time, as several suggested, to replace him with the Foo Fighters, or the Rolling Stones.

The group's creator was interviewed for Ottawa's Metro, and an online petition to "replace him with a better artist" garnered, at time of writing, over 1,000 signatures. (A similar petition protesting West's appearance at England's Glastonbury Festival has over 130,000.)

Unable to resist the urge to pan for the potential nuggets of precious social performance buried inside, I made my request to join the group, and was promptly accepted.

The group's contents read like a checklist of cultural projection: constructions of West as juvenile, criminal, misogynist, and arrogant; labored appeals to impressionable youth; what seemed to be obvious racial discomfort expertly repackaged as musical preference. One commenter communicated his hope for a repeat of the 2011 stage collapse during a set by veteran rockers Cheap Trick, which injured three people.

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So, as anyone jaded by the language of the internet might do, I saved my rousing, persuasive sociological essay for the shower and came up with a far more amusing solution: fucking around with them instead.

Trolling is, as I've argued before, an often misunderstood tactic; when people use the term they tend to conflate a wide range of undesirable activities that attack and marginalize others with the more valuable act of co-opting the language of a particular platform in order to highlight hypocrisy or disingenuousness among its ideals.

In accordance, my mocking post mostly tumbled over group members' heads like a Flaming Lips beach ball, though a thread of dispatches from within the group rippled through my and others' social networks.

Facebook screenshot

Since Monday, the group has upped its media savvy considerably, becoming publicly accessible and softening its name from "Stop Kanye West at Ottawa Bluesfest" to the disarmingly vague "Kanye West at Ottawa Bluesfest?" Conversation has expanded to include everything from earnest challenges to the tone of discussion to red-meat "reverse racism" allegations from men's rights activists to unfocused cross-posts from the results of "Kanye West meme" image searches.

The takeaway from surges like these is always complicated.

Isolating the variable of racial discomfort, at least in a conclusive sense, is invariably problematic. This year's Bluesfest provides an interesting control in the form of fellow headliner Iggy Azalea, who arguably embodies the gamut of artistic critiques leveled against West but, as of this writing, has yet to attract even the loosest of organized opposition.

If Ottawans or Brits really have genuine concerns about the musical identity of annual festivals they feel invested in, there are a range of structural and institutional avenues they should feel free to pursue. Complaining on Facebook, as usual, isn't a very good way to solve anything.

Seb FoxAllen is a Toronto-based writer, satirist, and extremely fluky fantasy hockey player. Follow him on Twitter.