Kanye West shines an unwitting spotlight



It'll probably surprise absolutely nobody at all to hear that, despite being among Twitter's most prolific users, Kanye doesn't seem particularly bothered about hearing other people's thoughts. In fact, for the first few weeks, so excited was the rapper with having a new platform to air his every grammatically-questionable deliberation, 24 hours a day, West hadn't decided to 'follow' a single person.

But this was to change on July 31, when the 33-year-old rapper bizarrely elected to tag one solitary individual, a 19-year-old student from the English town of Coventry. Steven Holmes, having merely commented on a picture Kanye had posted via Twitter, was suddenly designated the rapper's Tweeter of choice, informed that, 'You are the chosen one. Dun dun dun."

Instant web-fame came quickly knocking at Holmes door, and his followers catapulted from 60 to over 1,000 in an hour.

"My phone wouldn't stop bleeping," he told his local newspaper, The Coventry Telegraph, the only interview media-shy Holmes agreed to give, adding that people began sending him film trailers and music demos. However, the international interest wasn't something Holmes wanted, and he deleted his iPhone's Twitter application in an attempt to get some peace, tweeting 'not everyone wants to be famous'.

"The funny thing is," Holmes told The Coventry Telegraph, "I like his music, but I'm not his biggest fan."

Kanye no longer follows Steven Holmes, although most of the 5,000 Twitter users who followed him still remain. He's still choosing to just follow one person, although this time it's someone unlikely to be running away from the attention: Oprah Winfrey.