Lil’ Wang aka Weezy F. Roosevelt (or whatever his other nicknames are) caused a kerfuffle this week because he didn’t seem to be acutely aware of the inner workings of the Black Lives Matter movement when asked about it during an interview. That being said, asking a guy who can barely stay vertical on a skateboard due to the heroic amounts of codeine that fuels his every waking hour his views on anything political is just fishing for outrage on the part of the interviewer. Wayne has a storied history of what I like to regard as Acts of Deliberate Trolling, such as the time that he said that mixtapes were bullshit despite the fact that he built most of his fanbase from said ‘tapes’ and being publicly photographed kissing his mentor/boss/father Baby on the mouf.

I’ve always found the tabloid journalism technique of putting the hard questions to certified space-cases in the music game a rather dull form of picking the lowest-hanging fruit. That doesn’t only apply to rap, but the entire spectrum of drug-addled rockers, pill-popping pop stars and booze-soaked singers who have been tapped for a predictably moronic/ill-advised soundbite over the years, dating back to The Beatles claiming that his band were becoming ‘more popular than Jesus’ in 1966. John Lennon was clearly trolling the American Bible Belt for free publicity, ammirite?

The interview process can often be frustrating. I’ve often found that certain artists are either just plain boring, totally disinterested in talking about anything outside of ‘how great the new album is’ or just too stoned to offer anything worthwhile. When faced with this, one option is to throw caution to the wind and start asking ‘edgy’ questions about how many times they’ve been arrested soliciting the services of street walkers or dive straight in for some old fashioned toilet humour. The other approach is to direct a line of questioning which is almost certainly guaranteed to get a nonsensical response, such as asking DMX his thoughts on Google, Flavor Flav for relationship advice, or Wiz Khalifa about anything that doesn’t involve weed.

But perhaps I’m being far too generous here, and Wayne’s unfortunate outburst may simply be another case of a musician too damn high for TV. This time-honoured tradition has given us many glorious moments over the years, the best of which have occurred at award show ceremonies. Kanye vs. Taylor Swift immediately springs to mind, but that wasn’t shit compared to the amazing antics of the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who stumbled onto stage dressed to the nines to announce to the world that “Puffy is good but Wu-Tang is the best! Wu-Tang is for the children!” I was lucky enough to see that whole incident live on the boob tube, and it still rules the roost in terms of being both completely out-of-control and totally bad-ass in equal measure.

The king of such fuckery is still, to this day, Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. Here’s an incident recounted to me by Stetsasonic drummer Bobby Simmons recently:

“We met Prince prior to that in Minneapolis. He came to see our show when we played the First Avenue club when we did the Public Enemy ‘Bring The Noise’ tour. He was standing against the wall and he had on this long, black trenchcoat and black gloves and shit, when his hair was real long, like that Graffiti Bridge looking hair-do. Flavor Flav spotted him in the back while Public Enemy was performing. Flav said, ‘We understand we in Minneapolis, we in “Prince Town”, but PE is up in the motherfucker! Let me tell y’all something – fuck Prince! Let me hear you say “Fuck Prince!”‘ The funny thing is everyone in the audience knew he was there and he got the audience to say it. ‘Fuck Prince!’ [laughs] I’m not sure if he was on cocaine or he was drunk, but I was like, ‘Yo Flav, you buggin! What is wrong with you dude?’ [laughs]”

In the case of the unfortunate Earl Simmons aka Dark Man X, his once amusing public antics have long since become a sad reflection of a man on the losing end of a lifetime struggle with addiction. I’m not sure if he was getting as high as often when he was selling ten million CDs at a time, but when you’re at the top of your game any such behaviour can be written off as ‘exhaustion.’ Does the same fate await Lil Wayne in 10 years time when he’s blown all his money on cargo shorts and hair care products and is reduced to drinking cough syrup out of a medicine bottle because he can’t even afford a red plastic cup of Sprite to mix it with? All signs point to ‘yes.’