Shortly after Michael Jackson’s death, a sketchy website posted a made-up item about Kanye West claiming he’d declared himself the new King of Pop and had even contacted the Jackson family seeking permission to use the title. Fake quotes attributed to Kanye have been bouncing around the blogosphere since then, but the news only blew up this week, after it was picked up by a few larger, similarly disreputable sites on Monday. Idolator debunked the whole thing all the way back on Tuesday, but only now, today, an entire month after the story first hit the Internet, Kanye himself finally found out about it (he heard it on the radio, apparently) and issued the predictable all-caps denial on his blog. Is it really possible that music’s biggest egotist doesn’t have a Google News Alert set up for his own name? The Internet was even more wrong about this guy than we thought.
I WAS JUST LISTENING TO WENDY WILLIAMS [KanyeUniverseCity]