Celebs speak out about Kanye-gaffe

Celebrities piled on the anti-Kanye West bandwagon Monday, a day after the rapper grabbed a microphone from Taylor Swift, as she was accepting an MTV award for Best Female Video, and said, "I'm sorry, but Beyoncé did one of the best videos of all time."

Pink said on Monday's "Today" show that she would have used brass knuckles on Kanye if he had done that to her. "I just think he's an idiot. He's just a waste. He's just a toolbox." She posted on Twitter: "He is the biggest ... on earth. Quote me." (She's back with Hard Rock tattooer Carey Hart, by the way.)

Kellie Pickler: "Kanye, go grow some ... ! don't mess w/my lil sis!!"

Adam Lambert: "Kanye needs to chill. He freaks out every year. It ain't that deep man."

Kanye was seen drinking from a Hennessy bottle around showtime.

Donald Trump called for a Kanye boycott.

This tempest in a teapot went political. The Washington Post asked: "Separated at Birth: Kanye West and Joe Wilson?" Right, last week, South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson interrupted President Barack Obama's speech to Congress by yelling, "You lie!"

Free speech is nothing if it doesn't also open the mouths of such crazy people, so congratulations, First Amendment! Joe Wilson. Kanye. But Saturday, after Serena Williams cursed a U.S. Open judge, she essentially got booted and lost her bid to win the tennis tourney.

All three have apologized. Wilson said he apologized after GOP peers implored him to. Then came Williams: "I need to make it clear to all young people that I handled myself inappropriately."

Kanye's mea culpa: "I'm sooooo sorry to Taylor Swift and her fans and her mom. I spoke to her mother right after and she said the same thing my mother would've said. She is very talented!"

But did you notice? Wilson and Williams apologized with press releases; Kanye on Twitter. All three were bold enough to yell on TV. None had the courage to apologize first via vocal cords. (What did you think of Kanye on Jay Leno's new show last night?)

A LITTLE MORE CIVIL

A few days before Kanye's MTV rant, I was talking with R&B singer-songwriter John Legend -- he performs Friday at Red Rock ($60-$90) -- about Kanye's skills. Legend co-wrote with Kanye a song too appropriately titled "Selfish."

What was it like working with Kanye?

"He's very hands on. He's a genius," Legend told me. "He just has a sense of what's cool and what's fresh. And he keeps working it. He's tenacious about getting it right. I work with very few people that have the quality of ideas he has and the hard work" ethics.

I asked Legend's people Monday if he wanted to comment on Kanye's outburst. He declined.

But that's not surprising. Legend is the opposite of Kanye in a way: He avoids controversies.

He spends way more time as a charity machine, in concert with corporations.

Legend worked with a laundry detergent company to help repair a suburb of New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina. He worked with a clothes company to raise money for medicine for people with HIV in Africa. And his own Show Me charity helps kids and families in Harlem and Tanzania.

Show Me pushes education reform in Tanzania. It pays for fertilizer and farmer education, so families can free up children for school. And it funds school meals. His charity and others are making a difference, he says.

"The rate of malaria is going way down. Deaths from malaria are way down. Crop yields are up. And the number of students going to school is going up," he says.

He visited Tanzania and saw firsthand the troubles there.

"The roads are pretty bad. There's no electricity in the places where we were working. There's access to very contaminated drinking water that we helped alleviate," Legend says.

"Pretty much anything you can imagine that's the normal everyday infrastructure that we have over here, they just don't have.

"It bums me out, but I'm not one to dwell on being upset about something. I'm one to say, 'What can I do to help?' "

At the risk of sounding like a mom, why can't Kanye be more like John Legend?

THANK YOU

Thanks for the outpouring about my Monday column on my dad. I posted on my blog some of the many sweet e-mails readers sent.

Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.