Evel Knievel isn't the sort of man you want as an enemy, since the last thing anyone wants is a rickety old man maliciously jumping over your car on his motorbike all night when you're trying to get some sleep.
Because that's what Evel Knievel does if you cross him, you see. Unless you're a millionaire rapper who makes a music video where you dress up in a vaguely Evel Knievel-ish outfit and do stunts, in which case Evel Knievel will probably just try to sue you instead, like he did with Kanye West – the only millionaire rapper so far to dress up like Evel Knievel and do stunts for a music video. Luckily, though, Kanye West has managed to see off Knievel's legal challenge against him with the aid of an undisclosed legal settlement and the world's most awkward impromptu photo session.
You know when two people meet and they're so similar that they can't get along? That's basically the case with Kanye West and Evel Knievel. One is a 69-year-old from Montana who made his living smashing his body to pieces while testing the limits of physics and human endurance via a spectacular succession of daredevil motorcycle stunts, and the other wrote a song called Drunk And Hot Girls once. Truly Evel Knievel and Kanye West are like peas in a pod.
Two peas that didn't especially like each other until recently, that is. Not only does Evel Knievel see himself more as a 50 Cent fan, but the video for Kanye West's Touch The Sky single riled him up a little too. Starring Kanye West as a stuntman character called Evel Kanyevel – who wore a costume similar to Knievel's and did a stunt that looked a lot like Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump of 1974 – Evel Knievel called the Touch The Sky video a "worthless piece of crap" that "harm[ed] the reputation of the Evel Knievel trademark" and promptly sued Kanye West for roughly everything he's got.
And although Kanye West was adamant that his video was a satire and therefore protected by the First Amendment, he's now reached a settlement with Knievel that's finally made the old man happy. According to Evel Knievel himself:
"I was very satisfied and so was he."
The settlement is completely undisclosed, so we'll never find out exactly how much money Kanye West paid Evel Knievel to shut up, but we'd imagine that it was a lot less than it could have been, because Kanye West sweetened the deal by heading down to Evel Knievel's home in Florida to say hello and iron out the settlement in person.
This will have helped enormously because it allowed Evel Knievel the chance to hear a human explanation for the video instead of the mildly threatening legal-speak he must have been sick of hearing from West's lawyers. And not only that, but it also gave Evel the opportunity to tell Kanye that, while he's ultimately a fan of his third-party production work for the likes of Common and Jay-Z, he essentially feels that his solo work is let down by an insidious complacency when it comes down to his assonance-heavy rhyming style. Word.
Read more:
The Other Dark Meat says
Kanye blew him.
I like that scarf, though.