I remember the first person who introduced me to RJD2. The brass call-and-response sample off ""Ghostwriter"" trumpeted through my family room while Kobe Bryant threw a head-fake right, then dusted an entire defense with a pretty lay-up along the left-hand baseline.
I doubt I actually watched the NBA game the ESPN commercial was advertising, but I remember watching a game on TNT a few days later and looking for those same trumpets.
Mike D'Antoni's seven-seconds-or-less offense was in full swing. Raja Bell plucked the guitar strings with shut-down perimeter defense and a soft-spoken offense. Boris Diaw kept a steady beat with a soft mid-range touch and calculated passes. Shawn Marion chimed in with soulful harmonies while flying through the paint and sweeping in to collect boards. Everything came together in a steady flow, a perfectly constructed verse of humble parts overachieving as a whole.
Then it happened. Steve Nash took the outlet pass and swerved around traffic. Amare Stoudemire popped out to the top of the key, trapping a defender as Nash blew past. He ducked baseline, directing the orchestra straight into the opposing wing before blowing the rock toward an unattended basket. Stoudemire used one hand to hammer it home and the other to launch into the trumpet-led chorus. I was euphoric.
Basketball seems almost entirely alone in its ability to match music to its action, though.
Baseball players get to choose their own personal theme songs for each home at-bat, yet the sport itself remains utterly void of soundtrack. Budweiser called up Los Campesinos! for their Fall Classic ads, but there was not a single depiction of the game itself set to the tune. Baseball has the crack of wood and the smack of leather, yet their most distinguishable song—""Take Me Out to the Ballgame""—was written some hundred years ago and says nothing about the game itself, only the experience that surrounds it.
It's outrageous to think a marketing agency could do so little with the personalities on the San Francisco Giants alone—and maybe there is a reason the sport's soundtrack and its television ratings share the same chkkch chkkch chkkch of passing tumbleweed.
Yet, it may be the case that baseball is better safe than sorry.
I had very little to complain about this past Sunday night. The Packers rolled over the Cowboys, the flag football team I've played with each year but this one took home the intramural championship, and I was one dropped James Jones touchdown from a clean sweep in all three of my fantasy football leagues. But that was a heavy icing to cover up Sunday Night Football's pre-game hullabaloo.
You'll never hear me say I wouldn't go out to dinner with Faith Hill, but you'd better believe I would never bring her out to beer-and-nacho night with the Pack. The NFL's assumed country persona has been around at least since I memorized the words to Hank Williams Jr.'s ""All My Rowdy Friends Are Back for Monday Night"" in the third grade, and nowadays the country introductions are about as forced and outdated as the quarterbacks who share their tenure.
It's enough that the pop-country theme puts both of the NFL's feet in what is only a fragment of the league's demographic; but the fact is, that's not even what the NFL sounds like.
The NFL is dominated by tension and release. Each play is a study in strategic physical aggression, with some 30 seconds between each one to gather stress. When Nick Collins unloaded on Roy Williams' helmet Sunday night, we didn't hear violins—we heard a violent crunch of bottled aggression. When Brandon Jackson bruised his way into the end zone, we didn't hear clean guitars and harmonicas—we heard a very linear willpower drive through brute strength. When Clay Matthews returned an interception 62 yards for a touchdown, we didn't hear blissful sagas of life on the beach and fishing with your dog—we heard a decade of intense weight lifting and speed training make one of the world's best athletes look uncomfortable carrying a football.
The NFL sounds angry, oppressive and malicious. The pop-country themes distract from the sport's most basic hostile tendencies; but maybe that's the point. Maybe the pop-country identity is not supposed to appeal to a fragment of the sport's demographic, but rather a fragment of everyone else. After all, the NFL grabs the most viewers from all different musical backgrounds. Maybe the NBA is the one with the problem of narrow-minded marketing, and maybe that's why I can never seem to find anyone who likes the NBA who doesn't also like RJD2.
