Idols Become Rivals... (I'm talking sports today!)

"We going straight to the league!"

Hi, Ari here, this is my first newsletter edition touching on sports! OMG.

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I got a Color TV…

No matter what music you like, this line probably rings a bell:

I got a color TV / so I can see / the Knicks play basketball…

That’s from The Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 classic, “Rapper’s Delight.”

It has many memorable lines, and the Library of Congress even preserves the 12” track of the song to formally honor its “cultural” significance to the U.S. Part of that culture is the intersection of basketball and music.

As an aside, the “color TV” line also resonates with me, because I grew up watching a Black & White TV. Color was available at the time, but my parents thought B&W was just fine, and probably less likely to hook the kids. (I was also limited to one hour of TV per week, which may be ironic given the career I ended up in.)

Anyway, in the song, the Color TV is both a “flex” (something to boast about), and a tell — because it shows the most important benefit of a Color TV was to better capture the game.

Decades later, rappers are still obsessed with basketball, with references like:

• What is it like to be LeBron (J. Cole)

• More foreign shooters than the Sacramento Kings (50 Cent)

• Like Jordan, I’m going coast to coast (Ice Cube)

Meanwhile, the top pop and rap artist alive, Drake, has basically anointed himself an unofficial mascot for The Toronto Raptors. And he reaches for hoops references the way some news anchors strain to fold in lyrics (he shoehorned “Antetokounmpo” into a new song, for the Finals MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo). 

Sports and music are so synonymous…

Drake is also totally candid about this fascination. Over a decade ago, he rapped about the mutual interest between sports and hip hop, noting both feature idolization mixed with rivalry:

I can relate to kids / going straight to the league
when they recognize that you got / what it takes to succeed
and that's around the time / that your idols become your rivals
you make friends with Mike [Jordan] / but gotta A.I. him for your survival
[Allen Iverson]
Damn, I swear sports and music are so synonymous
cause we want to be them / and they want to be us

As they say, “FACTS!”

Over the years, some athletes have tried to rap (usually without great success), and many rappers play ball, occasionally approaching professional levels.

Then there are some talented people who truly excel at both — not moonlighting, but really doing it.

That brings us to an artist I’ve gotten to know over the years, in several interviews and hanging out in other settings — Harlem rapper Dave East.

Hanging out with Dave East—he’s tall!

East is objectively one of the best basketball players to ever drop an album, playing with maybe the best player in the world, Kevin Durant, as a kid, and then playing at Division I Towson University in Maryland.

On MSNBC, I’ve talked with East about his music, his family, and his views on national issues ranging from policing to foreign policy. We didn’t get to basketball.

But we recently caught up about it, which I wanted to share with you in the newsletter. I asked the simple question — especially for me, as a non-sports junkie — why does basketball endure as such an important topic across 40 years of hip hop? East’s answer:

Everyone who can’t rap, they play ball. Or if you can’t play ball, you rap, or you’re hustling. You only got a couple options in the hood.

That really puts a fine point on it. Dave is from a different generation than Biggie, but I told him his take reminded me of Biggie’s line about growing up poor in Brooklyn:

Either you’re slinging crack rock / or you got a wicked jump shot.

East replied:

“That’s a fact — Biggie wasn’t making that up. That’s just the environment we come from. I don’t know personally, no doctors, no lawyers… Everyone I knew was — they played ball, they was trying to make some music happen, or they had all the drugs in the world. So those are the options.

Imagine not knowing a single person who became a doctor or lawyer. That makes it harder to see that path for yourself. And yet, the path to making money playing sports is even more of a long shot.

East’s point reminded me of something another Harlem legend told me, the designer Dapper Dan.

He said when he began tailoring clothes, some of the most prominent paying clients were drug dealers, so they set the style for the rest of the neighborhood. He didn’t like that — he later wrote a book criticizing gang and drug culture — but that’s the way it was.

Me, Dapper Dan, and Dave East. c/o Jelani Day

As East reflected on his path from Division One basketball to a successful music career, he emphasized how the main limits in poor communities are external — because many other talented people are looking for an opportunity:

At the end of the day, it’s about getting put in that position [to succeed]. Every idea that I’ve brought to light since I ‘became Dave East’, I thought about that [first] in the hood…

There’s a million people I know right now that’s geniuses — they got all the ideas in the world, but they [stuck] in the hood.

Some pursuits draw an audience and inspire people; sports and music have done that for centuries. When we look a little closer, though, we can see that the broader drive to excel, to find a better life, to push against the often arbitrary and unfair limits in life — that goes beyond entertainment and is relevant to most people, who really just want their shot.

P.S. You can learn more about Dave East and his music here, or see our past interview here.

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