You can hear it on any given day. Hip hop rocking the speakers at a high school gymnasium before a basketball game. Maybe it is a tradition at a Midwest college football game to go crazy to House of Pain’s, “Jump Around” to start the fourth quarter. Even America’s pastime and our oldest major sport have taken part as the raucous sounds of Lupe Fiasco blares out of speakers from Dodger Stadium to Fenway Park.
Sports and hip-hop music seem to share this strange bond. Each has become inextricably linked to the other. In fact, since the mid 1990’s a cliché developed where every rapper wanted to be a basketball player and every basketball player wanted to be a rapper. A few even made semi-successful transitions and others take the Shaq route and spit their rhymes at nightclubs for “fun.”
Why the connection? Sure we hear the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” at sports venues and “The Eye of the Tiger” has become synonymous with dramatic sports moments but rock n’ roll has slowly faded from sports culture along with stir-ups, stripped socks, and the single bar helmet. Yet hip-hop has molded with sports culture in a more profound way than any of those ever did. Some offer reasons as to way but few are good and most are not so good, even borderline offensive.
One is the perceived relation to race. While seemingly a harmless social connection on the outside, this teeters dangerously on racism. The idea that because hip-hop music and culture has been predominantly produced by and for black people and thus there exists a connection to sports, a venue supposedly dominated by African-American athletes. That seems like an easy line to draw. Well, perhaps “lazy” is a better description.
This theory lacks in seemingly about every way. Hip-hop music remains run by corporations that employ plenty of non-blacks. Successful white purveyors of hip-hop like Eminem remain few and far between but so do successful black quarterbacks. Does that mean they can’t exist or are in some way incapable of being? By associating one race with something as broad as a musical genre, we pigeon-hole them and create unfair racial stereotypes.
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