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.
2 comments Last one added 10 months ago — Leave a Comment
Desmond Spann 10 months ago
Nice Article! You eventually hit the point right on the head. The inherit competitiveness in hip hop makes it a perfect fit for the sports realm. There is variety within hip hop. Just like you wouldn't hear Jon Mayer at the start of the game. You aren't likely to hear Common or Lupe Fiasco. They are a different side of the hip hop coin. "The Corner" or "Superstar" don't make me wanna dunk on fools. Great songs, none the less.
One,
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Peter Bukowski 10 months ago
Hey Desmond, thanks for the love. I appreciate it. Plus the line "don't make me wanna dunk on fools" is just awesome.
Keep doing it man
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