I have been an NBA fan since 3rd grade. My favorite team was the Celtics for a long time. (NH native) Now I’m an avid Pacers fan. I like the Pacers because they play a team brand of ball, based around the true principals of the game. (Insert Artest joke here) These guys going around throwing up “Q Dog” signs or “Bullhorns” (Quentin Richardson) when they score make me sick. The Pacers do the job. Yes they celebrate. They don’t go overboard.

The hip hop generation is part to blame for the decline in NBA fans, especially, the middle and upper-aged guys. The hip hop generation is very in your face, and very “I’m gonna do for me.” I see it every day. The music guys and the sports figures want to be eachother, so they act like eachother. The sports boys go and get their tattoos and their $100,000 chains. The music guys put on their extensive throwback collection. It makes sense that if you are turned off by hip hop, you will be turned off by the NBA today. It’s essentially the same thing.

The NBA guys need to realize something though. They are being held to a much, much, much higher standard than musicians. Musicians are creative people, who specialize in expressing themselves. They constantly evolve and push the envelople of what is decent and acceptable. This applies to all music. Athletes are different. Athletes generally follow in tradition. They are bound by rules. They represent cities, states, and even countries. Musicians do not. Athletes get paid way more than 99.44999% of all musicians. There is a reason for that. It is to uphold these traditions, perform at your peak, and represent your team. NBA players should really think about that.

It makes me sick, as much as a hip hop fan I am, to see athletes trying to celebrate with the newest dance move, or any other outrageous celebration.
Signing a ball and giving it to an unexpecting fan=great
Just giving a ball to fan=great
A pumped fist after a dunk=great
Standing on the scorers table and hyping up the crowd after a come from behind win=great

Giving the Q Dog sign after a dunk=corny
Signing a ball and giving it to someone who’s gonna give it back=stupid
Doing the Atlanta Stomp after a TD=stupid

Athletes, we hold you to high standard, you should think about that. You are not musicians, stop acting like them. The hip hop generation has come a long way, but it’s never going to be accepted by everybody.

BTW-My favorite player of all time was Larry Bird.

Steinbeck’s Hometown to Close Libraries

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20041227/ap_on_re_us/salinas_libraries

“But a top library official said the prospect of a white knight emerging to cover the roughly $3.2 million in annual operating expenses is remote. ”

This made me think of “The Benefactor!”

-Happy hollydays and Happy New year and may this year bring everyone the hapiness and health everyone deserves.

One of my contemporaries, another journalist named Adisa Banjoko, told me he was “giving up” on hip hop, after he had a son. I’ve read similar sentiments in numerous pieces, most recently in the October 2004 issue of Essence.

I mock these people relentlessly.

I told Adisa that Snoop Dogg is not hip hop. Eminem barely is, and only on certain days. Ninety nine percent of what you hear on the radio, and the musicians involved would and often do say the same, is not hip hop. It’s rap music, true, which is a subset of hip hop, but it ain’t it. This distinction may be too fine a point for older pundits and the uninitiated to discern, but it’s a fact.

When I was in eight grade, I sat at a lunch room table, before school started, with about six other young men (and two young women), nodding our heads as one beat out a syncopated rhythm on the table. In turns, each of us performed an improvised original rhyming piece, each trying harder to scan our juvenile vocabularies and impress the others. That’s hip hop. As long as there’s lunch tables and kids and rhymes and somebody pounding out a beat, there will always be hip hop, regardless of Jay-Z or the FCC or Tipper Gore, and that’s a fact, just the same was as there’ll always be rock and roll as long as somebody somewhere can pick up a guitar and jam.

I swear I’ve written this exact same thing a hundred times.

Let’s go by the numbers: Scott Griffith said:
“Hiphop is closesly associated with violence, drugs, and crime thanks in part to the lyrics. I don’t think you can cut it any differently. Hiphop looks bad on the NBA when they are associated together, though it seems their is not much they can do about it.”

Nuh uh. Ask Mos Def is hop hop is about violence, drugs and crime. Ask Common, Talib Kweli, Aceyalone, or even the wildly complicated LL Cool J, or any of a score of hip hop artists I can name off the top of my head.

You’re making the same generalizations your parents heard (or maybe you did, hell, I dunno how old people are) when Elvis swerved on TV screens, and they claimed that rock was devil music. That the “jazz” generation heard when their music was decried by their parents. You’re basically saying, “I’m the same kind of overgeneralizing, prejudiced person they were, as unwilling to think and research and learn due to fear or ignorance.” Do you really wanna be _them_?

Mark said:
“Mark, is this really so important? I know I should not be moralizing here, (bad netiqette, w/e), but as a regular reader of your blog I find the choice of topic trivial a day after 20 going on 50K fellow humans got wiped out like this. Perhaps you should post something about donating or just shut up for a week. Sorry, but occasionally American callousness just gets me fuming.”

Whoa, major netiquette faux pas. It’s a blog. The man posts about whatever’s on his mind. To say otherwise is not only unfair (as you could start your own blog and say what you want said) but kinda freakin’ rude.

Cosmo said:
“one of the biggest aspects of hip hop is rappers talking about how great they are, how much money they have, how much stuff they have and how much respect they get. i think that attitude rubs of on players which in turn, turns off the general public who watch the games.”

Really? That’s one of the biggest aspects of hip hop? You say this based on what evidence? Snippets of what you’ve seen on TV? Flipping channels on a radio? Again, this kind of wild overgeneralization is why _every_ generation thinks its parents are stupid.

One of the biggest aspects of hip hop, in its going-on-thirty-year history (yeah, thirty years pal, and that’s without going back to the griot tradition, boot dancers in South Africa and the scores of other clear cut historical precedents) is self expression. Say what you want. Do what you want. Be what you want. Now, what some people want is stupid (in my opinion) — that’s why there are, say, Seahawks fans or people who buy Britney Spears records, or, yes, want to be criminals. Because criminals — ask the Bush administration — seem to be making a killing. The _business_ community found a way to successfully market and proliferate a certain brand of rap music, to the exclusion of most other types. Superhero comics dominate the comic book world in the same way. Reality shows are starting to do the same thing to TV. Does that make, say, Love and Rockets any less a comic book? Does it make Scrubs any less a TV show?

Again, really, seriously, you do your self a major disservice speaking in such broad terms.

Continuing:
“another thing is the rampant tatoos. do you really need 50 of them? i think this comes from the hip-hop lifestyle (or metal if you are cherokee parks) as most rappers have a ton of tats as well.”

I host a karaoke show in Torrance, CA and see tons of people with tattoos all over their bodies. Most of them drive large Harley Davidsons. Are they suddenly rappers? Come on, now.

Finally, Cosmo said:
“it was easy to identify with bird and magic or jordan or drexler. you could see hanging around with them. however if you see darius miles walking down the street you figure out ways to avoid him. that may be prejudiced to say, but it is the truth. i would say the same thing about a group of bikers. maybe it is age. a lot of these players are just kids.”

Yeah. That’s prejudiced. Especially since I have two cousins who could be stand-ins for Darius Miles at a moment’s notice. So the way somebody dresses — biker or braids, leather chaps or jerseys — is suddenly reason to avoid somebody? That’s a really limited way to live your life, don’t you think? I know a former Pulitzer nominee who considers herself “hip hop.” Is she suddenly someone to avoid? Wow … and people wonder why Black people get so paranoid around you guys …

Mark said:
“The hip hop generation is part to blame for the decline in NBA fans, especially, the middle and upper-aged guys.”

Really? You don’t think the shift to higher priced tickets and mostly cable broadcasts have anything to do with it? I believe that was the big band generation who made most of those decisions.

More:
“The hip hop generation is very in your face, and very ‘I’m gonna do for me.’”

So are Republicans. Ask Karl Rove.

Boggling my mind with this one:
“t makes sense that if you are turned off by hip hop, you will be turned off by the NBA today. It’s essentially the same thing.”

Or, perhaps, one brand of criminal imagery doesn’t show up on your radar, and another does? Personally, I avoid law enforcement professionals and I’m incredibly wary of men in suits. Bad personal experiences. Is it prejudiced? Sure, and I acknowledge that, and try not to let it make me overly unfair to people like that. What I see — here in particular — is people so comfortable with their prejudices, so entrenched with them, that they consider an alien perspective to have something wrong with it.

“Giving the Q Dog sign after a dunk=corny
Signing a ball and giving it to someone who’s gonna give it back=stupid
Doing the Atlanta Stomp after a TD=stupid”

The Q Dog thing is based on members of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, a college thing. Are rowdy Black college students suddenly a problem? Most of the problematic rap artists in question have no idea what that means.

I dunno what the ball signing bit is about, but in my mind any form of TD celebration that doesn’t involve violence is all right.

I am saddened and disappointed to read a lot of this,

“Hiphop is closesly associated with violence, drugs, and crime thanks in part to the lyrics. I don’t think you can cut it any differently. Hiphop looks bad on the NBA when they are associated together, though it seems their is not much they can do about it.”

Nuh uh. Ask Mos Def is hop hop is about violence, drugs and crime. Ask Common, Talib Kweli, Aceyalone, or even the wildly complicated LL Cool J, or any of a score of hip hop artists I can name off the top of my head.

You’re making the same generalizations your parents heard (or maybe you did, hell, I dunno how old people are) when Elvis swerved on TV screens, and they claimed that rock was devil music. That the “jazz” generation heard when their music was decried by their parents. You’re basically saying, “I’m the same kind of overgeneralizing, prejudiced person they were, as unwilling to think and research and learn due to fear or ignorance.” Do you really wanna be _them_?”

No one denies that there are “good guy” rappers and hip hop artists, but as with everything, the greasy wheel gets the oil and the worst gets the most pub. The most extreme examples are always used as the standard examples. What are the odds that if you flip on BET, you will see something mysogenistic, racist, drug promoting or violent? From my general channel flipping, I’d say pretty high.

There are definatly hip hop artists who fight against those stereotypes, but the problem lies in those artists who embrace them and as so long as the NBA is associated with hip hop, elements of these aspects that many hip hop artists ebrace will also be associated with the NBA.

Every generation many people think that the next’s is awful. Just realize it isn’t. It is just different, like yours was from your folks.

Oh and it is generational. It is not urban, or black, or poor, or what ever other stereotype you want to put on it. Funny, those are the same stereotypes put on rock in its original form as well.

nice post, i enjoyed reading it. however, i wonder why my prejudice of avoiding darius miles’ or paul tuttles’ (american choppers) is anymore prejudiced than you not trusting suits or law enforcement? you seemed to exonerate yourself because you admitted it was a prejudice that you had, i did the same thing, why is it different for you?

whether eminem or snoop dog or any of the other top rappers in the “game” are hip-hop is probably a valid debate. however, it is understood by the vast majority of the public because that is what we have been told. i understand your point and agree to a point, but i am not sure how many of the players in the nba have a tribe called quest cd in their ipods, or common, or talib kweli. its more like pastor troy and devin the dude, or some other “rapper” rather than “hip-hopper.” would you be more comfortable if i referred to the nba as a bunch of rappers, than hip hoppers?

it sounds as if you are defending hip hop, and not rap? if that is the case, great we agree. i can identify the difference.

you also say that i overgeneralize about rappers being all about themselves and telling their fans how much they floss. i didnt get that from a snippet of tv, i got that from a cash money millionaires cd, or a fabolous record. if you watch a string of rap videos in a row, i would be willing to bet that in the majority of them at some point in the video the artist will throw money around or hold it up and fan themselves with it. or talk about his bentley and how “hot” they are.

it seems that you probably agree with me more than you think. you were degrading the same thing as me: rappers, however you explained the difference between hip hop and rap and i did not.

finally, i am sure your cousins are good human beings.