Vocals First, Drums Later

Here at FreeDarko, we're all about weird stuff no one knows or cares about, even though they should. That's why I want to talk about the latest Old Spice ad, featuring Ray Lewis. Actually, I don't want to talk about the campaign, or Lewis (although it's amazing he never won an MVP). I'm amazed at how much this resembles the best kind of work Wieden+Kennedy used to do for Nike. Then that stopped; players wanted to be taken seriously, Jordan cast a long shadow even in retirement, the NBA had an image problem, and there simply wasn't space for either fun or mischief. Even those Roswell Rayguns ads haven't aged so well. But here we have Ray Lewis, an older athlete who no one associates with playfulness, from a sport known as the No Fun League, in a truly bizarre spot that even makes a gratuitous, if compelling, one-line commentary on fantasy sports. The whole commercial becomes that for one second, in fact, and then it's back to the fun house.

Yes, I know that all this going against the grain might be exactly why this ad was possible, and part of why it works so well -- and would work in far clumsier hands. However, the irony is that, with Ray Lewis and football as premise, or the foundation, W+K are able to simply port in the kind of ad we once might have seen from Nike. Note: "The LeBrons" or the "Book of Dimes" are among the last spots in this tradition, before James's ads set out simply to prove that he wasn't a clown. We've been down this road a million times: Advertising with personality helps the NBA, whether or not the people in charge realize this. The Hyperize joint was an encouraging sign. Still, seeing an athlete used like this and have it be a football player -- much less advertise basketball products -- is a real bummer. It's the medical marijuana, or struck-down Prop 8, of a great advertising tradition.

Semi-related and probably deserving more space: There's a misconception floating around that FD likes underdogs. We don't. We like star players, weird players, and players who aren't afraid to be candid. We are also huge snobs who all cut our teeth in various realms of music snobbery. When players we jock, like Julian Wright, turn out to suck, it's an embarrassment. We're looking to catch the next big thing before you do, celebrate the unjustly ignored forces, or pick up on the glorious outliers who just might sneak in and transform the sport in small ways. We love potential. But potential, as it should be, is a burden -- for players in real life, and in terms of the way this blog views them. We don't root for lesser souls; we're all about those who deserve to be, or become, something rare and cunning. A screw-up or drop-out isn't FD, he's the antithesis of it. This isn't Slackerball, it's about making sure we're up on the best the league has to offer. J.R. Smith? He's not a patron saint, he's the prodigal son.

THE TORLEOF: Earth Without Sorrow or Flesh

The other part has been canceled, so I had to further misspell the title. Thank you.

I had a landlord once who used to say "thank you" after everything, especially the most dick-ish things he said. He said a lot of those. This was an enormous Colombian mathematician, and despite that odd combination was just a boring piece of shit who complained about us leaving a cooler in the yard and yet wouldn't acknowledge there was a cute local gang selling drugs out of the apartment building across the street. We got back at him by having a yard sale that started so early that a crazy man and tranny on meth came and bought all our spare wires and cables.

This was a terrible NBA season, and I blame it all on LeBron James. Well, not all on James himself, but on the long shadow his free agency (and Wade's, and Bosh's, and whoever else became a franchise player just by being on the market this summer) cast over the actual season.

Even if these players and their mini-maxes had, as they say, changed the game -- arguably for the better, or at least more noble -- they also proceeded to hold the hostage throughout the season. Not to retreat to what's fast becoming a cliche, but Durant and the Thunder provided relief from this climate, flushing out the stale air and giving us a team that, ostensibly, didn't need to worry about contracts, or money, or personnel, or brand, or media overkill. Sure, that's a really shallow take on that team, but compared to the Knicks and Nets and LeBron, they were unencumbered. At the same time, OKC was part of the next generation. Kobe, Garnett, and Duncan won't last forever, as we begun to see this year. The subject of Dirk remains open to discussion.

But even more disillusioning than the build-up to free agency was what's passed for NBA coverage, and fandom, in the wake of The Decision. Blanket statement: It was all a huge moralistic, lazy bore, that obscured the fact that we're about to see a team in action that could change everything we thought we knew about basketball. If you think that statement is overcooked, please find words to disagree with it. There has never been a team this grandiose; nor one that offered so many possibilities on the court. How many games the Heat will (or need to) win, whose team it is, and whether karma will rear its ugly head are continuations of a post-Decision mindset. Can we please, for fuck's sake, all stop whining and pointing fingers and get ready for the ride of our lives? If you're about to bungee jump into a Buddhist temple with a bag of coke in your pocket, you don't spend your time worrying about someone breaking in line.

There are two basic questions to answer here. One: do you love basketball or are you a miserable asshole? The second, which has very personal implications for me: Do you come to the game with an agenda, or turn on the television hoping to see meaning created?

Thus we arrive at the small matter of whether FreeDarko (noun) ever be FreeDarko (adjective) again. At some point, FreeDarko turned five years old, which makes us one of the longest-tenured sports blogs going. You think I would have noted this milestone before now, but I didn't—and not just because of Shoefly's early struggles with Blogger (he's back on Boxiana and pure as ever, by the way). FreeDarko is somehow both an experiment that should have burned itself out a long time ago, and a scrappy survivor. The latter doesn't suit me, and the former makes a mockery of the fact that I still write for a living.

You can say that we take the NBA too seriously, traffic in obscurities, or are out of touch with the average fan. But you can't accuse us of not being open. And that's why I'm looking forward to 2010-11 in a very special way, with an amount of gusto greater than or equal to the dread I felt in 2009-10. For FreeDarko, then, the Heat are the gift to end all gifts. I just hope the rest of the world hasn't gone so far that this team blows up in their face. Or wait, maybe I do.

So You Can See Me Now

It's rarely stated explicitly, but FD has a long and lasting connection to hip-hop. For all our jazz pretensions and obvious Pitchfork ties, many of us were shaped and formed by rap music, and spent many long hours trying to make sense of our place as fans and, in some cases, participants. All I know is that, no matter what they take from me, they can't take away the first time I heard Rakim, or Straight Outta Compton, or The Infamous. I've more or less repressed all the time I spent flirting with the tape trade underground, but certain albums, however obvious, are as much a part of my musical consciousness as, say, The Band (which came way later, by the way). I will even now unapologetically assert that Wu-Tang changed my life, without leaning too hard on Cuban Linx, but only if I only get credit for knowing most every Guru lyric by heart.

Why am I bothering to tell you all this? Well, mostly as a show of support for Dr. LIC's Straight Bangin' guest post on "why I hate rap now". It was supposed to be a "top 10 albums of the century" joint, but when the Doctor was blocked, and only go going when he realized what the problem was. I didn't even try and bother. Maybe I was always a tourist, maybe that "N.W.A. and Public Enemy were like punk rock" line had more truth to it than I thought. All I know is that, after having intently followed hip-hop since I first bought Raising Hell and yes, Licensed to Ill (gateway pass) in third grade, I'm just not interested these days. Did I give up hope? Grow out of it? Prove that I never had any place in it to begin with? I don't lose much sleep over ferreting out the answer.

But like I said, I think the good Doctor's post does a lot to explain why I've drifted further and further away, and right now own probably like three recordings from the 21st. My list would probably have included The Cold Vein, Supreme Clientale, Philadelphia Freeway, The Black Album, and Got It 4 Cheap 2. And yeah, I know there's definitely a problem/disconnect there, which is why I'll plead alienation instead of (for once) reaching for overwrought justification.

UPDATE: To reiterate, if you're in New York, and want to see me and most every other sports blogger of note on panels, attend Blogs With Balls.

We're All So Close Together

Heading home tonight. I am tired, and I am weary, or maybe I'm just like Hannibal Lechter when he makes collect calls to the FBI from some unholy tourist trap. But I did feel the need to weigh in on the latest stats dust-up, such as it is. I'm not sure entirely what's going on; I know that the Recluse was flush with angst, and that the crux of the matter can be found here. It instantly brought me back to the great PER Wars of a few years back, when myself and Silverbird5000 tried to take on Ziller and Kevin Pelton. We lost, but it was funny. Let the record show that this was all motivated by an attempt to dismiss Lamar Odom's dismal PER; as many of you have probably already seen, Odom's a fuckin' love supreme when it comes to adjusted +/- . . .for the past two years, when the Lakers grew strong again. So on that most superficial level, I'm not out to get stats anymore.

I will say this, though: The serious stats people I commune with also have one foot firmly planted in the very same currents of the game that I call home. Maybe they don't look for cartoons and metaphors, but joyous subjectivity always seems an important part of their statistical inquiries. These judgments are either bolstered or critiqued by numbers that, unless you're a dummy, have an undeniable power. Ever watch a game, think someone's playing well, and then see they actually shot like shit? So it is with advanced stats and more subjective claims about how, in ways both spectral and booming, Battier-esque and Bron-tastic, certain players or teams impact us as viewers. Anyone looking only at old numbers is as bad as the mythic ballhog who looks only at his points total; focusing solely on the new numbers is to imagine the game as an series of iterations that have no cohesion, will, or identity to guide them.



Which is to say, it all comes down to watching the game with some measure of both passion and sensitivity. Stats force you to think with greater sophistication, in terms of both aesthetics and matters most technical, lest stats overthrow your judgments. Maybe this is one man's attempt to come to terms with the way that numbers have begun to overrun this least quantifiable of sports. For that reason alone, though, I look to them as supplementary tools, ways of clarifying what the trained eye can already see. And yes, there is something vindicating about the ways in which some FD darlings have performed surprisingly well in this new realm.

It points toward some unified life force we can all share together, and makes me realize I've either been transformed or ruined by this ambitious book.

(NOTE: Said life force would be just one of the many episodes/stepping stones that crop up in Revolution in Mind. It's the interplay of outlooks that I'm feeling sorely affected by.)