The musings of a madman...

4: Fashion Sensibilities      Two things can be guaranteed to be taken into consideration when it comes to regional applications and those are fashion and local team fanship.  When it boils down to it, through the presented history hip hop in popular culture, it was no huge deal – one could argue that it was expected – to see their favorite rappers donning the jersey of their favorite player or hat of their favorite team, or even both! One of the “standard” hip hop uniforms from the earliest days included the simple jeans and t-shirt with a pair of sneakers.  Sneakers would become one of the EARLIEST connected fashion items tying hip hop and basketball together.  As a child born in the late 70s and raised in the 80s, I distinctly recall seeing and desiring to own the player-specific Converse sneakers worn by Dr. J and Magic Johnson, badgering my parents for a new pair of the Chuck Taylors that seemingly every other player wore and To this day, I still go out of my way to o

3: “Just Like Us”      So now we’ve seen an understandable correlation born of the similar creations of basketball and hip hop.  We’ve discussed why the participants should want to involve themselves with one another, if only from more often than not coming up from similar backgrounds themselves.  Now it is time we discuss what good reason they may have to continue and cultivate the personal-cum-business relationship(s).      As with any connected entities, their mutual involvement will eventually espouse emulation.  One could argue that Biggie saw this coming (or had already witnessed) when, on his first album, he mentioned “either you slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot” with the at-the-time unspoken third option naturally being music.  It was ironic, because he was passively speaking out that third option by participating in it for his own out of those very same neighborhoods.  Either way, generations coming up behind the ones who made it out of the neigh

2: Acknowledgement and Acceptance      With a mind fully focused on the facts that basketball remains a sport that requires VERY little to get into as far as resources, and hip hop a musical medium that (at the time) required little in the way of classical musical training, it seems only natural that kids from lower-rent areas would be into either, or even both of the two simultaneously.  The connection between participants of the two is more than natural.      What could not be assumed was that either would be accepted as continuingly viable forms of entertainment or even recreational activities.  For what they were and the relative obscurity from whence they came, they would surely be a hard sell to say the least. With that in mind, it is (or was) only fair that both would initially cultivate and grow in areas with less-than-affluent populations and grow from there up, sometimes (or often) moving those less-than-affluent on to greener pastures for their troubles.  One c

1: Humble Beginnings      We all know the story of basketball’s beginnings. Dr. Naismith was commissioned with the creation of an indoor activity to keep kids in his YMCA busy on rainy days or in the harsh New England winters in Springfield, MA.  In a dearth of seed money or other outside resources, a peach basket was nailed to a wall ten feet in the air and the objective was to throw the ball (then a soccer ball – specifically-designed basketballs  wouldn't  come until later) into the basket within the constraints of a set of rules he had written out prior to nailing the baskets up. Compared to what “basket-ball” – as a then-skeptical Dr. Naismith called the game in his diaries – would become, it really doesn’t seem feasible that beginnings get more humble than that.  From his brainchild, the activity became sport played in YMCAs throughout the US, spreading through the rest of North America as well and eventually into high schools and colleges en route to taking hold

     Allow me a moment to explain what it is we’re about to embark on… Back in May, I had this idea that I would write a book that would detail the connected histories of Hip Hop and Professional Basketball.  In June I got married, then had the week leading up to my birthday off of work.  In that time, I got a lot of work done on it, but it was not shaping up to be voluminous to be worth attempting to pursue a whole book’s worth of writing on.  As of the date that I type this (10/15/2012), I was a hair over 10,000 words into the project and running out of steam enough to carry it any further.  I mean that to say that I was almost “done,” and would need an amount of input up to about four times the amount of words I had put into it.      Given the length of what I DID have, though, I would not be willing to let it go to waste, and that is what brings me here today.  Instead of a book, I will publish the presentation as a series of blogs to be posted every Tuesday until I h