Peter Bukowski, Bleacher Report
- 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.
