compared to what

Or, you might say 3-0. The Rockies’ season is on the line, but with Hicks slated to sing the national anthem in game 5, there’s probably a few Hicks fans pulling for them just to make that happen. (as well as some just wanting to see Boston’s freaky sports bubble burst a bit).

But all of this got me thinking about music and sports - two of the largest entertainment industries going. (One of the questions was related to the lyric in the title of this post - if you’ve got any clue about baseball, go to this thread and help me out: speakeasy.

But mainly, I was thinking about how little interesting crossover there is between these two fields. A few sports have music directly integrated: figure skating and gymnastics, but it’s always canned and rarely interesting from a musical standpoint. Most American sports do the national anthem thing, for some reason - lately drawing on pop stars to do pop renditions, presumably for the mass appeal. (Do other countries do a similar thing?). A few sports integrate music into half time shows -either traditional marching band type things or big and bizarre extravaganzas (or some combination of the two). Whether you like these or not, I think you’d have to say top level sports does not, typically use top level music. Even if the artists are at the top of their game, the set up is not designed or intended for good music - bad sound systems, weird time frames, no intimacy.

Now, I’m not seriously complaining about the existence of half-time shows or national anthem renditions, just saying that whatever purpose they serve, it’s not primarily musical. And wondering if more interesting music/sport collaborations are out there. There’s a thing floating around using Hick’s single, Just to Feel that Way, in some ESPN montage. I wanted to show it here as another example of a mediochre use of music in sports, but couldn’t lay my hands on a video of it. Maybe one of you has it.

So I’ll leave with a couple of examples of what I consider close to excellent uses, where the music is real music and also really fits the sports context. The first is a Nike commercial. Not the absolutel best one - that was their first in this genre and it doesn’t seem to be out there - but still really good. The music skills and the sports skills in this fit perfectly and complement each other. Doesn’t feel like either is using the other. Though, of course, Madison Avenue is using both:

Nike basketball commercial

And an example of music fitting the sport in a movie, I give you Tripletts of Belleville. Unfortunately, this isn’t a cycling scene, thus making the point of this post believable or even apparent. So, I’ll just take a side road and make the music a sport: your challenge is to ID the artists depicted in this clip. Some are trivially easy. Send a ‘tube url so we can all see your answers.

Rendevous from Tripletts of Belleville

categories: music