While at this year's South By Southwest Music Festival, I ran across a fascinating music website start-up. Its central premise is to game-ify the process of loving bands and turning friends on to them. Using the model of a fantasy sports league, it ranks music fans by their ability to pick "the next big thing" and assigns musicians an index number, akin to a stock market figure, that reflects their value within the closed market of the website.
I have been a professional musician for almost 20 years, since the day in high school I booked myself a gig at my local coffeeshop and played for the unheard of sum of $50 plus tips in my Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox. But for even longer I have been a sports fan. I grew up celebrating players Doug Williams and Darryl Green and going to Orioles games with my dad, where I pined after Brady Anderson and got Cal Ripken Jr. to sign my field hockey stick.
I love music and sports for completely different and wonderfully complementary reasons. Sports soothes my human need for surety, definition, and clarity. I love the cruel elegance of a bracket. I love the cold finality of the buzzer. I love the short memories of athletes: Lose one day, go out the next day and try again. Sports provides a home for my pride and ego. One season, I played in a fantasy baseball league with novelists, musicians, and D.C. insiders and was mortified beyond belief when my team, Shock Lacan, came in last. In the company of my peers, I wanted so badly to win.
Music softens those edges. It gives me a space for my equally human ambivalence. Only sound can describe that wonderful, inarticulate place of complex and layered emotions. What would breakups be without breakup songs? What would a drive to the beach be without a three-minute pop song? A song doesn’t have to have a finish line; sometimes it merely asks you to observe the course.
I can’t separate my music fandom from my role as music creator, and wonder if the opposite would be true were I a pro athlete. But all the things I love about sports feel terrible when applied to music. I have long hated "best of" lists, mostly because one writer’s tastes become a definitive ranking that affects everyone on and off the list in untold ways. When I am creating a piece of music -- or listening to one for the first time -- I am not thinking about the success of previous performances. What would be the equivalent in music of WAR or OPS or QBR? I don’t want to know.
Recently New York Magazine's pop culture blog Vulture ran a bracket to name the greatest TV sitcom of the last 30 years. While I get that it was in good fun, and I do love The Simpsons, it does beg the larger question why would we want to apply something as objective as a win/loss scenario to something so gorgeously subjective as art?
My different loves of sports and music have also illuminated where I find my most delicious and satisfying joy. When a player who doesn’t look like much on paper defies the numbers, when a team collectively upends their supposed destiny, I am reminded of the unique power of sports to surprise.
Players like Dustin Pedroia or Ichiro Suzuki (just what exactly does he do?) -- or, dare I say, Tim Tebow at the end of the 2011 NFL season -- are proof that the clarity of sports is not infinite. They are like the thrill of seeing an unknown band for the first time. Or of waking up to a song that just needs to be written down.
Today, is officially Opening Day in Major League Baseball and I willingly begin the 162-game process of letting the Red Sox break my heart. Next week, during the NCAA Final Four, I will cross my fingers for Wichita State, but put my money on Michigan to win it all.
And in each game I will both revel in the stats and wait for the surprise moments of music.
Erin McKeown is a musician, writer, and producer. Her latest album is MANIFESTRA, out now on TVP Records. Follow her sports podcast “ * ” (@AsteriskPodcast) when it debuts in the summer of 2013.
PS: Since I am outstanding at predictions:
NCAA Basketball:
MEN's FINAL FOUR - Michigan over Louisville.
WOMEN's FINAL FOUR - Notre Dame over Louisville
MLB
- AL WEST - Angels
- AL CENTRAL - Tigers
- AL EAST - Orioles
- AL Wild Cards - Rangers, Red Sox (Had to!)
- NL WEST - Diamondbacks
- NL CENTRAL - Reds
- NL EAST - Nationals
- NL Wild Cards - Giants, Braves
World Series - Nationals over Tigers. (Sorry Pedroia.)