Doc Zeus has a PhD: a player hating degree.
I will be rooting for the Packers on Sunday. Now I have no allegiance to Wisconsin, nor do I have any special affinity for fromage. I don’t care for their colors and I certainly couldn’t care less if a Packers victory would somehow spite Brett Favre for having the audacity of believing he could still play professional football. Nevertheless, I will be flying a Packers flag on Sunday and will be deeply vested in the strangulation of Ben Roethlisberger in the strands of Clay Matthews’ Sebastian Bach hair.
I will do this because I have an allegiance, born out of blood and country – to the city of Cleveland and by proxy their sports teams – that demands Heinz Field must be razed from this Earth and Hines Ward must be sacrificed at the altar of righteousness. The Steelers are the Browns’ blood rivals and I believe that the Gods demand that you root for the damn home team and against their enemies at all cost. This can be a path of suffering and despair but I believe you accept the slings and arrows that fate may wrought your way with a sense of high-minded nobility. There are no rewards or guarantees beyond this and this is something I accept. God reserves a special ring in hell for traitors and there are none worse than those who practice the vile custom of “liberated fandom.”
It is with this truth that I come upon the heresy of Lil Wayne’s “Green & Yellow” and the unholy ideals this song represents. “Green & Yellow,” a freestyle built upon the awe-inspiring insipidness of the erstwhile Pittsburgh anthem, “Black & Yellow,” by Wiz Khalifa – a song much like the 2009 Yankee hymn “Empire State Of Mind” that took upon extra dimensions of banality when it became associated to the Steelers’ demonic 2010 Super Bowl run– is Lil Wayne’s love song to his professed Packers fandom. If the song was recorded by a particularly enthusiastic Green Bay native, it would be seen merely as a goofy ode to one’s local team not unlike the hundreds of equally moronic songs for every professional team that clutter YouTube. However, there is something truly cynical and soulless regarding Wayne’s Packers anthem that transcends it’s lighthearted stupidity. It is representative of all that is evil and cowardly in the world.
Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, a fact that one becomes intimately familiar with after even a small period of listening to his music. According to the all-knowing deity that is Google, New Orleans is located 1,131 miles from Lambeau Field. Thus, it becomes exceedingly unlikely that Lil Wayne’s declaration of his status as a “cheese head” and the conception of “Green & Yellow” are rooted in any meaningful connection with the region. Instead, we are left to assume that Lil Wayne believes in “liberated fandom” or as defined by “FreeDarko,” the practice of abandoning all meaningful ties to the teams held dearest by one’s family and friends to devote one’s life to Satan and his minions. (Admittedly, I’m roughly paraphrasing.)
It is a heresy of the highest order for it reduces sports fandom to the craven act of choosing a team based on superficial and specious reasons. Fandom needs to be devoted to an ideal that is beyond oneself for it to have any meaning. Otherwise, one is simply rooting for the act of winning – a joyless, selfish act that can bring no satisfaction unless there is someone there to share it with. How does a New Orleans native share joy over a Packers victory if he’s surrounded by a city of Saints fans? Does he hug a Wisconsinite through the soft glow of television as Aaron Rodgers throws a perfect spiral to Greg Jennings in the end zone for the go-ahead touchdown? “Green & Yellow” celebrates this hollow ideal by professing kinship to a people that Wayne has no real connection with beyond a fleeting love of Clay Matthews.
I will be rooting for the Packers on Sunday. It will bring me no joy if they defeat the Steelers beyond the cheap satisfaction that the city of Pittsburgh will be denied their ecstasy. It is not the Browns that will be winning the Super Bowl, but a bunch of dudes I only care about because they are facing a team I loathe. There can be no joy. I believe in the home team and the uncertain perils that the simple act of believing in an ideal can lead to. The big lie of liberated fandom is that it’s tell us that you can derive joy out of the disconnect and the nothingness that surrounds us all. “Green & Yellow” is nihilism distilled into it’s purest essence – the belief that nothing matters beyond the primal need to win. With that being said… Go Packers.
Download:
MP3: Lil Wayne-”Green & Yellow”
6 comments
Mike Laz says:
February 4, 2011 at 5:11 pm (UTC -7)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx8V3Cr54BI&feature=player_embedded
jimmy says:
February 5, 2011 at 10:00 am (UTC -7)
i dont know if lil wayne is actually participating in “liberated fandom”; i always interpreted that concept to mean that one could appreciate the beauty of the game and the personalities in it rather than a provincial “us vs. them” mentality.
lil wayne is just a frontrunning bandwagon jumper, and its pretty fucking obnoxious.
I’m a native pittsburgher living in cali, and i agree about the hollowness of california steeler “fans” who not only could never understand the emotional impact these games have on the city, but also are completely ignorant of the region or culture that makes the team so special to us yinzers.
Football is a spectacle for these people, and everyone wants to attach themselves to a spectacle. Being a hardcore football fan in the midwest is weird and almost sad in a way. You can go to a bar in pittsburgh in June, and 40% of the clientele will still be wearing steeler gear. The entire mood of the city is dictated by what happens on football sunday. If you haven’t been through that, than i have no desire to share my experience with you on sunday because your daddy arbitrarily picked the steelers to root for in the 70′s because they only showed 3 teams on tv and he had to root for one of them.
Elliott says:
February 5, 2011 at 10:56 am (UTC -7)
I agree with the spirit of your small diatribe (let’s be honest, it was pretty vitriolic) against liberated fandom, an agreed repulsive manifestation of the illusion that what is most substantive and real about the human condition comes not from community and sustained relationships, but from the selection of the best and the brightest and covering yourself in that artificial, commodified glory, be that the glory of owning a brand new Mercedes Benz, or the glory of cheering your ‘favorite’ Yankees to the World Series yet again (barf). However, I still must disagree with the core premise of your argument: that your allegiance to Cleveland and its proxy sports teams is somehow of a higher order than those who might’ve chosen to support a team without the legitimizing birth right of “blood and country.”
That said, let me introduce where I’m coming from in all of this. I will be rooting for the Packers tomorrow, and that is because I bleed Green and Gold. I was born and raised in Appleton, WI, about 30 miles from Lambeau Field (1,100 less than New Orleans) and I’ve been a Packer fan since I can remember. I was at Lambeau for the beautiful stomping of the NY Giants on Dec. 26, and since the first play of our Week 17 victory against the Bears I’ve been growing a GB Packers playoff beard–one which might get me fired from my job that requires ‘clean shaven appearance.’ But as much as I love my Packers, and I must say that there is nothing like Lambeau Field on a Sunday surrounded by the GB faithful, I don’t believe that fandom is defined by birth.
I am also a die-hard fan of Arsenal FC, and have been since–just 2008. I lived in London for a short time; so what were the only things that led me to support the Gunners? First, they weren’t Chelsea or ManU (I had no interest in just picking the front runner), and second, I had friends who were Gooners (the affectionate name for Arsenal supporters) who invited me to the pub to watch matches. I didn’t even know who Arsenal were in 2007, and I didn’t even live in the neighborhood of their stadium in London. Even so, if you deny the validity of my support for the Gunners, I will vehemently defend my allegiance, as I’ve cursed and cheered through every match for the past 3 years.
Fandom is not defined by birth or origins, it is defined by support for your team. I have been there with every major victory (there have been lamentably few, with no trophies since ’05) and crushing loss for Arsenal since I was introduced to the sport in ’08 (I was raised to hate soccer, the lesser counterpart of true football. There’s some blind ‘blood and country’ nationalism for ya.). While my first love will ALWAYS be the Packers, I’ve ‘lived and died’ with both teams–and that is what makes a true fan.
Admittedly, I know nothing of Lil Wayne’s allegiances; he could have been cheering on the Pack ages ago, or started two weeks ago. But lets propose a hypothetical scenario: let’s say that Mr. Wayne, being from New Orleans,became a fan when we won the Super Bowl there in ’97. For that game, and for that year and arguably the next, he was a bandwagon jumper. But if he’s been supporting my team ever since then, he has my approval as a quote-unquote ‘true’ Packers fan. Again, allegiance and support are greater than “blood and country.” Being from Cleveland yourself, how many people do you know who suddenly became Cavaliers fans when Lebron showed up, only to abandon the team now that they’ve lost 23 straight? (A sadly ironic number.) Fair weather fans and bandwagon jumpers be damned, but birthright is not the de facto determination of true fandom. If you’re from LA and you’re a Packer fan, you might be living in a diaspora community of Cheeseheads, but if you’ve been showing up to cheer the Pack every Sunday, you’re nonetheless one of us.
DEMO says:
February 5, 2011 at 7:41 pm (UTC -7)
Go Chiefs
curt says:
February 9, 2011 at 12:32 am (UTC -7)
nice
Jay-g says:
March 5, 2011 at 11:36 pm (UTC -7)
Why should Wayne have love for the Saints? The same team who tried to skip town after Katrina and the only reason they aren’t the San Antonio Saints is because they juiced the state out of 50 million dollars.