As long as I'm in Polo's smilin they think they got me
but they would try to crack me if they ever see a black me
I thought I chose a field where they couldn't sack me
if a n***a aint shootin a jump shot running a track meet
but this pimp is, at the top of mount Olympus
ready for the World's game, this is my Olympics.
—Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
When we woke up my snores were much complained about because, as I readily admitted, I had slept on my back, unusually, and I always snore when I do. Kimberly had to hurry back to Salem and was gone with her truck by the time I had ceased to rattle the walls. As Emily made us breakfast and coffee she spoke of the merits of the new Kanye West album. I had dismissed it months before as the laughable product of unharnessed megalomania and had heard very little other than hype and argument. She pointed out the reference to the Winslows of 1990s Family Matters fame and their high-strung neighbor Steve Urkel, infamous his over-the-top nerdiness: "Too many Urkels on your team that's why your win's low/Winslow." And she put the record on Tristan's iPod for the trip home.
This theme of literal sports competition as a metaphor for the struggle for artistic credibility, or general respect in popular American society, is all over the record. Chicago, in the popular consciousness in the '90s, was the Bulls and the Winslows. R. Kelly makes a brief appearance, but Michael Jordan gracefully dunking on the rest of the NBA, and Jaleel White portraying the black dork to his furthest possible conclusion—interesting considering it can come off as a smooth black man lampooning white people—were the two identities Kanye West came of age with. What shall a young man from Chicago become?
The motif of Jordan's media persecution for trying something new at the top of his career—baseball—seems particularly important to Kanye in his public persona of the last five years. With 808s and Heartbreaks he did what he wanted, not what people wanted and expected of him, and he took their criticisms very personally. A man should choose his fate, and if he finds less success in what he chooses rather than in what he is pigeon-holed to be, is that a humiliation or a triumph, especially when he makes his glorious return his tried and true realm, as Jordan did with the 1995 Bulls and Kanye did with My Beautiful, Dark, and Twisted Fantasy.
But what of his sense of humor? Could invoking a sitcom character give us the insight that the put on is part of his bravado, and that part of his bravado is a put on? That the egomania is a joke while the joking is egomaniacal? Urkel himself was two sided. He produces in his lab in his parents' basement "Cool Juice" that emphasizes his smooth genes and hides the dorky ones and reveals Stefan Urquelle, a smooth and handsome alter ego who turns out to more closely resemble Jaleel White, the actor who plays them both. The name is only different in pronunciation, the above spelling just an interpretation, but the character wears no glasses nor suspenders, maintains suave and relaxed conversation, but his humility suffers.
Kanye's relationship to the characters from Family Matters is a contradiction: he claims to be better than everybody else by being wittier and more intelligent than everybody, and claims this supremacy (a high number of wins/Winshigh, we must imagine), precisely by not having wittiness and intelligence on his team (represented by Urkels). But what could be dorkier than rolling down your window (a la Wayne's World's Grey Poupon joke), and shouting out a pun to a stranger comparing him to a hopeless, comic antihero from 1990s family programming?
Fresh air rolling down the window
Too many Urkels on your team is why your win's low/you'reWinslow
If he is entirely serious that the record is a journalistic account of him "winning" (a metaphor upon which Charlie Sheen would bestow much irony as 2011 trundled along)
This is my Olympics
And
The LeBron of Rhyme—
it's hard to be humble when you're
struttin' on the JumboTron
then what are the rules by which one outpaces his contemporaries? How does this contest work? The extent of the collaboration on the record contextualizes the assertion that the free reign of his massive ego puts him on top. Because really it was not Michael Jordan alone who made Chicago legendary in the '90s—it was Phil Jackson's team consciousness, his Taoist-inspired reduction of the ego that allowed Horace Grant, Scottie Pippen, and, later, Dennis Rodman, three massive egos themselves, the wisdom to work with the greatest player the game has ever seen. So Kanye is Jordan and Jackson, starring in and producing a record with Jay-Z, Rhianna, the RZA (also producing), Nicki Manaj, John Legend, Kid Cudi, Alicia Keys, Chris Rock, Justin Vernon, Raekwon, and Lil Wayne, among others, and featuring samples from countless other bench players or assistant coaches, like Smokey Robinson and Ennio Morricone giving informed consultations on the game. Phil Jackson went on to diffuse Kobe and Shaq in L.A., able to convince them the more they trusted and worked with each other, the better they would perform individually. Kanye understands this and adds a second, self-aware layer to his persona—he is an ego-maniac both self-effacing and collaborative. And for all of the joking in Family Matters it is always unironic working together that holds reign on the show's ethos.
If the game were Bocce Ball and not hip-hop I would say what allows him to stay winning is the taoist contradiction, the Zen letting go that spiritually and literally lets fall the perfect roll from a player's hand, and brings the connection between the symbol of your intent with that of your attempt. It is the moment when the acknowledgment of your dispersement throughout the universe that you are most fully you, when you are most fully participating in the movements of the cosmos that you are most fully acting in the present, when you are Urkel and Urquelle, Jackson and Jordan, when you are the diffusion of yourself and the celebration of that diffusion that you are more than anyone could have imagined.
This dynamic narrative of both the game and the mode of its documentation was the soundtrack of much of the remainder of the journey and the weeks and months that followed. I personally envisioned and composed many of the songs as simple narrative-based folk songs. I become another voice to the paradoxes that Kanye embodies; and the story of bocce becomes the backdrop for their development.
* * *
After meeting Emily downtown at the Everyday Music Tristan insisted upon entering the American Apparel store, something Emily and I did not want to join him in doing. He wanted their free periodical Vice magazine and came back out very quickly. The periodical became another satellite to the literary universe of our bocce adventure. He offered to read a selection as we drove our first leg out of town, before stopping at Eve’s house for a walk with the dogs.
It was an erotic story about the dominatrix/submissive relationship. The narrator was invited to witness the Japanese version of the ritual ritual between two women. He is accompanied by his interpreter. The story is told very colorfully and with a self-consciously literary tone. It boasts its references and claims that they lift the writing above purely erotic writing to something larger. For example, in the midst of this scene the narrator pines for “long-bearded old Walt Whitman sitting here between the interpreter and me, sharing water with her and whiskey with me, singing the body electric.” Thus when he gets to the line “She was now wearing nothing but her red panties, and her nipples were hard” he considers himself worthy of a sanctimonious asterisk.* Another such jovial example is the purposeful misremembering of the Wordsworth axiom: that poetry be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”—The spontaneous overflow of feelings, recollected in tranquility. “Spontaneous overflow” becomes recontextualized, obviously, as a male orgasm, for, of course, the story was written, and illustrated, by a man.
“Tristan,” I exclaimed. “This is precisely the approach I was considering for the writing of the book. This, I believe, means it should be an official credo for the composition of the book: we have experienced a kind of life, a unique experience, and we will postpone its description until moments of post-trip tranquility. And these descriptions will not come forcibly, but from the ‘spontaneous’ tipping point of internal remembrance. This story shall be an important focal point of study for the composition of our book.” Tristan read a little longer and the magazine lay at our feet on the truck floor for the trip’s remainder.
Andrew: “Eve Connell on Bocce Balling in Portland.”
Eve: “Hipster Bocce Balling in Portland. It became so popular last year that the Urban Sports League and the Underdogs Sports Leagues started Bocce teams. And those are the teams that usually run kickball, and flag football, and softball, and dodgeball. But they added bocce to the repetoire. And we piloted, during one of the community bike rides last summer, they had a little bocce court set up at Fern Hill Park up here. And so Pear Boy and I stopped, and, in true hipster-park-bike spirit played a couple games. And it was awesome.”
Andrew: “Is it two player teams against two player teams.”
Eve: “Uh-huh.” You should look on the Urban Sports League, or Underdog sports online, and check it out.”
Andrew: “The best we could come up with was the one downtown in the park blocks.”
Eve: “Yeah. That one’s still there, and leagues have been playing there forever. That’s like total old school, like you know old Italian dudes—I mean everybody plays there. And then I have friends who run their own kind of team/league, and they’ve been doing that, I think, five or six years, anyway. And they have a really funny name, I can’t remember, of course, because my brain’s a sieve. And they’ve been playing there for a really long time. But I don’t know where else there are courts in town; I’ve just heard that there are, like in a couple of the parks. And, you know, these guys, there’s this house up the street, right at the edge of Fernhill Park, they took out their parking strip and made a—is it called a court?”
Andrew: “Yeah. That is so cool. It’s just called a court.”
Eve: “They made a court. And they let anybody play there. And you should go play there. In front of their house. It’s on that side of the street, the very last house before you get to the park. Up on, you know, 37th or—”
Andrew: “Well, alright.”
Eve: “They dug it out and then rolled out the DG and got the thing set up. It’s great.”
* Context is everything, isn’t it? In isolation this sentence might be considered crass. But here is this genial, “literary” setting, it becomes not merely fit for a family publication, but a veritable jewel of “family values.”
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