Euphoria

On the sportsification of music media

When beef is afoot, music media becomes just as fun, and as annoyingly pointless, as sports media.

Kendrick Lamar released “euphoria” Tuesday morning and the timeline went buckwild. Every music fan and journalist transformed into a boxing judge and analyst: spewing out Round 1 scores and hot takes. Music media is suddenly indistinguishable from ESPN. Joe Budden and DJ Akademiks are like Skip & Shannon (or whatever updated reference makes sense nowadays). I don’t intentionally watch either of them, like I’d never intentionally listen to Drake, but their opinions force their way into my consciousness, like Drake’s music has for the past couple decades. I’d hate everything about it…

…But I love it. I finally understand why dudes who had a fitted Yankees cap surgically attached to their skulls in 2007 and can pull obscure player statistics from NFL players’ high school seasons enjoy watching pseudo-Tucker Carlsons debate MJ vs. LeBron for hours on end. As much as I want to avoid somehow out-cringing the Spotify billboards that say “hip-hop is a competitive sport,” I have always loved the artform of antagonistic poeticism. It is truly wonderful when a war is waged lyrically. There is nothing else like it.

As much as I want to avoid becoming my dad’s friend in the 90s, being reprimanded by an old man who kept score on a pen and pad next to us at Illinois college basketball games for saying “cheerleading isn’t a sport,” two superstars trading diss tracks back and forth isn’t a competitive sport, Spotify. But it can be discussed using sports terminology. Kendrick dropping “euphoria” at 8:24am (bc Kobe?) on a Tuesday was like a Game 1 buzzer beater. LA over Canada. Drake looked like he might be up in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, though. "Push Ups” was unsurprisingly catchy and surprisingly funny and clever. The momentum shifted when Aubrey airballed on “Taylor Made Freestyle”: a decently funny idea but ultimately a regrettable misstep, especially now that Game 2 has tipped off, the ball is (like Drake’s dicknballs) in Drake’s hand, and the clock is ticking again.

The inherent drama of this derisive song-swapping allows for the discussion of music in the recognizable framework of a competition. It’s less abstract than most music coverage. No one’s trying to convince you the five second sampled ambient B-side from 1982 is “hauntingly beautiful.” They’re debating who’s winning. What’s the score? Why?

Sports are popular because each game has a clear narrative, with an outcome Vegas and conspiracy theorists will assure you is as predictable as Drake’s angles. There are ups and downs. Then there is a winner, and a loser.

Sports media has been so successful because analysts have the luxury of beginning with that clear narrative. When they talk about a game, audiences can easily track and follow the arc. They know that someone won and someone lost, and something happened along the way. This allows sports journalists, then, to draw out broader stories and meaning from the game. They might comment on the significance of a player returning to triumph after a horrific injury. They might bring up the fans’ emotional reaction to a team representing their city, which has been going through tough times lately. They might debate who’s the GOAT for millions of dollars per minute every morning.

Music journalists don’t typically have the luxury of beginning with that base narrative. A piece of music is not as definitive as an athletic event. Outside of battles, no one wins. Every listener will hear a song differently, each time they listen to it. Look at the stans reaching for quintuple entendres on the “Euphoria” Genius page. There is nothing objective about music. Scientists, don’t correct me if I’m wrong. The best music journalists draw stories and meaning out of music or artists anyways, of course. It’s just harder and a little bit less fun to discuss and debate music without an instantly relatable structure, like sports has.

When music media draws from sports media, even casual music listeners can track what’s going on. Kendrick, Drake, Future, Kanye, Rick Ross and every other old man with a microphone are all just making music. People are still talking about the wittiness of their lyrical construction, performance and delivery. They can offer their opinions on who’s winning even though, due to the surrounding PR spectacle, the artists and the media personalities who cover them (and the execs taking splits and ripping pants) all win in their own ways. The fans win too because even though it’s annoying, it’s hella fun.

Opening “X” these days, I feel like I’m in an endless 1 v 20 battle: Big Me vs. Hot Takes. I think it’s because I’m Ray Romano: a man of a certain age. What I see on that godforsaken timeline is For Me, and what feels like the biggest deal in the world some days is far from it. I’m entertained by and engaged in the Kendrick vs. Drake feud, so that is what I see, alongside unspeakable violence and ‘the news,’ which is also victim to sportsification but in a much less entertaining way. If you subscribe to my newsletter, and opened this email, I assume our algorithms are similar, and you’re mildly entertained each day by Kendrick and Drake rapping at each other.

(Speaking of which, I want to invent a Tinder-like app that matches individuals with their algorithm soulmates. I have plenty of shared interests with those around me, but sometimes the content of the day is so niche that IRL folks couldn’t possibly comprehend what I’m talking about. Send some random dude from northern England named Nate to my door so we can speculate why Tao Lin is burying cheese, for instance. I would hand over my data to any foreign government for that.)

In a dismal era of layoffs and hopelessness for most journalistic beats, sports continues to increase popularity and profitability (I don’t have data to back this up, but just trust me, I saw an article that said something like that once). This beef is particularly entertaining because even though Kendrick likes to remind Drake that he still has PTSD and if he speaks on his family again someone in his family might bleed, these are two rich old men with fading relevance. For those who are aging and fading along with them, it’s been fun to talk about music in a different way, no matter how pointless it is.