Switched on Pop - ANTHEMS: Jock Jams — Get Ready For This

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

In 1995, ESPN launched Jock Jams Volume 1, a compilation record that would define the sound of sports for the next quarter century. We listen to the album's biggest songs to define what makes a "Jock Jam," and tell the story of how this record came to define the sound of the stadium. MORE Read Emily VanDerWerff's article: “The Jock Jam” megamix inadvertently plays out ESPN’s inner tensions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Today we have a deeply nostalgic musical inquiry brought to us by a listener. Here's Steve. So I was at work and like we all try and do sometimes, we try and get ourselves hyped up to sit at our desk and work on email.

So I went and I did my usual routine. I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down on my desk, ready to tackle. about a thousand emails. I sort of said to myself, all right, and my brain auto-completed, y'all ready for this. So I immediately remembered the jock jams hit classic song, and I started to really think, you know, whatever happened to jock jams, why aren't they still making them today? And I wanted to know more about that whole experience. We're in the middle of a four-part series on what makes a sports anthem, and I'd argue that there is no greater totem of sports anthems than the jock jams compilation totally i mean i have so many deep personal associations

with that phrase jock jams what's the first that arises done dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun you all ready for this perfect don't get ahead of yourself because we're going to be quizzing you on a lot of music and some musical memory of some of the most important jock jams i'm ready for those of us who may not be familiar. Jock Jams was the Jock version of the playlist album. Now that's what I call music. These are the sort of sports anthem biggest songs that are played in stadiums. Wait, are you saying that they're part of the same like universe? I don't mean to make that comparison. I mean to say that they are like it is akin to. They are analogous. Exactly. Okay. Totally. It is a series of six compilation albums running from 1995 to 2001 highlighting the best music

and sports stadiums. And if we go to the first jock jams, it starts with, let's get ready to rumble. Let's get ready to rumble. I don't know if you know this, but this phrase is trademarked. Oh.

Should we be careful about saying it on the air? Perhaps because Michael Buffer, the announcer who came up with this catchphrase, has trademarked it to the degree Guess how much money he's made off of just this trademark alone? I don't want to know. A million dollars. It was reported by ABC that he has licensed this for $400 million.

Wow. Four words. So that's $100 million a word. There's actually, well, there's five words, but maybe two. Five. You probably, you know, it's a short word. I'm bad accounting. But you have a great ear.

And we're going to have to exploit that today. Because right from getting ready to rumble, we are going to jump into some of the most pumped up jams that are going to get your blood moving, make you sweat. It's going to be a lot of fun. I can hear the crowd sharing already. Let's do this. This is fun of music, just to give us a sampler of the kinds of things that happen on jock jams.

You're going to get R&B, hip-hop, EDM, all designed to make you move. For example, Noddy by Nature's Hip Hop Aray. Montel Jordans, this is how we do it. Nice. And of course, rednecks is, which I can't believe you can say rednecks is. Cotton-eyed Joe. Which we covered extensively on my favorite episode that you've ever produced called Why Are the 90s So Bizarre? We did that last summer.

Near and dear to my heart. Here's what I want to do today. I want to answer some of Steve's questions and get to the bottom of what musical features make jock jam's essential lasting stadium anthems. where did this album even come from and conclude with how should we think about its cultural legacy? Yeah. So let's get right into the music. Let's go back to the song that Steve auto-completed in his head.

Yeah. Two Unlimiteds, Get Ready. You all ready for this? I can see players like warming up in my mind's eye as I listen to this. That's exactly what it's meant to do. Because according to an interview with the Huffington Post, Ray Kostaldi, who was Madison Square Gardens music director, who helped choose songs on the Jock Jam's record,

he thinks that the music has to fit the venue. So if you're picturing people running around, prax and getting ready, that's exactly what it's supposed to do. So let's think about some of these musical features that we're hearing in this quintessential jock jam. I think this is, for me, the number one jock jam. It's the thing that you remembered.

Totally. It's the thing that auto-completed in Steve's head can't get rid of this song. I think you're going to hear it at pretty much any sports game. No doubt. Potentially multiple times. And so the things that I'm, hearing, they're actually, I think they're fairly obvious. So the first is that it's in a medium

tempo. Things need to start in a medium place, but a good enough amount of energy, but not so fast that the song will get lost in the reverberation of a stadium. It's really fast, it's going to get muddy. Speed metal is not a good genre for stadium anthems. No, definitely not. Second, and for the same reason, the song isn't too complex. It's a single, memorable riff. Right. With sometimes some drums underneath, but you don't even need the drums. Just that synthesizer.

Many jock jams will be a riff or maybe a chant that people can all participate in. One positive quality about these riffs is that they're transmutable. They're short. They can be played in between plays. The context of this music

is that you've got three seconds in between plays. Dun, dun, dun, done. That's it. You can slice it and dice it. Exactly. And as I was saying, people want to potentially participate in the music. And I think we can find all of these musical qualities in one of the most famous sports chance of all time. We're going to go back a little bit, if you don't mind, and listen to the Charge fanfare.

Dada da da da da da. Dada. Charge. Yeah, kind of whiffed that one, but we'll give it to you. The charge fanfare is simple, but also rhythmically and melodically distinct. Right? It has just enough of its own character that you can immediately sing it back. We can all participate. Do you know where this comes from?

I'm guessing you're saying fanfare, so I'm guessing it's some kind of like bugle call, maybe a military thing. But no, I have no idea. It's more close to home than you could possibly imagine. What does that mean? First of all, not quite as old as I imagine. Okay. 1946. Oh, yeah, that's quite recent.

It was written by Tommy Walker. Uh-huh. He was a junior at your university at USC. No way. Yes. The song, also called the Trojan Warriors Charge. Okay. Was perhaps adapted from the first call revely theme.

Do you know that, Buegel? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Just that very first part. Yeah, that little moment. Yeah, da da da da da da. Yeah, totally. So it feels like it's maybe adapted from something, which is a bit older.

And like many jock jams. This is a song made by a less known artist whose theme gets co-opted for mass media sports. Fight on Tommy Walker. That's great. So this was a USC song, but in 1958, the LA Dodgers adopted it as their charge march. What? Yeah, so you don't even know this.

This Dodgers Stadium, which is just down the road from here. You go all the time. I do. So get this. In a piece in Sports Illustrated, the writer Bruce Anderson reports reports, that the reason why this charge march became ubiquitous with all sports, not USC, not the Dodgers, but everybody,

was first in 1959 that the Dodgers made 20,000 toy trumpets that could play only this theme. And it was heard that year nationally in the World Series when the Dodgers took on the white socks. So there are all these sports fans that could make one little trumpet theme,

which was the charge march. And after that, it became ubiquitous. I will never listen to those six notes in the same way again. Is that cool? Yeah. So Charge, just like Get Ready, is there to get us ready for the game. And this is the other feature of Jock Jams, is that they need to encourage participation. Right.

Thousands of people in the stadium, they all got to go along with it. Yeah. You can play these songs and really you should know exactly what you're supposed to do. For example, in the Jock Jamms remix, we have a song like The Macarena. Sure. What are you supposed to do? As I recall, if I can go back to middle school, you put your left hand out and then your right hand out and you cross your left hand over your right hand. I'm a little rusty.

Okay, I'll give you an easier one. How about House of Pains jump around? Oh, that one I know exactly what you do. You jump around. It doesn't have to be complicated. And so, you know, when we look at a jock jam, I think its musical features are fairly simple, right? Yeah, repetitive, yeah.

Anybody can do it, not too complex. And I think that one of the really quintessential features of a jock jam, to do its job right, you need to be able to recognize it in that half second that it comes on the loudspeaker. You got to know it immediately, and you have to be queued on what to do. Right.

So I'm going to play the most obnoxious game that we've ever played on the show. Oh, no. And I'm going to play you anywhere from a quarter of a second to one second of a song. And I want to see if you can remember what that piece is. Now, you don't have to get the artist. You don't even have to get the name of the song.

All you have to do is finish the musical phrase. Okay, I'm ready for this. Oh. All right. Song number one. Can I get that again? I know this. And yet I'm drawing a complete blank.

Can I get another second? La da da da da da da da. Exactly. What is that? That is Labush's Be My Lover. Be my lover one. Labush. The mouth, I guess.

Interesting. I was considering whether or not to give you the first two notes or three. And I was actually concerned that the song would be so effective that after three notes, you would get it. And you did. You got the first one. All right. That's so funny. Next song.

Okay. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, but dun dun dun da da da. Does this, like, it's so funny because you're right. I'm already realizing, like, I've heard these songs so many times. All I need is a note to recognize them. And yet, I have no idea what they're called. called Who Performs Them? What is this? This is We Like to Party by The Vanga Boys.

The Vanga Boys. Does its job. Yeah. All right. Two for two. All right. Let's go for the three-pointer. Wow.

Okay, I got a blast of like 90s house piano on a Yamaha DX-7. Female vocal. I think this one's an air ball for me. All right. I got nothing. Here we go. This is your knight by Amber. Can you at least give me the chorus?

I don't know if I can with this one. I got to be real, Charlie. This one escapes me. All right. You're two for three. Fourth song. This one is not fair of me. What?

Is love? I didn't even give me a whole word. Baby don't hurt me. No idea who sings this song. I know it equally from sporting events and from the night at the Roxbury skit from SNL. This is Hadaways. What is love? Yeah.

What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. No more. I would have also given you points if you've gone, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Once again, just so much nostalgia, just conjured up by hearing that song. Wow.

Three for four, we got two more. Okay. Dun da da da da da da da da da. I know once again, I'm like, this is right at the edge of, My synaptic pathways, and I can't quite make it all connect. I need a little more. I think you had it. But what is it?

Where does it go from there? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. But then, like, there's lyrics, and I don't know what they are. Here's another night by Reel McCoy. Oh, those ridiculous digital synthesizers. Amazing. Yeah, I know it well now. It's back.

I'm going to put our whole show on the line. If you don't get this next one, I'm walking. out. This is horrible. I don't like anything about this. Wayo. Wayo. I'm going to have to ask you to reconsider because the whole show is on the line right now.

Boom, boom, boom. Oh, no. Hey, yo? Wait, what am I doing? What am I missing here? Don't go. Don't go, Charles. Give me another chance. Whoop, there it is. Yes, thank God. Oh, wow. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Yeah, yeah. Whoop, there it is, by tag team.

Yes, my favorite thing about Wump, there it is. It's Wom, exclamation point. Parentheses, there it is. Punguation is key with this song. Oh, yeah. Otherwise, it can be very confusing. Yeah, it's almost as good as the Britney Spears, oops, exclamation point, ellipsis. I did it again.

I mean, think of all the potential variations. It could be Wump, there it is. Yeah, no, it's not. There it is. It's no joking matter. Is it? I think we've established that jock jams, in order to be a true jock jam, have to be basically one neuron synapsis jump away from immediately singing aloud with all of your friends. And this was exactly the problem that Steve was encountering, who we heard at the very top of the show.

So to review. Yeah. Simple? Yeah. Repetitive. Mid-tempo. Yeah. High energy.

Yeah, and I would also say riff-based or chant-based. Rift-based or chant-based participatory. Yeah. Instantly recognizable. Yeah, that sounds like a good formula for a jock jam. It's jock jam. Okay, so I think we've covered the musical features of the jock jam. But what I really did not know was where all of this came from.

Yeah. And we're going to get back to that in the second half of the show. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived on the new Google Jasmine Absolut of Carolina Herrera, A fragrance intense with character curman and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, toffee caramelized and tonka-tostata. A combination that seduce

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year for a euro a month on Shopify dot records. For me Jock Jams

is one of those things that just emerged in youth existed, never went away

and it almost always has been Yeah, right? Yeah, it's like primordial

And that's exactly kind of where this came from. So Monica Lynch, the then president at Tommy Boy Records, had the idea for jock jams as a compilation at a sports game. She told Joseph Urban Trout at the Hoffington Post that it came to her while watching a Knicks game and that it was a, quote, very simple, very obvious idea. Yeah. And that she thought that this stuff would probably be easy to license. It's like these are the songs that are already happening Some of them have been around Some of them are newer

But some of them are like not already hits So it's like I bet I could put that together On an album Light bulb going off over your head Boom Cash symbols and the eyeballs Yeah I see it Yeah so the series started out as

Jock Rock in 1994 That featured classic rock Stadium anthems like Queens We Are the Champion Which we broke down in the first episode of the series Jock Rock was a commercial success The compilation album peaked at 79 on the Billboard. It set up the opportunity for more jock rock albums that followed, as well as the 1995 spin-off, much more successful spin-off, I should say, jock jams.

Interesting. So you're saying jock-jams was sort of like the little cousin of jock rock. Exactly. And went on to eclips. So jock jams was all about bringing in more of the hip-hop, edm, art. R&B sounds and sort of out with the classic rock stuff, which is, of course, ubiquitously played in sports stadiums. Also maybe more difficult a license, I might imagine. And so there were five volumes of Jock Jams. They were released every year from 1995 to 1999, one a year, each of them charting on the billboard as high as number 10.

The whole thing ended in 2001 with a final all-star Jock Jams album and then they were done. Tom Silverman, the owner of Tommy Boy Records, which made Jock Jams, told the writer Tom Barnes for an article in the publication, Mike, that they couldn't find new music to make compilations after that. They kind of exhausted the existing zeitgeist of songs. I mean, I can relate to my own personal experience. I think I had volume one, volume two. And I remember, like, maybe hearing the later ones and thinking, like,

I don't actually, this is like, we're like scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like I haven't actually heard these songs in the stadium. So this is part of it. Also, we're getting into 2001 and fundamental shifts in the market of music also cause these albums to no longer continue, we should say. So you have, first of all, obviously, Napster. You also have an issue in which the industry makes a preference for the series. Now that's what I call music. and make it more difficult to license to other compilation albums,

and this is part of what kills off Jock Jams. Okay, here's the craziest thing, though. Yeah. I don't know if you knew this about Jock Jams. I honestly had totally forgotten. It was a co-production with ESPN. Yeah, no, it doesn't ring about it. No idea.

Okay. So I wanted to know more about the context of why ESPN would launch a record label, and so I reached out to one of our colleagues who has covered the story. I'm Emily Vanderwerf. I'm the critic at large, for Vox, but I wrote a piece about Jock Jams at the AV Club in 2013. So by the 90s, ESPN established themselves as the place to watch and take in all things

sports. And they did this through a number of ways. They had big personalities talking about sports in a way that felt fresh and new, and they made sure that ESPN stayed relevant in viewers' lives. They are sort of the root cause of all of the bad things in television, but one of the offshoots of this was that like TV networks became bigger and bigger brands. So in a landscape of media consolidation as well as fragmentation of channels, it was clear what ESPN needed to do to stand out.

They needed to become the home for sports. There was a hyper-localization of sports. And then ESPN was like, we're going to make this hyper-nationalized. If you were a sports fan and all you cared about was sports, you could just watch ESPN. And one of the ways that ESPN distinguished itself from the rest was by having a totally unique voice. There's that comforting, like, patter to the way that they talked that was, you know how CNN is like, if you're on CNN, like, sort of the rhythm is, five cats were found in a burning house fire today, and the firefighters rescued them. But if you're on ESPN, it's like, we found five cats and these firefighters took them out of the house fire and look at them. They're just fine.

The voice of their sportscasters distinguished ESPN from the rest of the field. Yeah. But it's more than just how they spoke. These guys had big personalities. This is the era of SportsCenter. This is the era of Dan and Keith, Dan Patrick and Keith Olberman on SportsCenter. It's the era of Chris Berman's like nicknames becoming like a thing that people knew about. It's also the era of these guys who were kind of this weird Venn diagram intersection of Jock and nerd, because they knew.

all the sports stats, they knew all the stuff. They were hyper-intelligent, hyper-literate, and yet they also had this kind of air of like locker room swagger to them. These sportscasters were many celebrities in themselves. They helped establish a nerdy slash masculine lifestyle brand that you could live beyond the comfort of your couch. What ESPN was really successful at was creating a scenario where you had an ESPN aspect to every element of your life. They had apparel. They had catchphrases

that made it into conversation. They later launched a magazine. But this is also in the context in which it makes sense to get into music. And it was a natural extension. As Emily puts it, ESPN sounds like a jock jam.

They are high energy. They are all about the game. They are always ready to rumble. And I think there's no better example than the remix song that they produced for the third album. Let's get ready. This song is like a mega remix of all of the biggest hits.

In under 30 seconds, you get a taste of all of the best jock jams. You get, get, get, boom, there it is. Pump up the jam, move it. It's all there. Whoa, it's the Uber jock jam. How are you feeling right now? That is like a fever dream. That is a lot to process.

And inters first, you get these sportscasters. Check this out. This is 25 breaks, a couple of tackles. is, I think, the best example of the worst term in the world. Brand synergy. This is like if you took sports and put it in a sausage maker, and this is like, this is what would come out. It's a lot.

It's a lot to handle. Yeah. And for Emily, this song personified, the ESPN brand. I do think that the, the Jackchamp Megamix is absolutely the essential version of ESPN. It is, we're all having a good time here. We're going to have a party. It's going to be a hard fought battle. Everybody's going to play as hard as they can.

May the best team win. And we're never going to think about anything beyond what happens on the court. It was a real success. The record went to number 31 on the billboard. What? Yeah. Madness. I would have a heart attack if that came on the radio when I was driving.

And this is the sound we still hear today. But here's the problem. The jock jam brand, I think, became. bigger than the sound of ESPN. Both of us were clueless that it had that association. Rolling Stone even wrote an article a few years back about Fallout Boy

and how they became a jock jam all-star, but they weren't on the record. The term jock jam is now well, it's basically been genericized. So like terms like hula hoop, escalator, cue tip, super

glue. Kleenex. Many. There are many of these. Roller blades. Rollerblaze. No way. Yeah, it's true. So like many of these, the jock jam is now, I think, has really lost its ESPN association. Frisbee. What?

Yeah. Get out of here. It's a flying disc. We know that this has been genericized because you can go to Spotify and listen to the jock jam's playlist. It's not the jock jam's records at all. There might be a little bit of overlap. It has nothing to do with ESPN, but it's its own playlist of things. you hear in stadiums today.

Sure. Though for what it's worth, it does have one thing in common with 90s ESPN. And this is getting to what Emily was saying. It maintains really that hyper-masculinity. Totally.

From my quick listen, there wasn't a single female artist on the Spotify playlist, and there were few on the original jock jams. Wow. Looking back at the image that ESPN wanted to create, that lockerer masculinity slash nerds,

thing. You know, if you look at how they projected it image-wise, what was on the cover of every album? A cheerleader, right? Yeah. And if you watch the music video, it's just scantily clad cheerleaders, a referee in a suit, and none of the predominantly male athletes, which were, frankly, the center of conversation on ESPN in the 90s and mostly today as well.

I think the dark side of ESPN making jock jams, the sound of sports, is that they also played into an essential narrative of the 90s. Here's what Emily had to say on the subject. That's the ESPN story in a nutshell is the idea that you should stick to sports essentially means an apolitical world where you just talk about the scores and just talk about the highlights and just say, oh, this was great, wasn't it? and never, like, touch on the deeper stories involved about exploitation, shifting cultural mores, the ways that we privilege certain groups over others that are true of every aspect of American life, but are particularly true of sports and particularly often they're true of sports. But now when I look back at the jock jams, I hear it differently. I'm kind of curious about what a modern jock jam sounds like.

And I asked Emily what's changed in sports and at ESPN that might give us a clue. For lack of a better word, it's gotten woker. Like there is more acknowledgement of women play sports too. And there's more acknowledgement of, you know, the cultural and political issues around sports. Because it's gotten a lot harder for us to avoid those sorts of political and cultural issues. In the 90s, sports was seen as apolitical and putting air quotes around that. you know, nothing is ever truly apolitical, but like ESPN does still try to preserve that. We're all about the sports thing, but like it has gotten a lot harder to pretend that sports are

just apolitical and fun. Even if you remove it from political context in an era of like CTE injuries in football, or, you know, we have things like the Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar stories that are like, you know, very important and big stories that have sports central to them and you have to talk about them and can't be like jocular in a way. It's like, oh, ho, ho. So that has changed. But yeah, ESPN is still largely kind of an ironically winking, but very heavily bro-y, masculine environment.

So in many ways that 90s masculinity has continued. And though ESPN might not have originally created the stadium anthem by any means. They just help participate in the distribution of the compilation album of that sound. I think that these records play a very important role in embedding that sound in our cultural memory, such that you go to a sports game and that's what you hear. Such that when you go and check out a playlist on Spotify called Jock Jams, it has many of those same features. The musical features are interesting to me. These things aren't necessarily gendered, right? Simple, repeatable, riff, upbeat, high energy, fun.

It's not to suggest, of course, that all music played in stadiums are going to necessarily be played by men. But I think that here we're negotiating a very complicated conversation about representation in sports, who participates, who can literally play, who gets the comment on it, and what is the sound of it? And I think there were some bigger implications there. There could be another way to experience the game, which is to really think about, you know, why are they playing this music? What is it doing to me? And what kind of cultural values is it projecting? Yeah. I like that.

You know, as you mentioned, this term has become sort of deracinated from its original association. And that maybe presents an opportunity to redefine what the jock jam is. It's ours now, essentially. No one is telling us, you know, what isn't or what isn't a jock jam. So that gives us a little leeway in terms of what we decide is and isn't. I love that. It's a good challenge. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding,

and I want to give a huge shout out and thanks to Emily Vanderwerf. Our show is edited and mixed by the amazing Brandon McFarland. Bridget Armstrong is our producer, and executive producers are Nashat Kerwa and Liz Kelly Nelson. We're a production of the Vox Media Podcast. network. Make sure you tune in next week for more in our anthem series. You can find our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts, including our website, switchedonpop.com. And chat with us on social media at Switchdown Pop, Twitter, and Instagram. We'll be back again

in another week. Until then. Thanks for listening.