Switched on Pop - Begging songs and basketball's musicality (with Hanif Abdurraqib)

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

There's no music writer like the essayist and poet Hanif Abdurraqib: whether he's narrating the beautiful awkwardness of a Carly Rae Jepsen concert or talking jazz and eastern spirituality with Andre 3000, he manages to coax stories and insights out of songs in a way that never fails to surprise. His latest book, There's Always This Year, is a free flowing meditation on basketball, childhood, his home state of Ohio, and of course, music – so on the precipice of the NBA finals, Hanif returns to Switched On Pop to discuss classic soul, sports, and sound with musicologist Nate Sloan. You can buy Hanif's work through his website here. Songs discussed: Boyz II Men, "On Bended Knee" Otis Redding, "My Girl" The Temptations, "My Girl" Joy Oladokun, "My Girl" Stevie Wonder, "My Girl" Stevie Wonder, "Knocks Me Off My Feet" Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, "Challengers: Match Point" 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 musicologist Nate Sloan. I read a lot of music writing every day, profiles, academic research, trade journals, but there's maybe no music writer who makes me sit up and pay attention more than the essayist and poetist Hanif Abdurikib.

Whether he's narrating the beautiful awkwardness of a Carly Ray Jepson concert, assessing the legacy of a tribe called Quest or talking jazz and Eastern spirituality with Andre 3000. Hanif coaxes stories and insights out of songs in a way that never fails to surprise. So when Hanif comes out with new writing, we drop everything and try and get him on the show. His latest book, There's Always This Year, is a free-flowing meditation on basketball, childhood, race, his home state of Ohio, and of course, music. We're so happy that he's joining us today on the precipice of the NBA finals to discuss classic soul, sports, and sound with us.

Hanif, welcome back to Switchdown Pop. Oh, man, thank you so much for having me again. It's really great to be here. It's been a while. It's been a couple of years. And so it's great to be back with you. This is your third appearance. I think your first was in 2018.

Yeah. Second was in 2021, 2024. So we've got a nice kind of like three-year rotation going. your new book there's always this year is ostensibly about basketball but like so much of your work it takes that topic as a sort of opportunity to enter a slipstream to discuss personal historical issues of art and society the things that matter to you what were you trying to explore with this book there's always this year what prompted you to to write it i was thinking a lot about time I think that on a high level, I was thinking about mortality, and I was thinking about my own ability to grapple with getting older, which is something I had not considered for a long time. Basketball was a perfect format for that, I think. Basketball is a format for that because it is a game where time shrinks incrementally. There is a 24-second shot clock. There is a game clock. There is a clock that allows you a certain amount of time to get the ball in. There are all these descending times that inform how much time you have left to do any kind of action.

And because basketball has all of these miniature times happening in a larger time window, it was a good opportunity for me to think about the way that a life is kind of operating in a similar form. A life operates in small blocks of time that are feeding into a larger block of time. We have days, but we also have months. We also have hours. We also have minutes. And I'm just a basketball fan, so it was also a fun challenge to myself to ask myself how I could best use this thing I love to articulate something really large. I thought it could be fun to start our conversation by playing a sound for you that can sort of bridge the worlds of basketball and listening.

Hanif, if you'd indulge me, what's the first thing you think of when you hear you. hear this sound. I think about closure. Yes, I think about the ending of something. That is the most familiar sound to me, the one that sounds like a buzzer, but also just sounds

like a loud shouting bird. That is the buzzer that you hear when the 24 second shot clock in a basketball possession counts down to the end. And I thought this is a good example of the links that you find between basketball and sound. If basketball is the starting point for this project, that's not where it ends and not where it takes us over the course of this work.

There are digressions and diversions, and we jump around through space and time. And what also emerges is a kind of soundtrack. Music seems inescapable. When you started writing about basketball, how did you feel music start to come into this topic? I mean, like so many things with me, you know, music is kind of the starting point for how I make sense of a larger idea or a larger concept.

And because so much of the book is grappling with these other themes, be it mortality or be it longing or desire, There's no better way for me to make sense of that than through song, which I'm so obsessed with the way desire appears in pop music, you know, or the way that longing appears in pop music. And I'm at this point because in the book I talk about the begging song, you know, so I was knocking at the door of these thoughts for a long time. Music helps me make sense of the bigger emotions that I otherwise would maybe leave behind, you know, so there's some, there's some granular emotions that music helps me get to. Well, let's go a little deeper into one of these subcategories that you just identified for us. Yeah. One of the most protracted musical discussions in the book centers around you establishing these categories of what you call the leaving song and the begging song. And before we listen to an example of those, maybe tell us how those come up in the context of the book. Yes.

So the book is divided in the quarters, and in one of the quarters I talk about for those who know basketball, LeBron leaving Cleveland. And, you know, what I'm trying to get, I'm trying to get at many things in that quarter. But one thing I'm trying to get at is this kind of odd, but beautiful tension that exists when someone leaves and you are hurt by them leaving, but you don't like not want them back, you know. You know, you maybe want them back a little bit. And then, you know, there's the begging song, the please don't leave song. I, in the book, I highlight boys to men. I don't really love boys to men, but they are, for what it's worth. I mean, they're kind of masters of that subcategory of song. It's always, in the book, I kind of specify, it's often men. It's often men doing the begging. It's a selfish song. It's almost like, you know the person isn't coming back. You or perhaps have even made peace with them not coming back, but you want to show the world how badly you want them back, even though they are not going to come back because it's like showing how sensitive you are, you know? I love that subcategory of song. Gosh, I love it so much. One example of the genre that you give is Otis Redding's cover

of The Temptations Hit My Girl, written by Smokey Robinson. Yes, I love that cover. I mean, I love I'm a big Otis person. I love my girl. I love almost every iteration of it. You know, Joya Lada Kuhn maybe has one of the greatest covers that I've ever heard. But the Otis cover, it's its own unique world. It's like, a different tone of song entirely. You write, you must hear Otis Redding sing, My Girl. If you have already heard it, you must hear it again. Through the entirety of the tune, he is always just a half step behind the drum beat.

He enters this way and never completely catches up. Let's listen for that in the chorus of this tune. Oh, gosh. I love that. I love that version. You know, the funny thing about that version, I don't know, have you ever heard Steve you want this cover of My Girl when he was, like, young? They dragged him in the studio and did like a one-take cover.

Stevie on the first chorus also comes in too early, but he comes in like fast, you know? And because Motown was like, we're going to do one take of this and that's all you got. So we're going to just keep whatever you lay down is what we're keeping. So the Stevie Wonder version has this kind of like fucked up entry into the chorus that they just kept. And Otis comes in like slowly behind the track.

And I mean, I think that's intentional. I don't, you know, Stevie's was an accident. The way Otis frames that entirety of the presentation of that song, feels like deeply intentional. Like he's trying to re-render, perhaps, the emotional meaning of it, you know? You say the whole point of these popular tunes that got passed around like the blues at a funeral

is that everyone had to put their foot in it in a slightly different way. And Otis couldn't even sing a song about love without a little hint of ache, a precursor to the begging. Yeah. You know, I mean, because I don't know if we think about songs, big popular songs in the same way.

There were so many covers of my girl by like one year after it came out, you know? I'm trying to think like a massive song on the charts. I don't know. It'd be like if there were four different covers of Texas Holden by four different very big artists right now, like right now, you know? So the songs don't move the same way.

But my girl, you know, by the time was out for like a couple years, these songs just got passed around, a pass around, a pass around. And when a song does get passed around with that much frequency, the onus is on the person who receives it or takes up the task of receiving it to make it a little bit different than the last person

who had it before him. And Otis, his version is unlike almost any other version because his voice does, Otis's voice is maybe naturally suited for the begging song or the song that's steeped an ache. But his version of my girl is like very tentative. I love how tentative it is. If you look at the original lyric sheet to my girl, Smoky Robinson writes a question in. There's a question mark. It's what could make me feel this way? Question mark. The interesting thing about my girls is that no one sings the song as though they sing it as though the question is rhetorical and not an action item. They sing it as though you, the listener, are to understand the answer before to rise because the first time you heard it, that is the way it was presented. So if you look at a version like Otis's version, and I know I keep bringing up their version, but Joy's version, Joy Laudocoon's version, they kind of present that question mark.

It feels like the question mark is there. In Otis's case, the question mark is, I am not sure. if this is my girl or not. You know what I mean? Like, or I'm not sure if this is my girl today. Yeah.

There's a certainty, and I, again, I love My Girl. Smokey Robinson is one of my favorite songwriters of all time. There's a certainty in most presentations of the song,

My Girl, that I think robs the listener sometimes of a kind of anticipation, which I think is a vital part of Romantics is anticipation. I appreciate your deep dive into the song.

And that is exactly why you hear. You take songs that might be so familiar to the point that you think they'd have nothing left to tell us, and yet you'd excavate something new and refreshing about it. And we've been talking about this song, interestingly. My podcast partner, Charlie and I, had a sort of hostile exchange because he was listening to the Hojure hit Too Sweet.

And he said, this reminds me of the Temptations My Girl. And I was like, that's ridiculous. But then all these other listeners, wrote in, they're like, no, I hear it too. So I'm sensing that this song, my girl, that is, has sort of like embedded itself into the substrate of our collective consciousness in such a deep way. But it's because Motown in general laid a sonic blueprint that was hard to duplicate. Like, you can't do a hard duplication of the Funk Brothers, but you can kind of pick apart some of those sonic elements and utilize them. It's why people are always, like, in trouble for

borrowing Marvin elements of Marvin Gaye songs. right? Right. Like when Marvin Gay's estate sued Robin Thick and Farrell Williams because their song Blurred Lines sounded too similar to Marvin's got to give it up. Same thing with Ed Shearin's song Thinking Out Loud and its similarity to Marvin's Let's Get It On. These songs are crafted in-house, in a Motown house that had a soundscape that was so uniquely Motown. It's timeless in that sense. Now you can't exactly hit it on the nose, but those elements you hear and you're like, man, so much of the Motown sound, so much of the Funk Brother sound, I imagine leaves people thinking, damn, why didn't I think of that first? You know, like having a baseline like my girl, it's like, I imagine hearing that

when it first came out. If I were a bass player, I'd be like, what the fuck? Why didn't I just think of this? You know? And that was the goal of a lot of this music, too, was to craft something so perfectly intricate and precise that it would reach the maximum audience possible. And then when you hear Otis do it, he sort of hoax at that sheen a little bit and like picks it apart somehow. He complicates it a bit. It's like you're putting maybe a black and white filter over a color photo. I'm intrigued by that.

I'm intrigued by Otis's preemptive longing, which is essentially what he's doing, I think, is imbueing the song with some kind of preemptive ache or preemptive longing. that may or may not present itself. You know, Smokey Robinson is so great at writing love. So for me, truly one of the great love songwriters, because he relied on the simplicity of like plain telling, which I call it, you know, where it's like, I'm not going to beat around the bush

in telling you how much I love you. And this is a formula that actually, I think, like, runs through the Motown catalog, even songs that Smoke didn't write. So you think about like Stevie Wonders, knocks me off my feet, which is breathless, in its approach to the repetition of I Love You

because what else is there to say? There's only so much you can do with that if you are someone who is reformating that song for your own purposes, right? Except in Otis's case where he's like, I can change the vocal tone and delivery of this so that I'm not cheapening the message of I love you,

but I'm saying, I love you so deeply that it has circled back around to an anxiety around how much you love me, you know? There's a connection between that interpretation and the way you describe him singing this song where his phrasing is kind of all over the place, right? And he sings, I guess, it's very tentative. He sings, you'd say, it's like a shrug. And then he says, what could make me feel this way as if he's resigned to a type of doom? His ability to generate all of that emotion from just a few simple lines.

of music is really a testament to his skill as a performer and interpreter. I love someone who is skilled at the reinterpretation of songs. I think I love how people interpret songs because you are taking ownership over the way someone encounters a story being told. When you're crafting a narrative, are you deploying these musical examples sort of as they come to you? Or do you have them like in your back pocket and, and, you're, you're, you're waiting for the right place to use them. I don't know if that's even a linear process necessarily, but I'm just curious to get at how a musical soundtrack

really kind of enters the writing experience. I think I tend to just stumble into them. Sometimes you just kind of, you know, you throw one part of a web out into the universe and then everything starts to stick to it. That is what happened with the Begging Songs idea too. I was writing about longing. I know for sure how I can navigate

and work my way around musical narratives, in enlivening musical narratives to reach for something else. And so if that door has even opened a little bit for me, I kind of want to run through it. Let's leave that door ajar as we take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk to you about the music of basketball. For sure. Attention, Spotify.

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hypnotica irresistible. Discoveringla and let's be involver for susentia. We're back with Hanif Abdur-Aqib at the top of our conversation. I played you a sound

and asked for your reaction. I'm going to do that again. What's the first thing you think of when you hear this? Gosh, you know, that's a single sound, right? Yeah. But it ignites like several senses for me.

I can like smell that sound. I can visualize that sound. visualize or sounding attention. Sometimes I like go, I play basketball still maybe once a month with regularity, sometimes a little more. And, you know, the gym is in a building that is pretty vast. Yeah. And when I walk into it, if I'm early enough, it's still dark in there. Like the lights are out, except for in the gym that I can't see yet. So I cannot see the gym, but I can tell how many people are in there just by the sound of how many sneakers are squeaking across the gym floor. And so this is really welcoming sound that tells me your friends are not far away. And if I don't hear it when I walk in,

I feel like there's an absence. Like I feel like I'm walking into a kind of absence. I love that sound. It's a beckoning sound. It beckons me to move quicker to get to where the people I love are. So basketball seems to be a sport that is often compared to music. People have described basketball as being like hip hop. People have described basketball as being like jazz. I've even heard basketball compared to classical music. Yeah. Why does this sport have some inherent musicality to it. I think it's because there's just the movements of it, which I don't think it's actually unique to basketball.

I think tennis is musical. I think I grew up playing soccer too, which I think is a very musical sport. But I think basketball has a percussion built into it. It has different modes of percussion built into it. I think the way that players run around screens, navigate screens in particular, there's a poetry to that, not to be like the poetry in motion guy, but I do think very literally, you are analyzing a small space through which your body can navigate. Or if you say are in a pick and roll situation, you are perhaps in a band, right? You're a rhythm section and you're trying to

find a level of comfort where you and your partner can operate and kind of hit your own little groove. So, you know, I think you can look at any sport and affix a kind of musicality to it. But basketball has a lot of opportunities for that, not just sonically, but the way that people, eye contact functions, the way that bodies move alongside of each other. These kind of things, I think, provides some musicality. When you mentioned tennis, it made me think of the film Challenger. I don't know if you've had an opportunity to see it, but it's a movie about tennis that is scored by this driving,

electronic, up-tempo soundtrack from Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross. And I feel like that's a fitting soundtrack for tennis. It's fast-paced. it's back and forth. Basketball brings to mind different kinds of music's because there's a little bit more spaciousness and a little bit more

improvisation and every point is like a little bit different. So there's always some new combination that you've never quite seen before. It seems to me that this could be why people compare it to jazz or hip-hop because it has this sort of flow

state to it. That music is more. maybe one of the only other places to access that. In a lot of sports you can improvise, but there's sometimes a small window in which you can improvise or the degree to which you can improvise shrinks. Basketball, there's a level of improvisation, particularly in one-on-one play that is intriguing to me.

There's no player, perhaps, in the NBA, I love watching in a low shot clock situation, say, Kyrie Irving. And Luca Donchick, they're both very good when the shot clock gets below, say, six or seven. Because they're such good. improvisers. When the shot clock gets that low and you got to get a shot up, everything kind of goes on the window and then you are relying on what you know of your own capabilities. And if you go to see enough jazz musicians, there are points when the groove falls apart and then someone

has to rescue it. Yeah, right. And basketball has all these opportunities to watch someone trying to rescue a groove, so to speak, or get a team back on the right time. And that requires improvisation, in boldness. What about you as a viewer or listener? Are there things that you get out of watching basketball or playing basketball that are similar to the experiences you have listening to music or making music? Or do those occupy different emotional terrains for you? Yeah, there's some similarities. I mean, I played point guard, I guess, to whatever degree there are positions and pick up. And that to me is operating like a symphony director or you're like leading the orchestra. I mentioned the pick and roll earlier. If you are the ball handler in a pick and roll,

you are trusting that someone will adequately surrender themselves to the rhythm of your ideas. That to me is a musical level of trust. And basketball offers us a lot of opportunities for this kind of like two people entrusting each other with with a grand idea and seeing where it goes. Hanif, I have one more sound to play for you. Yeah. You know, if we're going to talk about musicality. There's a real musicality to fandom. There's something about a collision of voices coming together to taunt someone.

In the universal cadence of da, da, da, da, da, it always has to be that interval. Syllabically it works. But it's also like easy enough for people to follow. Like no one's really going to mess up that cadence, you know. That's right. If you add another beat to it, then that might get tricky. But, you know, you're just kind of like airballs, two syllables. You're flowing from one syllable smoothly into the next, you know.

Chanting air ball makes me think of other things that people chant at basketball games. And there's one that you write about it at some length, too, which is ball don't lie. Ball don't lie. Yeah. Well, first of all, maybe just, just explain what those three words mean in the basketball context. Yeah, in the context of who, if the ref calls a foul, but it wasn't really a foul, you get two foul shots anyway. If you miss the first one, ball don't lie. The ball knows, the ball knows that you got away with something,

and there's a penance to be paid for getting away with something. There's a way, I think, that that phrase applies to the way in which you listen to music and the way you write about basketball and maybe the way you see the world in general, one of the most refreshing things about reading your work is the lack of judgment that you bring to any particular subject, that you bring a genuine curiosity, that you're willing to entertain a deep discussion of really any object

as long as it has something to say. Oh, yeah. As long as ball don't lie. And I think it's disarming in a really productive way to encounter the breadth of your taste and knowledge. Because it kind of makes you say, well, why don't I have that same openness? Why can't I talk about basketball with the same passion that I talk about politics and race and history? And why can't I listen to different genres of music with equal sort of attention and reverend? I mean, speaking for ourselves, we read your book,

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us When We were, in the early days of starting this podcast, and I feel like we're probably not alone in adopting your expansiveness as a mode of engaging with the world and really that opened our ears to so many different sounds that we might not have given the time of day to otherwise. I really appreciate you have me on again, too. You know, this is like a place where, like, I feel like these kind of conversations about individual songs. Being able to do this to a place like this stops me from being the guy shouting on the sidewalk, you know. Yeah, I mean, really and truly, you know, I don't, I don't,

you have like my little crew of friends who are also music nerds when we do this, but I mean, broadly, being able to have these kind of conversations with some frequency, I think this feeds me in a way that very genuinely stops me from being the guy shaking my fist on the sidewalk, shouting about the nuances of Stevie Wonders drumming, you know. Well, you can always come to our, you know, metaphorical sidewalk and shout. Hanif, thank you so much for joining us today on Switchdown Pop. No doubt.

Thank you again for having me. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz. Art Chung is our editor. Brandon McFarland is our engineer. Iris Gottlie does illustrations and Abby Barr does community management. Nishak Kerwa is our executive producer. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of New York Magazine and Vulture.

You can find more episodes of Switchdown Pop anywhere. you get podcasts and our website switchdownpop.com while you're there pop your name into the little box that signs you up for our newsletter it's a it's a fun blast of musical logical insight right in your inbox check out honey's new book there's always this year anywhere you get great literature we'll be back with a brand new episode next tuesday and until then thanks for listening