Phil Jackson, in the past six years, has subtly dropped two quotes in the past five years that mentioned the hip-hop culture as both unthinking and inappropriately dressed. This coming from someone who was a big part of the anti-Vietnam counter-culture of drugs and tie-dye. It’s all a little hypocritical.
Scoop Jackson, of ESPN.com, has a great article about it. Usually I don’t agree with a lot of Scoop’s stuff, but this one is pretty good.
The quotes, from Scoop’s article:
In October 1999, these words came out of his mouth:
“I don’t mean to say [that] as a snide remark toward a certain population in our society, but they have a limitation of their attention span, a lot of it probably due to too much rap music going in their ears and coming out their being.”
OK. Let that one slide. Chalk it up as generational hate. Cultural Alzheimer’s.
Then…
In October 2005, these words came out of his mouth:
“I think it’s important that the players take their end of it, get out of the prison garb and the thuggery aspect of basketball that has come along with hip-hop music in the last seven or eight years.”
OK … the camel’s thoracic and lumbar vertebrae just went into trauma. Forget a broken back, this is spondylitis. A disease.
Check it out.
yeah, i read this article yesterday. it was awesome. i had read that phil jackson quote when he said it a couple of weeks ago and i was actually surprised that it took this long for anyone to really say anything about it. i don’t even normally read scoop’s column, but i think that phil jackson is a dork (actually insert any number of worse names here, just tryin’ ta keep yer blog clean, or at least PG-13, corey!) so i read it, and liked it. i think that ever since ol’ phil shaved his goatee into that satan-beard, he has been posessed by satan himself, maybe not, but that’s about when he started to turn…
congratulations, mr. eric!! I wish you great happiness on your way to husband and wifedom.
thank you!