We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music

Ken McLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409408642
• eBook ISBN: 9781317000099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

Sports and popular music are synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community. They are often interconnected through common cross-marketing tactics and through influence on each other's performative strategies and stylistic content. Typically only studied as separate entities, popular music and sport cultures mutually 'play' off each other in exchanges of style, ideologies and forms. Posing unique challenges to notions of mind - body dualities, nationalism, class, gender, and racial codes and sexual orientation, Dr Ken McLeod illuminates the paradoxical and often conflicting relationships associated with these modes of leisure and entertainment and demonstrates that they are not culturally or ideologically distinct but are interconnected modes of contemporary social practice. Examples include how music is used to enhance sporting events, such as anthems, chants/cheers, and intermission entertainment, music that is used as an active part of the athletic event, and music that has been written about or that is associated with sports. There are also connections in the use of music in sports movies, television and video games and important, though critically under-acknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice and performance. Despite the scope of such confluences, the extraordinary impact of the interrelationship of music and sports on popular culture has remained little recognized. McLeod ties together several influential threads of popular culture and fills a significant void in our understanding of the construction and communication of identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Chapter 1
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game”: A Brief History of Music, Sports, and Competition

As demonstrated by the recent focused marketing and popularity of sports music, sports and music have become closely intertwined cultural expressions of the modern and postmodern era. Athletic competition and music, however, have long been connected. At some point in ancient history the idea of rivalry and competition became important to human socialization. The straightforward idea of the hunt was refined such that those members of a society who most effectively administered a kill were elevated in status. As sports historian Ellis Cashmore has outlined, “Competition between individuals or groups added a new and apparently appealing dimension to an already perilous activity.”1

Such rivalry and competition eventually extended to other cultural activities, including music, which thereby gained a wide appeal, both for participants seeking to express their physical or intellectual dominance and for audiences who were enraptured by the spectacle of humans competitively displaying physical or technical abilities. Through what Norbert Elias has termed “the civilizing process,” humans gradually replaced the physical dangers of hunting and warfare with the vicarious thrills of less dangerous physical displays.2 The seemingly inherent human need for pleasurable excitement and entertainment was a common rationale for the early inception of both sports and music.

This chapter provides a historical overview of the relationship between sports and music in Western society for the past 2,000 years. It is not intended as a complete documentation and narrative of the socio-cultural evolution of the historical connection between sports and music, the volume of which would necessitate a separate study. Rather, this overview is intended to provide an outline of the breadth and depth of the issue. Before commencing the survey, however, it will be helpful to understand some of the historical debates regarding the relationship of sports, not just to music, but to the arts in general.

The Sports–Music Aesthetic

On a general level the concept of aesthetic beauty in sports and its relationship to the arts has been the subject of considerable inquiry and contemplation. The link between athletics and music in Western society is founded upon the ancient Greek notion that the union of strength and beauty is the hallmark of the ideal man.3 As outlined in Politics, Aristotle believed that both music and gymnastics were fundamental to the education of boys and wondered whether music is “capable of producing a certain quality of character just as gymnastics are capable of producing a certain quality of body.”4 In contrast to our contemporary Western notion of the two spheres existing in isolation from one another, for the ancient Greeks sports and the arts, including music, were intimately bound together in the cultivation of a complete individual. Many festivals, notably the Pythian Games held in Delphi in the sixth century BC, subsequently encouraged musical as well as athletic competition. If not incorporating actual musical competition, many athletic events were accompanied by music, often by reed flutes, and victors could be honored by ceremonial hymns. The poet Pindar’s tenth Olympic ode, for example, proclaims:

All the precinct rang with music

Sung at the feast

In the mode of praise

For the ancient Greeks the athletic body—though this was limited to the male body—was held to be the aesthetic ideal of symmetry and proportion. Throughout the succeeding centuries painters and sculptors often used the subject of sports and the associated athletic body in their works.5 Perhaps the most famous example of this is Myron’s Discus Thrower (Discobolus), a bronze sculpture from the fifth century BC that is typically praised for its symmetry and proportion. As the historian John Fairs stated, “The perfectly proportioned body was the beautiful body and for the Greeks the beautiful body was the good body.”6

More recent aesthetic analysis of the athletic body maintains such a notion of unity and symmetry but adds the element of technical mastery. The ideal body of the athlete, according to Paul Weiss, writing in 1969, makes him “a man apart.” “The beauty and grace of his body, his coordination, responsiveness, alertness, efficiency, his devotion and accomplishments, his splendid unity with his equipment, all geared to produce a result at the limits of bodily possibility, set him over against the rest of men.”7 Despite the rather dated patriarchal tone of such language, it is language that, however unintentionally, applies equally well to bodies involved in musical performance.

The need to delineate a distinction between sports and art has preoccupied scholars from the time of Plato and Aristotle. The Aristotelian position was that sports should be determined by the beauty of nature. In his De rebus naturalibus Aristotle states, “Nature is the cause of motion in natural things, not only in the body itself in which it is (immanent motion) but also on another external body (transeunt motion).”8 Thus what distinguishes art, for Aristotle, is that the principle of motion comes from forces external to the object, caused by man, whereas in sports the principle of motion comes from within. More recently, in attempting to delineate a similar distinction between art and sports, the Organizing Committee of the 1972 Munich Olympics published a paper entitled The Scientific View of Sport. Among other issues the paper promoted the following opinion:

Art and sports are both to be distinguished from play through the quality of earnestness; they demand hard work, and intense effort which can only be made by total commitment, and a great deal of expenditure of will. The seriousness of sport is stressed by the presence of spectators. The spectator has a “connection” with the athlete, a “participation,” which might be understood as a sort of initiating reproduction of the movements he makes. The “participation” is accompanied by a “distancing” (distanciation), for the spectator “never in fact intends to take part in the action.” Both “participation” and “distancing” are equally characteristic of the reception of works of art: the latter can only be and has to be reproduced by the observer.

The earnestness of the athlete and the presence of spectators [are] explained by the fact that sporting, just like artistic activity, is directed towards an end; both are directed towards a result. But what corresponds in sport to the work of art (oeuvre)?9

The paper stresses the similarities between art and sports that stem from the participant’s effort and hard work and the common “participation” and “distancing” experienced by the spectators of both activities. As expressed in the final line above, the committee ultimately failed to answer its own question. Nonetheless the similarities between art and sports have been noted in a variety of sources. In his book Soccer: The World Game, Geoffrey Green saw strong aesthetic commonalities between sports and art:

In order to appreciate the possibilities of aesthetic compensation in the sphere of sport and to grasp the meaning of the latter—especially the simple and beautiful pattern movements created in football—one can point to the very real nearness of sport to art.

The two have three important things in common. Strong, emotional excitement; a system of conventions and rules by which an appropriate sphere of human experience is delimited and dominated, and which are just as serious and valid in their own particular way as the intellectual categories of the philosopher and the physicist; and last, exercise and creativeness within such a sphere.

The essential difference between art and sport is that the latter is more external and everyday, more materialist and matter-of-fact.10

To be sure, one might argue that the difference between an aesthetic of sports and one of music, or of any other art for that matter, is that there is a closer empathetic relationship between the spectator and the sport as an art form. Indeed, one might expect a sports aesthetic to correlate most closely with an aesthetic of dance, owing to their common kinesthetic element. Indeed, given the aesthetic description of the well-proportioned athletic body as outlined by Fairs and Weiss above, it seems clear that one of the strongest connections between athletic and musical pursuits is the social value placed on disciplining and regulating the body.

In recent years the world of sports has become increasingly aestheticized in a postmodern pastiche of advertising logos, television and publicity images, and various symbols of consumer capitalism. Even the body parts of athletes have been subject to hypercommodification (think of the often-remarked-upon size of Shaquille O’Neal’s feet in basketball or the emphasis placed on Rafael Nadal’s muscular biceps in tennis), such that they become mere extensions of the larger self, alienated, disembodied—appendages, as it were. Sports theorist Genevieve Rail goes so far as to claim that athletes’ bodies are “disappearing under the weight of social power.”11 Such a proposal is resonant of arguments, addressed in Chapter 3, surrounding the increasing removal of the body in musical culture stemming from various technologies that allow virtual experience of both “live” performance and listening.

Dance and Athleticism and Competition

As previously intimated, one of the most pervasive manifestations of the commonality between music and athletics occurs through the practice of dance. A central characteristic of dancing is that it always involves physical human movement and exertion and is fundamentally accompanied by musical sound. For the ancient Greeks, in fact, music, dance, and poetry were represented by the single term mousikē (art of the Muses). The Greeks used dance in education and to some degree, as a form of gymnastics—a fact that impelled Plato (in The Republic and in more detail in The Laws) to recommend strict state control over the forms of dancing to be permitted. Free Hellenic citizens, he suggested, should concentrate on stately dances such as the emmeleia, which he deemed to impart grace to body and soul alike.12

As dance has evolved throughout history, the connection to exercise or athletics has never been far from central. William McNeill has studied dance from the standpoint of what he terms “muscular bonding,” its role in creating “social cohesion among any and every group that keeps together in time, moving big muscles together and chanting, singing … .”13 In this sense dance has often been linked to militarism, both in the sense of rehearsing group battle formation and in preparing soldiers for the physical exertion of human combat.

In the middle ages and early Renaissance, one of the most common dances was the saltarello, an athletic dance form involving a vigorous jump or leap. Slightly later in the Renaissance, athletic dances such as high-vaulting voltas and energetic galliards were common entertainments mingled with exercise. Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual Orchésographie (1588) lauded the practice of dancing both for health reasons and as part of the pleasurable search for a mate. Arbeau explained at some length the many possible variations of the galliard; the basic pattern consisted of the dancer hopping onto the ball of one foot while moving the other forward in the air “as if to kick someone.”14 Men would attempt to impress their female partners with athletically and technically impressive virtuoso “tricks,” including fast footwork, competitive hitch-kicks to a tassel raised high above the floor, pirouettes, or rapid air turns or beats (“capers”). Men and women, when dancing hand in hand, suited their styles to each other, but when dancing separately, their styles were strongly differentiated according to sex, the gentlemen displaying strength, elevation, and athletic prowess, and the ladies grace and charm. According to Kate van Orden, in “the galliarde … the male dancer had the opportunity to show his strength, fiery nature, and even aggression.”15 Van Orden also looks at the military connections of the French theatrical ballet de cour, in which she claims “musicians and professional dancers [became] an infantry under the command of nobles who command from above … [for whom] sweating it out together on stage was not far from the closeness that came from shared blood sports, fencing, jousts, and fighting together in battle.”16 Thus the athleticism exhibited and required in many dances of the day was closely connected to the competitive nature of war and likely served to keep aristocratic men physically active and fit between actual battles.

During the baroque period dancing skills were cultivated daily by the nobility and their middle-class emulators and typically taught by ubiquitous dancing masters. The enervated flirtation and the exhibition through dance of feminine charms and lusty male prowess were considered to be healthy and desirable aspects of social intercourse. All occasions of state, great or small, required celebration and entertainment, often by dance, while personal aggrandizement, physically and sartorially, were natural concomitants of the theatrical and socially competitive ambience of such public events.

The nineteenth century saw a more rigid division between socially motivated dance and competitive sports. The twentieth century, however, witnessed much more blurring of the sports–dance division. Several Olympic sports, such as men’s and women’s figure skating, ice dancing, women’s gymnastics and rhythmic gymnastics, and synchronized swimming have routines and movements that are also heavily choreographed and dance-inspired.

Recent controversies over the suitability of some dance-related sports, particularly competitive ballroom dancing—commonly referred to as “DanceSport”—for inclusion in the Olympic Games would seem to reinforce the particularly blurr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Warming Up
• 1 “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”: A Brief History of Music, Sports, and Competition
• 2 “Let’s Get Physical”: Female Identity, Music and the Fitness Industry
• 3 “Who Let the Dogs Out?”: Sports Music, Marketing Crossover, and the Business of Performance Enhancement
• 4 “We Will Rock You”: Sports Anthems and Hypermasculinity
• 5 “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”: Constructing Male Identity in African American Music and Sports
• 6 “Go West”: The Integration of Sports and Music in Constructing National and Transnational Identities
• 7 “Gonna Fly Now”: Visual Media and the Soundtrack of Sports
• Conclusion: “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”: Codas and Overtimes
• Bibliography
• Index