Sounds of the Celtics: finding the perfect track for every rotation player

At the tail-end of Jaylen Brown’s appearance on “Hot Ones” with Sean Evans, moments after eating a wing doused in Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity (Scoville Level: 135,600), a question about studying a player’s rhythm and cadence sparked this answer:

“I look at basketball as like poetry in motion, which is music, and everybody is playing their own song and everybody samples from different artists,” Brown said. “If you want to stop them, you’ve got to study their rhythm, you’ve got to learn when their beat is about to drop.”

That’s a pretty beautiful way to look at this game, and as someone who loves trying to find the perfect song to match a buzzer-beater highlight, it furthered my interest in the intersection between music and sports.

It also sparked inspiration based around a simple question: What song encapsulates the playstyle or career of the players of this Celtics team?

To answer this extremely subjective question, I set up a loose criteria, of which each player/song combination only needs to check off one:

1) Does the sound match or accurately emulate the player’s style, personality or career?

2) Does it lyrically connect in any way to the player’s career or style?

3) Would this song work in a highlight video for the player in question?

I decided to stick to just the top-10 players within the rotation (sorry Baylor, Neemias, Jaden, Jordan, etc.), though feel free to further the discussion for those players down in the comments. I don’t believe there’s a wrong answer in this exercise, but hey, I could be way off-base, and I encourage anyone and everyone to call out a song that doesn’t fit. Let’s have a good time, share some music, and discuss the sounds of the Celtics.

Jayson Tatum – “Because I’m Me” by The Avalanches (featuring Camp Lo)

In the opening minutes of “Because I’m Me,” lyrics sampled from a 1955 song by Six Boys in Trouble called “Why Can’t I Get it Too,” beg the question, “what can you do when they don’t love you?”

The answer: “put on your best pair of shoes and love yourself.” It then introduces a sweeping level of triumphant, strings-based enthusiasm before 90’s hip-hop duo Camp Lo storms in and takes over.

It feels like a song that checks all three boxes for the Jayson Tatum Experience: a style blending old and new, lyrically rising above the maligning voices and doubts of greater success. It’s a rejuvenating track, and one that I can perfectly envision being placed behind a montage of Jayson’s graceful ballhandling and fall away baseline jumpers.

Fans of this team have often wondered just what Jayson has to do to earn a certain level of respect reserved for the elites of the game. At the end of the day, all he can do is get on the court, and be himself.

 

Jaylen Brown: “Me and Your Mama” by Childish Gambino

Lyrically, a song about unrequited love may not add up with the style of Jaylen Brown. It’s instead the feeling this song gives off, or rather, the feelings spread across its three-part, 6:19 runtime.

The opening two minutes of “Me and Your Mama” are hypnotic and dream-like, lulling you to sleep like an ankle-breaking crossover. Imagine a slow motion mid-range highlight at this stage, with Jaylen soaring off both feet, right on his sweet spot on the elbow, releasing off a nearly-unblockable and oftentimes automatic jumper that touches only nylon.

Now picture a thunderous jam (and there are countless to choose from) where Jaylen sends a defender flying to the floor. That is where the second part comes in, with a thunderous guitar riff, powerful drums and Donald Glover belting out an electric falsetto. That is the side of Jaylen Brown that sends the crowd into a frenzy. We’ve seen it a million times.

And then it falls back down to the quiet finale, back to where it began minutes before. It represents a player that can just as easily dazzle with a smooth bag of tricks as he can embarrass you with the force of a Mack Truck.