Beats before cleats: why music is my sports

By Jacey Gibb, Opinions Editor

Being a young male, my having a complete disinterest in sports has always been somewhat of a handicap. Despite partaking in a variety of athletics, the closest I’d say I ever came to being a sports fan was last year when I spent two weeks avoiding human contact and burning through the entire Friday Night Lights series. Texas Forever, indeed.

But while I used to see my inability to talk sports as a defect or a shortcoming, I recently made a wonderful personal discovery: the reason I’m not into sports is because music is my sports.

As hopelessly trite as that sounds (realistically, it could probably pass for something you’d read on a graphic tee at Bang-On), I’m being serious.

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars a year on Canucks tickets or seats to a Giants game, a large portion of my recreational fund gets funneled into attending concerts. While I would never pay more than $50 for a show, I have no problem shelling out half a day’s worth of pay in exchange for the chance to see one of my favourite bands rip it up on stage.

You have a pretty modest collection of jerseys hanging in your closet? I can guarantee that over my lifetime, I’ve had more band tees than you’ve had overpriced sports garb.

The main reason I came to this sports-related realization is because of how much time I invest in music. I can spend hours sitting at my computer, browsing Bandcamp and going on a downloading binge, thirsty for my next favourite artist. People spend large amounts of time looking over player stats and stuff that might as well be Klingon to my ears, but I usually get a similar reaction when I try to talk music with certain folks. Bands that I thought were decently popular, or even overplayed, turn out to be completely unknown to people outside of my immediate circle.

On the bus I’ve been forced to listen to half hour conversations about how this player needs to work on their endurance or how this coach is a pig-headed asshole, but the verbal exchanges have no deeper meaning to me. I can still relate though: some of my favourite conversations have been pointless babble fests with no direction, simply talking music talk.

I’ve been on a few sports teams, so I know that the whole comradery element can be a big part in people’s devotion to athletics. But I can honestly say that that “connection” is closer to a dropped call when compared to the electricity that flows through a venue during a concert. To stand alongside hundreds of strangers, swaying and singing along to a song that you all simultaneously know the words to? Sometimes it can give a guy goosebumps.

While I’ve been singled out before as being pretentious when it comes to my playlists, for the first time the other day, a friend called me a “music snob.” I hadn’t even been referring to anything particular at the time, so my natural impulse was to be defensive and smack them, but then I realized that my passion for music could easily be mistaken by others as an exercise in arrogance. I don’t mean to come off as belittling; the beauty about music, as it is with sports, is that so much relies on personal opinion that arguing is almost arbitrary. That certainly doesn’t make it any less enjoyable though.

Anyways, my self-discovery quota for the month has now officially been reached. To recap things: for Jacey, music = sports. You can keep your group showers and rookie hazing; I’ll stick to my music festivals and pretentious tendencies.