Spin Magazine decided to have a little fun with the NBA, and it is worth checking out because while the idea is simple it took a place like Spin to make it work:
Take NBA players and match them up with their pop music alter egos.
Some of these make a lot of sense, like for example Kobe Bryant is Kanye West (remember, Kobe was in studio with Kanye).
It would be cheeky enough to suggest that the NBA player with whom Kanye has the most in common is Kris Humphries, but only the Black Mamba has shared ‘Ye’s complicated relationship with fighting to dominate, then attempting to share, the spotlight with his elders, peers, and lesser teammates. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was Kanye dropping 81 on the Raptors.
I also kind of like Kevin Durant is Frank Ocean:
Shy, subdued, sublimely talented, and not without their share of kaleidoscopic quirks, Durant and Ocean also represent unlimited potential: thankfully, we don’t yet know how great they can be.
But as you go through these, there are always things that are tougher to fit together, some stretches. For example…
LeBron James is Jack White?
The most physically dominant force the game has ever known (sorry, Shaq), he often makes you forget that he’s playing against grown professionals. It’s his body that links him to perhaps the only other guy who knows what it is to bring such physicality and versatility to an art form. No one can punish a guitar or shriek melodically or transform his collaborators like Jack White does, nor can they produce and engineer and market like he does either, roles that (on the floor and off) LeBron knows better than any other player of his generation.
There are others worth reading up on, go check out the entire slideshow. Dwight Howard is Nicki Minaj made me laugh, and I love the idea of Dirk Nowitzki as Radiohead. They’ve got 40 of them, go check them out.
