West Coast Sojourn 9: A week of strategic exposure

Now Dwight Howard's post-athletic career can be world's longest porn star

Let me start by thanking you for reading me. Knowing that you’re out there makes me write a certain way.

This morning a football champion was on my sports talk radio, using the most mangled phrasing and most tortured syntax to explain what happened in a game. The sound all but physically pained me, and I thought:

Negroes with bad syntax fucking up my sports consumption experience.

I remember the first time I felt bad listening to a Black athlete talk.

He was in a post-game locker room interview. Exactly how I thought 1974 Cleveland Browns scatback Greg Pruitt was supposed to sound? I’m not sure, but he was my first favorite NFL star. It felt like I’d waited forever to just to see him without a helmet, never mind talk.

Then the former Oklahoma star opened his mouth and sounded like Mushmouth from Fat Albert. Not even as well-spoken as the R.I.F. kids. I was crestfallen at the new distance between us.

Why someone like him who was born in 1951 Houston might speak as he did was beyond me. Today, I cringe at that talk radio sports champion and understand that there’s justification beyond elitism for not enjoying these fractured sports voices.

Today they sit in for coherent Black analysts. About more than my early aesthetic concerns, their presence is the tell-tale sign of Black malleability: If these analysts and commentators can’t put words together in reasonable sentence form, they certainly aren’t going to generate powerful new thoughts. Never mind asking the right questions.

10 Will Thee year’s biggest music hit on Friday?

The debate over who’s the best rapper alive has been raging among my aged friends lately. To me, the BRA title isn’t purely about skill, just as it’s not bestowed on the basis of popularity in itself.

No one ever accused MC Hammer of being the greatest rapper alive.

In its essence, the question asks which vocal artist has the most powerful hold on the culture. The best best rapper example is Tupac Shakur, who was the greatest living rapper for years at a time, without ever being my classicist ass’s idea of a virtuoso rhymer. The world he spoke to helped him connect.

After Drake’s lackluster release earlier this month, he’s officially out of 2023 contention. Legit candidates include Billy Woods, NBA Youngboy, Conway the Machine, Killer Mike, and Black Thought. But I vote for Megan Thee Stallion. She might have gotten my vote even if I hadn’t seen her tearful account of being shot in the foot by R&B star Tory Lanez.
The Root/Billboard

• Back in April, the Houston-bred MC said she would be “taking a break,’ to focus on “healing.”

• Megan Pete no longer has a record lane. The Hot Girl Summer inventor and her production company are billing “Cobra,” as “a story by Megan Thee Stallion.”

• Tory Lanez was denied bail for the second time on Thursday.

Lil Hit

• I didn’t watch either Friends or The Nanny. But where the death of Matt Perry (see below) left me abstractly sad, I’d be tangibly upset should Fran Drescher unfortunately perish. Saturday Night Live spoofed the latter sitcom star in illustrating the magnificence of her turn as the face of SAG-Aftra.
  Saturday Night Live

9 Where Dwight Howard puts his mouth

Followers of the hoops rumor mill are five years into affirming one belief or another on champion former Laker Dwight Howard’s sexuality. The volume of exes spilling his tea has been positively Clinton-esque.

Rather than relaying techniques, quality, or sexy pillow talk, what past Howard lovers are saying has featured scarily similar stories of repression. His latest case, a civil complaint, has made the unsigned 37-year-old go public as a queer man.
Black Enterprise

• Howard has been on six teams in six years and spent last season playing in Taiwan. On Instagram Live he denied the allegation and asked that folks mind their own business. “I don’t gotta tell nobody where I put my wood,” he said.