Hardwood Paroxysm’s NBA Summer Jams Mixtape
“Second Summer” by YACHT, Recommended Jointly for LeBron James and the Entity of Cleveland
By Miles Wray (@mileswray)
And what, pray tell, does a troupe of peppy Portland hipsters have to say about the comings and goings of the world’s most successful basketball player? Multitudes.
The romantic relationship has been examined within the pop song from every possible angle, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Common junctures of the romantic relationship examined for the purposes of the pop song include: (1) the first, heart-fluttery moments of heated eye contact and world-overwhelming “interest” (to put an underwhelming, clinical term on that fuzzy feeling) and also (2) the end of the story, when even the giddy foundations of the relationship have been reduced to jagged rubble, bruising – but not breaking – so many emotional constitutions. These are the first and last pages of the book. But what about all of those middle pages? Those pages that actually make the story, you know, a story?
YACHT’s “Second Summer” puts an airtight disco groove behind a song that is concerned about perhaps the most mundane – but oh so essential! – page of the relationship, when the first year together slides by from in front of your windshield to the small confines of your rearview. The chorus (which reads like quite a normal sentence when divorced from the song): “Our second summer of love and I wonder if this time the sun will not go out.”
The first summer of love was 2003 — how could it have been that long ago? — when LeBron was drafted and the Entity of Cleveland was just absolutely googly-eyed about their new man, blinded to the possibility that all of his little quirks would become aggravating pet peeves. They have spent some time apart and then they have talked it out and now they have decided to get back together, and so here in 2014 is the second summer of love. Everybody is a bit more savvy — and, truth be told, realistic — about what the other can provide, untethered fantasies now replaced with genuine appreciation for their partner and their partner’s limitations. This doesn’t sound like as much fun but, in truth, is it not the one true path to contentment? And make no mistake, this really is a love story we’re talking about here.
The chorus continues:
Can you stand by your love after push comes to shove?
Can you stand by your man after [poop] hits the fan?
Most love songs are declarative statements about what happened in the past, or bold daydreams about how the future will go. But this is an honest-to-goodness question, entirely open-ended, the answer yet unknown.