Ask anyone who has been to a professional sports game in this country and they’re bound to give you a strongly worded opinion on the sights and sounds that occur within both the stadium and arena experience. Many diehards will be quick to scold the corny music played during play, asserting that it takes away from the gameday product and the “game’s gone” because of it. Other fans, however, will be quick to laud and praise the gameday experience, pointing to the Red Sox’s “Sweet Caroline” or the Bruins’ “Livin’ on a Prayer” as mainstays within fan culture.
What originally started on April 26, 1941 at Wrigley Field as a one-day gimmick led to a time-honored tradition of organists playing at baseball games. Slowly but surely, organists became mainstays between every play, noodling between every pitch and leading the crowd in “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” during every seventh inning stretch.
In-game music evolved in the late ‘90s when the arena DJ was born. In an attempt to inject more action in the game, the Miami Heat brought in DJ Irie to harness the nightlife of South Beach and bring it into the arena. The idea caught on and, soon enough, DJs and organists could be found in most arenas and stadiums. The standard NBA layup package comes bundled with a full arena DJ starter kit — one that includes canned crowd roars, hype blasts that rattle your teeth and a grab bag of wild stingers that pass as routine.
In fact, the sound of arena DJs has become so predictable that my friends and I joke about how predictable their playlists truly are. Although the DJs have the difficult task of appealing to a wide audience — one that includes people of all ages and demographics — the allure of gameday music has become watered down and corny.
The solution? Simply removing music from the gameday experience would make the game dry and also take away the time-honored traditions which have united franchises. Instead, arena DJing needs to be deliberate, carefully calculated and far from mainstream.
We jump across the pond to the U.K. as a perfect example of this. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” was a song written in 1918 by an American, yet adopted and modified by West Ham United Football Club into a cultural mainstay of the organization. As a tradition, the song is chanted once before the start of every match to excite the fans. It’s timeless, as the music adds to the overall experience instead of adding to the overall corniness, as in-game djs so often do.
Although sport culture is so different in the U.K., the deliberate use of music and sound effects should be used as an example to improve the American game. Less is more, and the auditory experience provided by the British crowd certainly proves that. In order to win back the captivation of the ordinary fan, let the game do the talking with music reinforcing tradition. The fan doesn’t need to be overwhelmed by noise but rather guided by it.
So my message to arena DJs is clear: A lighter touch of the play button will yield a clearer purpose. Don’t be afraid to venture off the same 10 songs played every night and turn our focus to the game so that the people can love to hate the beautiful game of professional sports.
