There is not a better theme song in the history of American television than “Roundball Rock.” For those of you who missed out on the legendary song, “Roundball Rock” was used as the theme for The NBA on NBC back in the 1990s/early 2000s. There are no words to it – well, unless you count the Saturday Night Live version of the song, which may be even more perfect than the original – it is simply an instrumental that the song’s original writer, John Tesh, sang into his answering machine when it popped into his head when he was in Europe one day.
This has been sampled a few times because it’s an awesome instrumental and it’s the perfect backing track for a pump-up song. Most notably, Nelly sampled this for his track “Heart of a Champion” back in 2004.
Now, someone on the Internet has decided to mix it with a song by another rapper: Kanye West. The beat is “Roundball Rock.” The Kanye song is “I Love Kanye” off of his newest album, The Life of Pablo. Here is the result:
https://soundcloud.com/tole_cover/i-love-kanye-nba-on-nbc-remix
There are several emotions going through my head as I listen. For one, this is a mix of a very good thing (“Roundball Rock”) with a thing that I do not like. For my money, “I Love Kanye” is an unnecessary addition to TLOP, and while it’s fun and silly, it’s better as an SNL skit than a track on an album. So to get some amount of enjoyment out of the song is kind of difficult.
But at the same time, this is a total banger. One of the biggest issues that “I Love Kanye” suffers from is that it is just Kanye rapping over no beat, so it sounds kind of incomplete. Adding a beat is important, but it can’t just be any beat, obviously. It needs to flow with Kanye’s vocals, and as it turns out, “Roundball Rock” fits perfectly. Everyone’s taste in music is subjective, of course, but off the top of my head I like this more than all but three of the songs of The Life of Pablo.
There are (approximately) a billion Kanye mashups on the web, and for my money, this is one of the best that I’ve heard. It’s probably just half a step below the “We Major”/”Hey Jude” mashup that came out a few years back. Hopefully if Kanye decides to tinker with TLOP again, he scraps the current version of “I Love Kanye” and replaces it with this one.
(via SB Nation)
