TORONTO, CANADA - OCTOBER 14: Auston Matthews #34 of the Toronto Maple Leafs celebrates his third goal of the game against the Minnesota Wild during the third period in an NHL game at Scotiabank Arena on October 14, 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Maple Leafs defeated the Wild 7-4. (Photo by Claus Andersen/Getty Images)Claus Andersen/Getty Images
The hierarchy of pop musical achievement goes like this – first record deal, first No. 1, first time playing Wembley Stadium and being chosen for the Toronto Maple Leafs’ goal song.
Well, you’d think so, given how people took the news that the Leafs were replacing their old Hall & Oates number this season and debuting something else.
When the new goal track was first played on opening night, I had this conversation with the guy next to me on pressrow:
“Who is it?”
“Kid Cudi.”
“Kim Cuddy?”
“No, Kid. Kid with a ‘d.’”
“Kid D?”
“No, kid. KID. Two words.”
“Kid with two words?”
You think the two of us were excited? Oh boy, were we.
Just imagine the wild joy with which Kid Cudi – multihyphenate, Grammy winning, multimillion album selling, hip-hop household name – received the news. He may have leapt from a thicket of nude bodies on his alligator-skin couch and said, “What is a Toronto?”
The song was one of Cudi’s minor hits, Pursuit of Happiness, remixed by DJ Steve Aoki. My main impression of it was ‘loud.’
In fairness, that’s my impression of every song played at arenas these days. Sometimes I think all sports teams are secretly owned by a syndicate of evil hearing-aid manufacturers.
People had a lot of thoughts about the new song and not enough of them were, ‘Why are we talking about this?’
First issue – songs. Songs don’t matter any more because they are omnipresent. As soon as we leave our homes, we are buffeted by a uniformly pounding and relentlessly up-to-the-minute soundtrack. I have never knowingly turned on a Justin Bieber song. But I’m pretty sure I’ve heard every single one of his songs about a million times, just by virtue of going to Starbucks.
It’s gotten so I’ve started to miss muzak. It was, at least, easy to ignore.
Musical GBH is happening everywhere, but people still cared about the Leafs new goal song. A lot. Most of them didn’t like it. Too dance-y. Too American. Where’s the rock’n’roll? If the Leafs had put Beethoven’s Fifth in there instead, someone would complain that it was too modern.
If that were it, then fine. But we are no longer moved as a society by the simple pleasure of complaining into a void. Now we must complain to a purpose.
In short order, some prig found the right hook – that the original version of Cudi’s song contains this line: “Drivin’ drunk, I’m doin’ my thing.”
That bit wasn’t played during the goal celebration section of the song, but that’s not the point. The point is striking social-media gold – something to feel self-righteous and aggrieved about. How can a multibillion-dollar entertainment company miss something this awful? Don’t these people care?
A throwaway line in a PG-rated pop song about permanent childhood and pointless rebellion was enough to activate the Internet’s Butterfly Effect. If JudyChicago74 says that something sounds offensive to her on Reddit, will it cause a hurricane twelve hours later in Leafs headquarters?
Of course it did. The song was canned after one game.
By Monday night, Van Halen’s Panama was the Leafs’ latest goal song.
It’s an objectively better track. But let’s face it – the first guy once wrote about driving drunk; it’s possible the second group of guys never drove anywhere unless they were drunk.
If sobriety is the moral bar we’re aiming for at the hockey game, perhaps a bunch of self-admitted, coke-addled California sybarites ought not be your poster boys. Though if I had to choose who to be trapped in an elevator with – Van Halen or four random hockey players – I know what I’d pick every time.
The episode puts you in mind of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Centre. Back in the 80s, Gore and her cronies tried to ban offensive language in pop music. All they managed to do was convince impressionable young people that we liked the Dead Kennedys.
We didn’t. No one could. We just enjoyed the idea that we were bothering someone.
How did we get back to the point where picking out naughty lyrics is a popular pastime amongst the indolent? The more I think about it, the more I welcome our new Artificial Intelligence overlords. We’ve proven we’re not bright enough to handle our own affairs.
The one bright spot in this is putting a hard light on the whole idea of a goal song. Why does such a thing exist in the first place? What does it do?
You’ve got a whole bunch of people cheering. You’ve got a red light flashing. You’ve got the goalie looking like someone just kicked his dog. And that’s not enough for you? You also need a special song to remind the other guys they suck?
Why not have a laugh track? Why not release a bunch of goats onto the ice and force your opponent to herd them off the rink?
If it’s just that the Leafs want their own song, it isn’t hard to find a classic that gets at their essence: Won’t Get Fooled Again; Heartbreaker; The Tears of a Clown. We could play this game all day long.
Somewhere along the line, sports confused the fact that it is a cultural product into thinking it is cultural. It isn’t. They aren’t.
Because sports isn’t creating anything. It is a middleman that sells what other people create. The goal isn’t to produce something compelling. It’s to make something as cheaply as possible and then resell it for the maximum price available. If you want beauty in sport, go to a soccer field in a park on a Sunday.
The professional game is at the whim of its marketplace. If you’ve spent any time online you know that that marketplace exists for two reasons – to consume and complain. If it’s not doing one, it’s doing the other.