On constraints in argumentation (🐐)
Why aren't greatest of all time conversations limited by decade?
One of my favorite internet phenomena is the lively social media debate; contrary to popular discord on the subject of arguing on the web, and perhaps playing into my chaotic tendencies, I love the intimate drama of a heated instagram comment section/the din of a twitter reply thread stretching beyond the limits of the site’s ability to contain it. For the most part an extension of real-life hot-topic conversations, it’s good for us to talk about shit! And there’s a certain freedom in not having to care about the feelings of the person you’re arguing with (as negatively as this can also play out)…I got my start in media as a frequent commenter (and replier) on a school-specific confessions page, and used to revel in exacting logics and critiquing arguments. Whether or not this was a time in my life I’m proud of (and whether or not I had friends…) is an entirely different object! But it’s an inescapable dynamic precisely because of this gratification, and because it’s merely replicating something that already exists irl.
My favorite of these arguments I witness/participate in from time to time, on and offline, is the litigation of who gets to be considered the “greatest of all time”; related debates include “who would win in a verzuz battle” (sidenote: if you don’t know about these…you better get to knowing), “top fives”, and really any comparison/competition formatting between popular figures in music, sports, culture: you name it and there’s a bevy of understimulated overly-online young people purporting expertise/research and old heads poking their head in to offer sage wisdom and correctives (“LeBron? Oh do you mean LeBUM?”). It’s a great way to engage folks intergenerationally in one space and have fun shitting on one another’s preferences and ordering of our favorites; it’s also a great way to get hip to new material you’d missed, or old stuff you’d slept on…those verzuz battles this summer hipped me to more than a few illustrious songwriters’ catalogues, and pulled me back to Aaliyah’s sensational body of work, in the same way that old hoop mixtapes are coming back to demonstrate the flashiness of even the bummiest of NBA stars (looking at you, Andrew Wiggins).
But, honestly: fuck these intergenerational debates! It’s positively infuriating to rehash the same arguments for who was the best basketball player of all time between Jordan/Kobe/LeBron, largely because they all played at different times…in essentially different leagues! Jordan damn-near invented the high-scoring/high-volume wing that later became the mold for the Kobes/AIs of the world, who played in a league filled with this archetype; LeBron’s everlasting precipice of his career coincided with the reinforced importance of playmaking and 3-pt shooting as NBA games turned into offensive showcases. How can you compare these players? Of course the problem of comparison plagues almost every detail of their careers (almost nothing is held constant across these player comps: teammates, league officiation, opposition, injury histories); but the generational gaps represent the largest barrier to such conversations making any type of sense. Also: I didn’t watch Oscar Robertson play a lick of basketball, nor do I ever care to watch that black-and-white-ass footage. Likewise, my metaphysical barbershop grandfather follows the NBA still but may never have the same youthful awe/appreciation/investment in our hometown hero LeBron as I do, so maybe I should sit back when they starting pulling out reels of tape and a projector + pull-down screen and just listen…and maybe older folks should relax their pent-up aggression at our buoyant youthfulness and hear us out when the digital footage loads up in HD so crystal clear you could lick a bead of sweat off of Draymond Green’s donkey-esque forehead.
To pull this into a more musical direction, much has been made of the recent coronation of Drake as our era’s King of Pop; he tops every chart, has made unmatchable runs in the streaming era, and rivals our beloved MJ and Prince in US sales; but what does any of this mean when looking at our (in the sub-royal possessive) music industry’s simultaneous agglomeration/conglomeration of labels, and the clear dominance of rap and a relatively singular sound relative to the comparative diversity of musical competition label-wise and successful sounds of disco/house, rock, and early break-beats/hip-hop inflection which characterized pop in the 80s? Likewise, the construction of music sales as machinery worked much differently in the hard-sales of the 80s (where the black box of streaming now leaves Drake’s sales dominance to algorithms and strategic playlisting/site placement); the definition of stardom has also changed! Drake has never had an album go diamond (10x platinum, or 10 million + sales), only a single…I guess God really had a plan. Anyway, Eminem, Nelly, Biggie, 2Pac, and MC Hammer all have diamond selling albums; Mariah, Mary, Michael, Prince, Stevie have all done it multiple times (often on Grammy-winning non-cringeworthy work, if that means anything); but they all operated in different times under different label schemes.
Time-corralling these debates, say by decade, largely elides such problematized discussion while also introducing more contributors to the field of play. For instance, if we’d like to talk about basketball in the aughts, now we get to appreciate Tim Duncan, Shaq, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, AI, and in positional debates we can get even more granular (Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter making strong showings in an otherwise crowded field of mixed guard/forwards); and this allegory is roughly transferable across media. I’m really tired of seeing people bring up the same stories and accomplishments highly regarding the same people, and this could broaden our realms of recognition!
Anyway, I wrote most of this in procrastination of a chemistry quiz I had to take before midnight, so take this as you will. ttfn :)