The Rise of the NBA Nerd: Basketball style and black identity
But 21st-century blackness has lost its rigid center, and irony permeates the cultural membrane. More than kids knowing they can be president of the United States, it might be more crucial to the expansion of black identity that — thanks to, say, N.E.R.D or Odd Future — they know they can be skate punks. Kanye West can release an album called The College Dropout, then run around the world dressed like an Oberlin junior. (The backpack craze was popularized by him.) West had done what 15 years of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters could not. He ushered in the chic of the black nerd. He cleared a safe space for narcissism and self-deconstruction; for singing rappers with names like Drake, J. Cole, and Tyler, The Creator; for the Roots to be Jimmy Fallon’s house band; for the threat in the music to move from the street to the psyche. Hip-hop had already begun to splinter into a land of a million mixtapes before West’s arrival. And with that shattering, black male style was transitioning away from Sean Combs’ “Puffy” era gilded age, with its plushness, flamboyance, glamour, and actionable danger.
If you were black, liked hip-hop, but also liked the confessional dimensions of the singer-songwriter, West was an alternative you could relate to, and you could see the change in NBA press conferences. Once upon a time — about two or three years ago — these same players greeted the press and stepped onto buses awash in big, creamy sweaters, roomy leather jackets, and substantially karated wristwear. Then, suddenly, that was switched for less urban, more meticulously groomed style. You can still find baggy denim shorts, long white T-shirts, sideways baseball caps, and platinum ropes with a diamond-encrusted crucifix. But it’s Allen Iverson in the time of Blake Griffin, Gucci Mane in the moment of Drake. These men aren’t dressing for A-T-L pool parties. But they’re not wearing the clothes of the streets, either. Durant and James and Stoudemire are wearing what black kids are wearing in the suburbs, where white kids’ belief that the racial grass is greener applies to black kids.
