Hits at the Garden: The Boston Celtics' Hype Music
by Marissa Leah
As the intensity increased between the Boston Celtics and the LA Clippers in double overtime last month, the mechanical music selection kept coming back to mind.
Up until that game, I had only attended one major league game of any sport (among countless minor events I was subjected to as a kid). On this occasion, my friend, a rare basketball fan from London, brought me, and carefully explained the impact of Kawhi Leonard's balletic performance on the dynamics of the match. However, since basketball isn’t my forte, I ended up watching more of the crowd’s reactions towards TD Garden’s music while my friend focused on the game.
Amid the energetic and frustrated screams of fans sporting their Celtics jerseys, lamenting about Carsen Edwards’s missed layup while their kids eat a $6 pretzel, we all want to enjoy one thing (other than the game): free attention. The fan cams are meant to pick the “biggest” fans of the team. But they also show the energetic and goofy people who are determined to make a fool of themselves in order to get a free 10 seconds of the whole arena’s attention.
And what do the fans need to get excited? Easy music to follow.
Out of the wide selection of “crowd-pleaser” songs played last week, four songs were played at least 6 times throughout the night. These were the classics, “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N Roses, “We Will Rock You'' by Queen, and the iconic wedding and cruise song, the “Cha Cha Slide” by DJ Casper.
These ubiquitous songs are stuck in what I tend to think of as music purgatory. They’re still relevant sure, still getting stuck in people’s heads, but at what artistic cost? It’s not too hard to understand why these songs end up here in the first place. I’ve been singing “We Will Rock You” for years, dating back to 5th grade when our music teacher would instruct us all to clap and stomp and sing to it as if these were our battle cries. In an arena, the song had a similarly rousing effect.
Within “Cha Cha Slide”, the “Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap your hands!” and “Everybody clap your hands” lyrics looped during regulation. This is the song that feels almost as if, even though I wasn’t even a year old when it came out, I was programmed at birth to follow along. There is not one way in hell that you keep from clapping to this song or at least tapping along.
So, the base level similarities I’ve concluded are as follows: these songs are all catchy, easy to clap and sing to, and are all only played at kid-friendly events.
Looking at the musical similarities, they all maintain a unified bpm (except for “We Will Rock You”). “Seven Nation Army,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Cha Cha Slide” all have a rounded 130 bpm– which means that they stay at a common “heartbeat” tempo. This fast and cheery tempo encourages us to resort to our animalistic ways of getting “hyped” up.
If these four songs aren’t playing while the game is going on, they would play an instrumental of a simple musical scale. For example, when the Celtics are trying to score at the opposite basket, this swing beat glides up the scale until they get the flashing green lights and airhorn noises once they get in. However, when the Clippers tried to get a basket, it was crickets. No one would clap and the silence almost seems to have been left to allow the crowd to fill the silent air with boos and jeers.
With these easy songs that we are almost programmed to clap along to, it helps connect basketball fans and people who come along just for the experience.