999,846: Miami Hurricanes 7th Floor Crew - 7th Floor Crew Rap

Sports fans may remember that in 2005, a two-year-old recording surfaced which featured members of the University of Miami Hurricanes football team rapping about sex. Thanks to the insatiable demands of 24-hour sports media for fresh material to bluster about, there ensued much overblown controversy, during which nearly everybody involved was revealed as a colossal idiot.

First, there’s the song itself. Lifting its hook from Aaliyah’s “If Your Girl Only Knew,” it chronicles the alleged sexual exploits of the 7th Floor Crew, named after a dorm area inhabited by a cluster of football players. Each crew member gets his turn to rap, for as long as he’s got lyrics. Then the chorus plays. Over and over again. As a result, this song is nine minutes long. That’s two minutes longer than the Grammy-nominated “Super Bowl Shuffle.” Now, to be fair, these dudes weren’t trying to make a bangin’ club hit. They were just doing this for themselves to laugh at later, in private. But the sheer length works against the repetitions of the chorus. The more often you hear “If that ho only know/That she was gettin’ fucked on the seventh flo’/If that bitch only knew/That she was getting mutted by da whole crew,” the more you’re forced to think about it. Apparently this ho isn’t even aware that she’s getting gang-banged, which raises the distinct possibility that she has also gotten roofied by da whole crew. Plus, the gang-bang slang term “mutted” suggests roots in the world of dog breeding, which we now know as a healthy and productive hobby for such football stars as Michael Vick.

Second, there’s the media outcry about the song. ESPN’s initial report stated breathlessly that the song “referenced multiple acts of group sex” (well, why stop at one?), “derogatory terms for women” (because you never hear “bitch” or “ho” in rap songs!) “and minorities” (because black people never address each other as “nigga” in rap songs!), “and dozens of curse words” (remember the days before rap music, when “motherfucker” was still a swear word?). What we learned from this report, basically, is that no one at ESPN has ever even HEARD rap music. And don’t tell me it counts when Stuart Scott announces touchdowns by yelling “Hear the drummer get wicked!” I was as white a teenager as they came, and even I’d heard that sampled on Anthrax’s Public Enemy cover. (Side note: I distinctly remember one SportsCenter anchor – possibly Scott Van Pelt – marveling in an interview that Scott had “almost created a new language” with his catchphrases. Ostensibly these were the same ones Scott had lifted from not-terribly-obscure hip-hop songs. I rest my case.)

Here’s what we have so far: a bunch of jocks acting like dumbasses, dirty talk in a rap song, and a big media outlet stirring controversy over some dumb shit while praying to God somebody is offended. My stars, Western civilization must be ending! The only way this could get more shocking is if some bureaucrat offered a cosmetic PR-driven solution that failed to address the root of a problem!

So, third, we have the official University of Miami response to the “controversy.” How do you excuse yourself and show the world that you’re taking real action in the culture of 21st-century America? Well, of course you have to call it inappropriate and demeaning, but the kicker is this: “Any students whose voices can be identified will be subject to appropriate discipline and/or counseling.” YES, Miami. If only football players could learn via counseling that their aggressive words were hurtful and offensive to others, THEY WOULD CEASE ANY SUCH SPEECH IMMEDIATELY. ESPECIALLY in PRIVATE, which is where this song had been intended to stay. I don’t care whether this “counseling” is sinister Orwellian brain reprogramming, or just some innocuous weenie bullshit with a name everyone rolls their eyes at, like “sensitivity training.” Sometimes, America, there is no clinical cure for “being a horse’s ass.”

I can’t quite figure out who typifies the worst cultural narrative at work here. Is it the hyper-macho athletes, spoiled rotten by a combination of conditioned aggressiveness, physical strength, and cultural adulation? Is it the bloviating bigmouths of sports talk, desperately clinging to the notion that America’s obsession with sports signifies some kind of objective importance, which in turn legitimizes the amount of time and money wasted on them? Is it the sanitized corporate blandness which – given the money-making machine that is sports in America – constantly has to cover up the fact that our golden athletic idols are mostly the same assholes we all saw swaggering around high school calling everyone else “faggots”?

Despite my obviously keen cultural awareness, I like watching football anyway. Sure, it often attracts horrible people. But even for spectators, it’s a tremendous psychological outlet for biologically programmed instincts designed by evolution to help human males compete for scarce resources in a harsh natural environment. (Careful bringing up evolution around certain football people, though!) As a longtime Chicago Bears fan, I sought out the “7th Floor Crew Rap” because it contains a verse by our starting tight end Greg Olsen, who here goes by “G-Reg.” (This rhymes with “third leg.”) Now, I grew up with the Grammy-nominated “Super Bowl Shuffle,” a project so rife with potential hubris (it was recorded a month before the playoffs even started) that it could never be repeated in today’s blandly corporate, play-it-safe, team-first conformist NFL. So hearing a college-age Greg Olsen rapping “Come on fellas let’s get weird/Stick your dick up in her ear” is, sadly, the closest I’ll probably come to repeating that cherished childhood experience.

The Youtube video below helpfully identifies the players for you, and notes what professional teams signed them. See if your favorite team has one!