Thursday, June 18, 2009

Welcome to The Purple Drank!

Ladies, gentlemen, Amado Villarreals, welcome. This is the Purple Drank.
If you're here, you're probably a fan of one of two things: either Northwestern athletics, or the promathazine-based hallucinogenic drug widely referred to as purple drank. (Really, Wikipedia? You have a purple drank page? Anyway, back to the post.)
In this inaugural post, I will poorly summarize both by providing a brief primer for people who came here looking for one of those things, but know little about the other.
First, drank fans: Northwestern University is a proud academic institution founded in 1857, that, for some reason or another, decided to give a rats ass about athletics from its founding until roughly 1995. Somewhere along the line, its administrators had the bright idea to join an athletic conference with nine ten other schools, all of whom give multiple rats asses about athletics, are literally all at least three times the size of Northwestern, are named after states (with the exception of whatever the hell Purdue is supposed to mean) and who carry tremendous amounts of civic/state pride in their taxpayer funded athletic teams. Northwestern, on the other hand, is, like, really small, named after some directions which the location of the school really doesn't represent at all, and, the fanbase consist of approximately 1/3 of the already small school and it's alumni. You don't have to be one of the uncomfortably studious athletes to figure out how those matchups went for the vast majority of the school's history.
Now, NU fans: Purple Drank is a mixture of cough syrup, Sprite, and generally, Jolly Ranchers popular throughout the southern hip-hop community. Sizzurp influenced music is generally really slow, repetitive, and awful as all hell. Syrup gave rise to the screwed-and-chopped music scene, which involves taking normal songs, slowing them down, and randomly repeating some words over and over again so that nobody could possibly enjoy it as much as the original. Obviously, I'm highlighting some pretty bad examples - full disclosure,  I love me some southern hip-hop - but for better or worse, drank has given creative aide to every rapper from Weezy to UGK to all these clowns.

Now that that's over with, we come to the question I'm sure both syrup and Wildcat fans alike have upon coming to this blog: what do these two things have in common? What is the possible connection between Pimp C and C.J. Bachér? (besides a love of chinchilla fur coats and Pimp C's 14 touchdowns to 18 interceptions in his final year at quarterback before his tragic and sudden drank-related demise.) (Oh, and, R.I.P. Pimp C.) 
At face value, not much. In fact, I went ahead and cross-checked the database of all people who have ever attended a Northwestern football game and all people who have ever sipped purple drank and made a Venn diagram, the results of which are below.

(My guesses as to the two: rapper Young Dro and outgoing president Henry S. Bienen.)
Anyway, here's where I finish this post and wrap this convoluted, terrible metaphor up nice and tight. To me, the similarity is this: both the purple drank scene and NU sports have come a long way - chopped-n-screwed music used to just be a couple of dj's in Houston dicking around with records and getting overwhelmingly messed up by cough syrup, now it's a friggin youtube cottage industry, with random heads from Houston with approximately no talent going platinum. The phrase "doormat of the Big Ten" has been used in approximately 42,000 articles about Northwestern sports, yet I think anything below mediocrity from an NU football team would be considered a major disappointment. 
Yet, for every great Northwestern sports moment or objectively well-done youtube chopped-and-screwed video (they even slowed down the pre-video dialogue! and smart not to really mess up andre's verse too much), there's too many terrible examples.

So, basically, sipping the purple drank is about slowing down and enjoying those moments. For southern rap songs, the slowing down is literal - its sort of the side effect of all the codeine in your blood system - but with NU, you need to slow your roll and force yourself to savor the good times. Right now, we're in the midst of those good times - like I said earlier, people expect mediocrity, at least, from our football team, and with Kevin Coble graduating, we're looking at a now or never year for our basketball team, and, truth be told, I'm feeling now more than never. So, that's what this blog is about. Northwestern fans have to accept our place in the sports universe, and that, plus the Sprite and jolly ranchers, can make the good times so much sweeter. So sip some sizzurp with me and enjoy it. 

Oh, and the color. Purple drank is purple, kinda like the uniforms our team wears. I hope you got that.

Anyway, posts in the next few days look to be way less convoluted, more relevant, better written, and less depressingly unfunny, so stick around. 

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