Pop Music

I loved the Murphys, and while I've never been a big Bosstones fan, I was impressed by their show as well.

But sitting in McCoy Stadium, the same thought occurred to me as at concerts in Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park: I'm old enough to remember when the worlds of sports and music Did. Not. Overlap. Musicians didn't know anything about sports (Steve Smith, our listings guy who sits next to me, is proud and sometimes aggressive in this lack of knowledge); athletes hated musicians and regarded music as a context for rubbing up against girls, and any music that didn't lend itself to that purpose was noise to be turned off. Why did that change?

I asked Peter Gammons from ESPN about that once while I was interviewing him about something else, and he thought it had something to do with the influx of women fans in baseball in the late '80s and early '90s, which partially cleaned up baseball players' acts. It also might have had something to do with a general cleaning-up of the musician's act around the same time.

The old socialist in me says money has something to do with it too - everyone respects a player, no matter what their field. I also can't help thinking there's been a general devaluing of what we used to call the simple, honest, down-home life in the past 30 years, and anyone who breaks out of the cycle of birth-school-work-death is part of some sort of We Did It Our Way club, almost without regard to what they got there for.

I dunno. Am I making any sense? Thoughts?

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