Award Tour - A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders - 1993

And so speaking of the frustration of following things that used to be a cool little niche that are now more and more mainstream...it's actually become harder and harder for me to be an American soccer fan (A soccer fan who is American, not a fan of the generally awful MLS).

Again, like Indie Rock, it's counter-intuitive. I would have thought, 10 years ago, that living in a world in which everyone knew who Pavement and The Pixies were would be AWESOME! But instead, I find it sort of troubling and frustrating. Well, Soccer has sort of become the same way. With EPL games becoming increasingly broadcast on Fox Soccer Channel, Setanta Sports and starting this season ESPN2 I have more opportunities than I ever did to watch the sport I love...but the problem with this came up yesterday.

Arsenal played the first round of the Champions League group stages yesterday against Belgian Champions Standard Liege. The game was live at 245 and was being shown on FSC at 5 PM. I set my TiVo, stayed away from the Internet in the afternoon and prepared to go home and watch my game. As it turned out, do to some collasally stupid defending Arsenal went down two goals in the first five minutes of the game (This is exceptionally fast, for those that don't know)...and within ten minutes after that I received all sorts of messages from various friends and acquaintances that know of my strange obsessions "Dude, sorry about your team", "Are you watching this, yikes!" and "Yeah, you may not want to watch this game..."

Now fortunately, we did come back to win 2-3, but...even as little as 3 years ago, no one I knew, besides my fellow soccer fans would have had any clue that there was a game on. And certainly none of them would have been watching...but there it was.

It's hard being me.

Anyway, this Tribe song is a further result of my girlfriend's attempt to broaden my horizons. It's fun, I don't hate it...that's about all you can ask, right?