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tfloosh · 6 years

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Discovery

Week 4 is here!!! I’m starting the week off with some post-game BotW Zelink. Enjoy!!!

Zelda was exceptionally giddy when she woke that morning. Today was the day Link promised to take her exploring across Hyrule. Sure it was disguised as a trip to reestablish diplomatic relations with the four faces across Hyrule, but Zelda knew Link saw it for what she really wanted: a chance to rediscover Hyrule. So much had changed over the past one hundred years. Even little Hateno Village had grown from a few sparse rice patties and homes to a thriving town. She had enjoyed staying at Link’s house there and talking with Purah about the changes in technology while she had been fighting Ganon, but she needed to get out and see what was left of her country.

“The Princess can only thrive in the wild,” Link had said teasingly the night before.

Link had their horses saddled and ready for their journey just as the sun was breaking into the sky. They had enough food for the first leg of their journey, which would take them to the Zora’s Domain.

“Are your old friends still there?” Zelda asked once they set out on the path to the Dueling Peaks. “The ones you would play with when you were younger. What did you call yourselves? Bazz’s Bad Bunch?”

“The Big Bad Bazz Brigade,” Link corrected, his cheeks turning slightly pink. “And yes, they are all guards for the Domain now. One of them, Rivan, even has a daughter.”

“That’s so strange to think about,” Zelda mused. “So much of Hyrule seems untouched through those hundred years, but then you meet the people. The grandparents who were children during the Great Calamity, the people who grew up with the legend of Hyrule at its height.”

“The Rito assumed I was a descendent of the Hylian Champion,” Link explained. “I didn’t know how to correct them. How do you say you’re not a descendent of yourself?”

Zelda laughed.

***

“I want to show you something,” Link grinned as they repacked their horses. They had stopped for a quick lunch in Kakariko Village and were about to head out again, but apparently Link had other plans.

He grabbed her hand and led her back toward the east gate. Zelda wanted to ask where they were going, but the grin still on Link’s face told her he wouldn’t say. They raced up the side of the mountain and past the shrine that was there. Link picked a beautiful blue flower and handed it to her.

“Nightshade,” he said. “It will help reduce noise from movement if cooked properly, and it glows in the dark.”

“Link, did you study the properties of herbs and plants while you adventured across Hyrule?” Zelda’s eyes lit up.

“Inadvertently,” he grinned. “But that’s not what I really wanted to show you.”

He led her further into the forested area until they caught sight of what appeared to be a giant flower.

“It’s a Great Fairy’s spring,” Link explained. “I thought you would want to see it.”

“Why didn’t you show it to me any of the other times we were here?” Zelda gasped as she walked forward to inspect the spring further.

“Because we were busy then,” he shrugged. “And this trip is all about discovering new things.”

Zelda rolled her eyes and gave Link a small shove. They spent the next twenty minutes looking at all the different plants around the spring. Zelda smiled at seeing a small cluster of Silent Princesses, and Link informed her of the augmentation properties of all the samples she had collected.

“I’ll have to start a research journal for this trip,” Zelda said as they rode down the slope to the ruins of Goponga Village.

“We can get a book in the Domain,” Link said.

***

“I will forever be amazed by the beauty of the Zora’s Domain,” Zelda sighed as they stood before the statue of Mipha. “It is fitting that the greatest craftsmen in all of Hyrule would memorialize her in stone. I pray the ending of Calamity Ganon has given the Zora here even more closure over the loss of their Princess.”

“It truly has, Your Highness,” Prince Sidon smiled down at them. “The elders have even welcomed Ruta shutting down. I would even go so far as to say Father doesn’t mind it either.”

“Oh, I don’t mind Vah Ruta shutting down,” Zelda said. “I would just like to know why. Even after all these years, we still know so little about how the Divine Beasts work. I’m afraid those who would know best are our lost Champions.”

“But that can wait ‘til tomorrow,” Link said.

Zelda whipped her head around, “What?”

“We’re going exploring tonight,” Link smiled. “Sidon agreed to show us the Veiled Falls.”

“I remember that waterfall,” Zelda grinned as the two led the way to their destination. “I believe that’s where I first met you, Sidon, though you might have been too young to remember. Mipha was teaching you how to swim up waterfalls.”

“I do remember her teaching me,” Sidon frowned. “But I did not know you were present.”

“Yes, Mipha agreed to pilot Ruta then,” Zelda saw Sidon’s frown deepen, so she changed the subject. “You were so small then, I almost didn’t believe Link when he introduced you.”

Sidon laughed, “At least swimming up waterfalls is easier now.”

***

“These fireproof elixirs are disgusting,” Zelda made a face as she took another swallow.

“You seemed to enjoy making them well enough,” Link smirked.

“Because that was science,” she complained. “I wish your flamebreaker armor fit me.”

“You still feel the heat in that,” he pointed out. “So trust me when I say drinking the elixir is much better, despite the taste.”

“It’s been so long since I’ve been to Goron City,” Zelda skipped along the path to examine a smotherwing butterfly. “Has it changed any?”

“There’s a new rock sculpture of Daruk,” Link answered quietly so he wouldn’t scare off the butterfly. “At least I think it’s new. You’ll remember better than me.”

“Is your memory really still that spotty?” she turned away from the butterfly to examine him more closely.

“I remember memories of us best,” he blushed. “But details from them are hard to make out sometimes. And it’s hard to piece together memories from when I was younger.”

“Do you remember your family at all?” Zelda’s brow furrowed.

“I know more about them from what other people have told me,” Link started walking again to have something to do. “My memories are best triggered by locations or sensations, and we lived in Castletown.”

“Which is in unrecognizable ruins,” she nodded understandingly. “Then we will have to rebuild.”

“What?” Link froze where he stood.

“You deserve to remember your family and other childhood memories,” Zelda said without stopping. “I remember mine far too clearly, and I don’t want to be the only one that suffers with embarrassing childhood memories.”

“Hey wait a second,” Link jogged to catch up with the now laughing Zelda.

***

“So how much of our time together do you remember?” Zelda asked as they cut across Hyrule Field toward the Gerudo Desert.

“More than you think,” Link said, a small smiled crossing his face. “Those pictures you left on the Sheikah Slate really helped, and I could fill in most of the rest on my own.”

“And the, uh, feelings that came with those memories?” she blushed, letting her hair fall in front of her face so Link wouldn’t see.

“Those are a little disconnected,” he admitted. “I didn’t find the places in your pictures in order, so I got a little mixed up with the feelings I had while experiencing the events and the feelings I felt remembering the events. I felt anger toward you when you went to that shrine in Tabantha without me, but when I remembered it, I had already remembered your struggles and anxieties, so I knew why you were taking your anger out on me. So I remembered I felt anger, but now I also remember compassion and wanting to help you, and I really want to slap the old king sometimes, Hylia bless his soul.”

Zelda couldn’t help but laugh, “I understand. I’m surprised you can keep it all straight.”

“I tend to focus on my feelings from the second go round, which makes things somewhat easier,” he shrugged. “And probably better for you anyway.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” she cried indigently, but Link was already sprinting away on his horse, laughter flying with the wind.

***

Link found Zelda sitting on the edge of the platform next to the Akh Va’quot Shrine. She was talking with Kass. Link could imagine Kass telling her all about his teacher, the Sheikah poet who worked in the old Royal Court. Zelda was aware of the bard’s feelings for her; the Sheikah’s songs were not subtle, but she never had the heart to spurn his feelings. Link thought the whole thing was quite ridiculous, but he had enjoyed Kass’ stories of his teacher after the Great Calamity struck nonetheless.

“Ah, hello Link,” Kass said cheerily when Link finally joined them on the ledge. “Here to enjoy the beautiful night as well?”

“There is no better place to see the stars,” Link smiled and let his legs dangle next to Zelda’s off the ledge.

“Kass, would you mind if I talked with Link alone?” she asked in that sweet way no one could ever say no to.

They sat for a time in silence after Kass left, and Link was never one to start a conversation, so he waited for Zelda.

“I’ve been debating whether or not to talk to you about this,” she started. “But after talking with Kass, it would seem that you already know.”

She looked at him, her green eyes shining in the blue light from the shrine.

“Link, I have romantic feelings for you, and I didn’t want to make you feel pressured to return them, which is why I held them in since we were reunited,” she smiled. “But I have loved you for one hundred years.”

Link smiled back and moved his hand so it rested on hers, “I don’t remember much of the past, but I do know I loved you until my dying breath, and I remembered I loved you before I remembered your name. I would be happy to always walk by your side, if you would have me.”

“Only if you consent to walk beside me,” Zelda laughed. “No more of that three paces behind business. I could always feel you staring at me.”

“It was a part of the job,” he laughed back. He squeezed her hand. “I’ll always protect you.”

“I know,” she said before leaning in to kiss his cheek.

Link reached over to cup her cheek in his hand and gave her a proper kiss.

“I’ve been waiting one hundred years to do that,” he smiled.

“Well you don’t have to stop now,” she grumbled.

Link pulled her closer, “Yes, Princess.”

#zelink #zelink month #zelink month 2018 #botw zelink #botw #loz #flooshfics

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kylydian · 6 years

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Breath of the Wild Music Analysis: Folk Music and Kass’s Theme

Breaking into one of the deepest tracks (Characters?) in the game! There’s quite a bit of historical context to unpack here, so let’s get to it.

Track 13: Kass’s Theme

Genre: Folk, Waltz

Featured Instruments: Accordion

Compositional Techniques: Historical Context

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Truthfully, this track isn’t too complicated composition wise, so rather than covering the composition in depth, let’s delve a bit into ethnomusicology and how it’s implemented into Kass’s theme, and by extension the role of Kass himself. The applications are pretty neat and are very easy to gloss over. In identifying exactly what this track does let’s first set a preface, because this is an info rich post.

An accordion being performed is significant, the fact that Kass is a traveling musician is important, and lyrics play a role in understanding how Kass’s music works. All of these actually interact behind the scenes to create something awesome! So, let’s start by briefly talking about the style of music, because that’s what I’ve been doing. Best to knock it out now.

This track is a Viennese Waltz, or for all intents and purposes a waltz. If you’re even somewhat familiar with basic musical forms or dance, you’ll likely know what a waltz is. Waltzes are marked by a 3 beat pattern, often played at a tempo fast enough to make you feel only one beat at a time. The fact that we can trace this form of music historically to Austria’s capital Vienna will play a little bit of a role later on, but just keep that in the back of your mind for now. You’ll likely recollect that you can hear similar sounding accordion music in a lot of other media, and when you do, it’s often to accompany the performer singing. These vocals are generally easy to understand and will either explain part of a story, or describe a scene that’s going on. Vocals and accordion go pretty hand in hand in many types of music. Again, save that for later!

The melody is very memorable, and obviously is associated with Kass, which keeps us in the realm of more traditional Zelda music. But it’s important to realize that the waltz itself isn’t necessarily overly significant in this case. Waltzes exist in all forms of instrumentation. In fact, if you remember, I explained how the music in the large guardian battles is actually a waltz. Because of this, let’s look to how we could actually tie in the accordion to aspects in Breath of the Wild other than the music itself.

Accordion is often associated with a very wide, sweeping genre of music called folk music. Folk music in many ways might be the widest genre of music possible, as it simply refers to “traditional” music in the confines of western music history. By this association, every nationality has traditional folk music. Because of this, folk music can sometimes be associated with “World Music.” This is not an absolute generalization however, as world music definitely does exist outside of the realm of folk. The easiest way to think of traditional folk music, is as a type of music that is usually transmitted orally, across generations, and performed over long periods of time. Naturally because of this, having a good recognizable melody is everything.

However, transmitted orally is one of the most important things to understand in relation to traditional folk music. In general, the idea behind folk music is it’s a music representative of a traditional culture, music of the past if you would. It’s music that had no way to be recorded other than to be passed down with the intention of future generations remembering it. These are often songs associated with religion, custom, holidays or spirituality, but they’re all passed down by the idea of tradition. The interesting thing about where traditional folk music occurs today is in towns or areas that might be…let’s call it “Old fashioned.” Small, isolated villages are prime targets to find traditional folk music. The thing about Breath of the Wild though, is every village is pretty isolated and each one has a very strong visual and cultural representation in someway or another. Without the influence of many outside sources, this would make each village prime material for cultural folk music. And remember, the accordion is our symbol that relates to folk music itself. Which brings us to its performer Kass.

Kass is a Rito and a traveling minstrel, or musician. His purpose in the game is to learn the songs of the various lands in Hyrule, the songs that have been passed down over generations. Believe it or not, this is actually very similar to a profession called ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists generally study the traditional music of cultures or people, doing things like residencies, interviews, or recordings of performances. They’re people who are trying to retain a musical past, one that’s often only translated in person. They hold onto the music we don’t know about, so that one day we can hear it too. It’s often a behind the scenes job, and one that can go easily forgotten.

The neat thing is, because Kass travels to different lands, tribes, and locations to learn about their music, documenting them for future generations, he’s a sort of in game ethnomusicologist.

Kass’s songs tell stories, or provide riddles that help you solve puzzles, but the important thing is that they’re direct lore for Breath of the Wild because they contain lyrics, even if they’re only through text. If we think back to when I talked about Nier: Automata, I said lyrics allow us to provide literary meaning to music, something that you’ll often hear in folk music.

In addition to this, Kass plays a ton of music over the course of the game. You can hear a bunch of different versions of both new and familiar Zelda music. Which…since Nintendo says that Breath of the Wild takes place at the “end” of the Zelda timeline (Don’t get me started on this), it’s very evident that the music in question would also have been passed down through the ages similar to folk music. And for the songs that relate to the regions, those would be direct representations of the tribes’ folk music, passed down over time.

Because of the way he presents the music, both past, old and present. You could stretch it and say all of his renditions of music could be considered folk music. So naturally, let’s stretch this to the breaking point.

One of the songs that can be heard is the main Breath of the Wild theme. This is significant in a way, and although it can be chalked up to the fact that “it’s a different arrangement of the main theme end of story,” this places the song in the game’s world itself. You could then infer that the theme of the wild is actually music that has the potential to be passed down in game as well. It has a strong, memorable melody, and has important association for the game. It’s a direct representation of the soundtrack by our traveling Rito musicologist.

Again, more than likely this wasn’t intended, it most likely was simply “Man wouldn’t it be cool to have him play the main theme as well?” That doesn’t make it any less important though. The best ideas to find are the ones that might not be there.

However, something that does hold great significance is the ending to Kass’s storyline. If you complete all of his challenges, you can find him completing his wish in performing in front of his siblings in Rito village. He starts by playing his theme (with a few variations on articulation,) and eventually goes through some changes before he ends up on the familiar main theme for The Legend of Zelda

Historical contexts are important, and despite what Nintendo says about any timeline, music has always held kind of a historical Easter egg worth of information if you will. And honestly, this is the biggest, brightest egg of them all. We’ve known the main theme for the Legend of Zelda from the very beginning of the series, and it’s made an appearance at some point throughout all of the games. It’s a very important theme, but as you’ll notice it only plays at a few places in the soundtrack. Sometimes for seemingly no reason (Riding the horse,) and others for important locations (Hyrule Castle.)

Throughout our personal histories with the Zelda series, we’ve come to associate this track as one that transcends the games, the timelines etc. We’ve likely made assumptions (even if subconscious) that the theme is present in the world of Hyrule itself, even if it doesn’t always appear that way. But with Kass performing it, you could infer that this is now transmitted music of Hyrule, much like the music of the tribes, legends and history of the now broken Hyrule.

That’s cool.

This has been an overly long exposition, so let’s get into some quick meat of how we can apply this information to our own work.

Essentially what’s being done with Kass is creating lore through music. The songs Kass performs, whether shrine, divine beast, champion, city or whatever related, in someway or another build lore. If we think about the way the story is structured this makes complete sense. If you like, you can actually skip all of the story other than “The kingdom is broken Link. You must stop Ganon.” Or you can take the time to experience as much about about the world and the story as you choose to. Kass’s music is also a direct reflection of this. His purpose is to transmit the music to those that listen, allowing Link, you the player to learn more about the lore of the world. This is a unique way to not only provide more story, but also music that is relevant to the in-game world. Making the music itself a part of the lore.

So why not find ways to incorporate music into lore in our own projects? Admittedly, this isn’t easy, nor should it always be done. There are many ways that it could distract from player experience depending on the project, but if able to be accomplished it can provide a new way for music to be heard, experienced, and appreciated, even if not explicitly noticed. Breath of the Wild does it through a traveling character that develops overtime, but why not find other ways?

Truthfully, Zelda music has always done very well in incorporating music into lore. Playing music in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask are the two most obvious ones, but you can find instances in Wind Waker, Twlight Princess, and the often forgotten Ballad of the Wind Fish in Link’s Awakening.

In these cases, playable music, music association, and direct story implications are three ways to accomplish this. But honestly the possibilities on how to include music into lore are endless. After all, what is music other than retelling a story?

Let’s break it down.

Summary: Kass’s theme is representative of his character who present a unique take on the idea of traditional folk music in the land of Hyrule. Our clues include his instrument of choice, his status as a traveling musician, and that he collects songs to pass on to future generations. This act of passing on songs is a direct representation of lore, as it interacts with gameplay, and can add key story segments to the overall plot. Kass’s theme itself is reflective musically of traditional folk music.

Takeaways for Developers: Consider possible ways that you can build lore through music. There are many ways to do this, and many ways to do this incorrectly. Think about ways that you could place music inside the game’s world itself, and how the music could be representative of your setting, characters or ideas.

Takeaways for Composers: Using influences of folk music is a powerful way to build lore through music. Find ways that music might be able to be directly representative of a group of people, kingdoms, or countries when applicable. Remember the connotations that are carried with folk music. To effectively translate lore through music, it might be easiest to include lyrics, even if only in text.

I’ll come out and say that this has been one of my favorite tracks to listen, research and write on. To be honest, I could unpack even more here if I really wanted to. But I don’t want to make this more of a novel than it already is. Please feel free to reach out with any questions to my DMs, or at [email protected]. I’d love to chat with you!

I’ll be back soon with the next entry in this series~

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sneakersonlinesale-blog · 5 years

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Deborah Kass’s “OY/YO” (2015) was placed on the Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront this week by the North Williamsburg ferry terminal. It is planned to be there for roughly a year. (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Are photographers being marginalized at the Venice Biennale? Writing for Aperture, Annika Klein writes:

Almost every time photography appears in the Venice Biennale, especially in the marquee exhibition, VIVA ARTE VIVA, it’s either in service of something else—performance, collage, film, books—or it’s one element of a larger, multimedia project. Out of eighty-seven national pavilions, only three exhibitions are dedicated solely to a photographer: Australia, Belgium, and Poland. Perhaps this dearth of photography is a reflection of a contemporary art market that favors painting and sculpture. But the argument for photography as art was made, and won, a long time ago. At the Biennale, with its multistory sculptures and flashy installations, photographs alone can’t compete with the spectacle. Which isn’t to say that photography doesn’t work well in conjunction with other modes of art making, such as with Hajas’s performances. But, too often, it gets lost in the fray. Genre-bending multimedia work—where most new art seems to be headed—can be timely and powerful, and at the Biennale, there is painting and sculpture aplenty. Why is photography still denied the same consideration?

Why it matters Jimmie Durham isn’t Cherokee:

Ultimately, Anne Ellegood has done Native art communities a favor by digging in and forcing this public discussion through her exhibition catalogue and her persistent framing of Durham as an American Indian. The catalogue showed that Durham still claimed to be Cherokee and still used our culture in his art and writing. Native people told Ellegood that Durham wasn’t Cherokee or Native for years, but she dismissed them and dismissed the tribes’ sovereign rights to define their own membership criteria. By doing so, she made apparent that this conversation could no longer be postponed.

The politics of fire from Ancient Rome and modern San Francisco to the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London:

The political context of any fire starts with the systems put in place to prevent it, and the decisions regarding who, or what, is in most need of protection. The first large-scale fire-fighting force recorded was the Vigiles Urbani (city watchmen) of Ancient Rome, who were pressed into action during the Great Fire of 64AD – a disaster laden with political implications, from speculation over its cause (the Emperor Nero was widely rumoured to have ordered the torching of the capital himself) to debates over reconstruction in the city, two-thirds of which was destroyed by the blaze.

Over the centuries, different strategies aimed at avoiding urban fires have been used to entrench the autocratic nature of some regimes, or to showcase the supposedly enlightened and modernist credentials of others. In addition, the social background of those injured or displaced by fires has helped show the degree to which class, race and religion play a part in determining urban vulnerability.

Brandon Taylor is thinking about the state of queer narratives:

Queerness, unlike heterosexuality or whiteness or being able-bodied, is not a neutral state, and as such seems to command some contextualizing energy in order to justify its presence within narrative spaces. One must do work in order to explain why a character is queer or else it is seen as an extraneous fact, a superfluous detail, a distraction. I have been in many workshops where I have been asked to provide background information to explain how it is possible for a person to be attracted to both men and women, that if a character has only slept with women but finds themselves involved with a man, that there has been some mistake in the writing of this, that their sexuality has come as a sudden and startling surprise. The underlying assumption is that any deviation from the experience of a presumed white, cis, heterosexual, neurotypical person of some means is seen as an undue tax upon the reader’s empathy and worse still, some kind of indulgent idiosyncratic quirk on the part of the writer—avarice.

Lapham’s Quarterly has some fascinating facts about Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893) that you may not know, including:

Digital photo accidents can turn out funny, and in this case (posted on Reddit this week) the woman on the right sneezed in the middle of a panoramic shot:

My phone has a wide selfie feature similar to a panorama. You need to sit still for it to work. My girlfriend sneezed, and this happened. from pics

A group of street artists in Russia have “deleted” the graffiti covering a dumpster and abandoned car with a Photoshop-like illusion. The visual illusion is pretty great:

New York Times clown columnist David Brooks wrote a ridiculous article that appeared to suggest Italian lunch meats represented a divide between elite and everyday America. It was silly, but Lucy Huber of McSweeney’s responded with this satirical take on Brooks’ imaginary cold cut college:

Talking to Your Friends About Italian Delis 426

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Thanks @OregonDOT http://pic.twitter.com/SmwHtWLeQ3

— Depoe Bay Fire Dist. (@DepoeBayFire) July 13, 2017

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Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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flauntpage · 7 years

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The Immortal Life of John Tesh's NBA Anthem "Roundball Rock"

There's cowbell in "Roundball Rock," which I'd never noticed. You can hear it thonking along metronomically under the hyperactive arpeggiating strings and swelling synthesizers. The version I listened to is just one minute and nine seconds long, and I had come to believe that I knew every bright corner of it. This is not because I have spent much time listening to the song on purpose, because I have not. It's because I have never had to seek it out.

Whenever there was a NBA game on NBC between 1991 and 2002, some edit of "Roundball Rock" was played before the game and at the half and wherever else it would fit; in all, it was played more than 12,000 times during the 12-year period in which it was NBC's NBA theme song, which breaks down to something like 20 times per game. It became so ubiquitous during this period that it is easy to forget that "Roundball Rock" is no longer the NBA's theme song, and in fact has not been since George W. Bush's first term in office.

When the rights to broadcast NBA games transferred to ABC before the 2002-03 season, John Tesh—the leonine new age music composer and former Entertainment Tonight host who wrote the song—offered "Roundball Rock" to the network. They declined, and replaced it with a song called "Fast Break," which was composed by Non-Stop Music; the official YouTube upload of that song, from 2012, has been viewed more than 114,000 times, which is pretty impressive given how easy it is to hear it during basketball season. It is also not in the same universe as its predecessor.

There is a video of Tesh performing "Roundball Rock" in concert that was uploaded four years earlier, by Tesh's official account. The only word to describe this version of the song is "extravagant." Pacing the stage before a rapt crowd, Tesh pushes play on the first of two answering machine messages that he left for himself in July of 1990, when he was in the French city of Pau covering the Tour de France. The first message he left was "Roundball Rock"'s chorus, as Tesh told ESPN's Darren Rovell in 2002. In a second message, 30 minutes later, he scatted the verse.

In the video, Tesh is towering and lushly goateed and wears a glittering silver vest with seven buttons on it; he introduces the performance of the song by miming dribbling a basketball. A large corps of musicians, including a full string section, launch into an expansive version of the original; it features both a guitar solo, complete with Surprised At How Hot These Licks Are faces from the soloist, and some violin filigrees courtesy of a gamboling fiddler in an epaulet-adorned Napoleon-style coat. When I watched the video of this performance earlier this week, it was the 1,435,747th time someone pressed play on it.

Tesh's website mentions that he "claims that he made in the six figures from royalties each year it was used." It further mentions that Nelly sampled the song for "Heart Of A Champion," the first song on the Sweat half of Nelly's 2004 double album Sweat/Suit; because Tesh owns the song's copyright and publishing, he presumably made some money on that, too. (It does not mention that it has also been sampled by Ras Kass for a song called "NBA" or been subjected to three-and-a-half minute onslaught of NBA-related punchlines by Joe Budden.) Tesh has made the song available as a free download, and that 69-second version is the one that Tesh recorded on spec and sent to NBC executives. He paid an orchestra $15,000 to record it, sent the demo to NBC under an assumed name, and worked out a deal with the network that paid him a fee every single time the song was used. "Every five seconds—into commercials, out of commercials," Tesh told the Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay in 2011. "It definitely put one of my kids through college." Tesh told Rovell back in 2002 that he had offered the song to ABC for use on its broadcasts. "I'm also perfectly happy to sell it to the NBA if they want it," Tesh said.

None of that happened, which means that 15 years after it was last played during a NBA broadcast, the only place you can hear "Roundball Rock" is everywhere—in your head whenever you watch a NBA broadcast, echoing around the online spaces where basketball weirdos gather, in the collective memory of a generation that grew up associating the song with the experience of watching basketball on television. When I looked up the jazzy latin alternate version of the current ABC/ESPN theme, I had the strange experience of realizing that, despite having heard that rendition what now must be hundreds of times during NBA broadcasts, I had also somehow never heard it before. Every time I had heard it, something in my brain took it upon itself to remedy what it perceived as an oversight, and so simply plugged in "Roundball Rock." Tesh's song is vexingly catchy with marimba and horns, too, if you were wondering. Maybe you've heard it, too.

John Tesh sent me a link to a video and asked me not to share it. I can describe it, and so can tell you that it opens with a classic YouTube establishing shot: pallid indoor lighting, anonymous suburban paint job, a bespectacled man in a black-and-white windbreaker seated at a Yamaha piano. The man tears into the beginning of "Roundball Rock" and then gives way to another recognizable YouTube shot—wood floors, larger piano and better light, a man with a duckling's fluffy quiff—and then another keyboard, and then another. Then two bearded guys play it on electric guitars and a man in plaid shorts picks it up from there on a ukelele, and so on and on. Someone with an acoustic guitar explains how to play the song, to camera, as a graphic with the corresponding guitar appear behind him in a homemade graphic. That last one is Tesh's favorite part.

When he performs live, which Tesh still does 25 to 30 times per year at venues tending towards your larger casino-based performance spaces, he projects that video plays as a sort of introduction. "I wanted to do kind of a Storytellers thing, sort of inside the music, and I said let's bring projection with us, because we have a team of editors," he told me. "So I said 'why don't you search YouTube, just search for the song' and it turns out there's hundreds of people learning to play the song. I was ... this is crazy." At his shows, Tesh generally uses "Roundball Rock" as an encore. "When we play the song, at the end of our concerts, that's when the guys in the audience that have been dragged to a John Tesh concert by their wives or girlfriends, they're like 'holy crap, you did this?'" he said. "That's really fun for me."

If you know what Tesh looks like, it is probably either because of the decade he spent hosting Entertainment Tonight between 1986 and 1996 or because of his still-ubiquitous Live From Red Rocks PBS special, from 1995; the accompanying album, in which Tesh performs with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, went platinum several times over. His career sprawls across decades before and after that, and continues still—he presides over a rather startlingly vast multi-platform empire today, which includes a daily radio show that's on 300 stations in the United States and Canada, a weekly television show that's on 174 stations, and a podcast that he does with his wife and her adult son from a previous marriage. He is still making records and generally doing more or less what he wants. Everything except the albums comes from a studio that he built into his home. "We gave up on Los Angeles traffic," he told me. "And we got 15 hours of our lives back. We just took all that gas money and put it into building a studio."

All of which is to say that Tesh has had a fantastically successful career—a happy marriage and kids and grandkids, a successful run as a journalist and a lucrative stint as a host on Entertainment Tonight and millions of records sold as a New Age recording artist, which was always what mattered most to him. All of which is true, and all of which cannot be said without mentioning that Tesh has also spent much of his public life as a big, earnest, good-looking guy learning how to live with being a punchline. His albums have been hugely popular, but his records filed under the most readily mocked musical genre that exists; he is as recognizable as anyone in American life, but it's at least in part because he used to tell millions of Entertainment Tonight viewers that it was Dabney Coleman's birthday, whenever it was Dabney Coleman's birthday.

Tesh, at least as far as I could tell, is extremely cool with all this, and with the strange-but-habitable shape into which his fame has shaped his life. "Triumph [The Insult Comic Dog] came to my house, or my quote-unquote house, in Los Angeles, in one of those TMZ-style tour buses," Tesh told me. "And he's yelling, with a megaphone of course, out of the bus. And I peek my head out of the house and he goes, ' Teshy, Teshy, come out, come out.' And I say 'Triumph what do you want?' and he says 'I want you to stop playing that crappy music.' And then I got on the tour bus and he started humping everybody and it was very uncomfortable." The important things to know about how Tesh told this story is that his Triumph imitation was both extremely enthusiastic and pretty on-point, and that he laughed a big happy basso laugh at the end of it.

All of this is strange, but also this is Tesh's life: he has been successful and become famous in every field he ever endeavored to enter, and yet he is still someone Triumph does not hesitate to poop on. The strangest part of this supremely strange and strangely familiar Real Hollywood Story is that "Roundball Rock," which is almost certainly Tesh's most lasting contribution to the broader culture, is one that's not generally associated with him. It couldn't be any other way. Even people lucky and talented enough to get what they want in life never quite get it the way they imagine. No one ever gets in through the front door.

When Tesh came up with the founding theme for "Roundball Rock" he was spending most of his day in a van filled with synthesizers as an employee of CBS Sports. "I worked in local news for many years, in Orlando and Nashville and then in Manhattan at WCBS as a local news reporter," Tesh told me. "And then I got hired as what's called an anthology sports reporter—none of the basketball or baseball, but the downhill skiing and the figure skating and Mr. Universe. And I was assigned to the Tour de France and that's where the producer, David Michaels, who's Al Michaels' brother, he said 'let's do this MTV style.'"

What that meant, for Tesh, was more work. He would be not only writing about what happened on the Tour that day, but composing a soundtrack for the footage illustrating it; Michaels edited that footage, and then Tesh wrote and read his own narration over a musical score he composed more or less on the fly. "It was a truly collaborative process, but what happens with editing video like that—and you can see anybody like Hans Zimmer doing this, too, and doing a much better job of it—but you can't just write a song," Tesh told me. "It's odd time signatures, and it's more like colors than anything else. Deep Moog synthesizers when people are climbing up a mountain and really high-speed arpeggiators when they're descending at 60, 70 miles an hour. So what I would do, for two months before we'd even go to the Tour de France, I would write out little canvas pieces, 'I know I'm going to need this, I know I'm going to need that,' but I wouldn't set the tempos. I wouldn't commit it to anything except being in the computer. So then when I saw that, I could pull that out and adjust it so it would fit."

This was more or less the approach that Tesh took to composing a theme for the NBA on NBC. He had some ideas, which he sang into his answering machine from a hotel room in the small hours of the morning, and by now you know what those sound like. He knew, he says, because he was plugged into the broader sports media scene, that NBC was looking for a theme. He knew enough to not just record the theme but also to sync it to video. "In order for the guys at the network to buy in, you can't have them imagine it," he said. "So I edited together on VHS tape like 20 fast breaks, from the Bulls and the Lakers. And I would play the theme that I had, the rough theme, over that footage. Just to see, you know, how it worked. When I sent it to NBC, I sent them a copy of the VHS and also a copy of the mixed song, so they could see it with video. You want to remove any chance for imagination or work from people who are judging that kind of stuff. So I made sure it was the right tempo, so they didn't have to imagine it was 134 beats per minute, which is the tempo of a Michael Jordan fastbreak—I put it at that tempo. And then I re-edited the footage so it looked like it was already in the show."

Tesh also knew enough to submit the theme under an assumed name, because he already understood the gap between what he wanted to do and how he was perceived: "The guy that reads the celebrity birthdays on television isn't going to be writing our sports themes, you know? It ended up getting judged on its own merits, but definitely being a TV host stood in my way." What Tesh calls "renaissance-ing" was still anomalous in the business at that time, but also he was already figuring out how to be serious about his work even when precious few took him seriously in the way he wanted to be taken seriously.

No one has quite cracked the musicological science behind earworms, which is reassuring given how many steel-trap minds and proprietary algorithms have doubtless been loosed in pursuit of this answer. There was a CBS theme for NBA broadcasts that existed before Tesh's, and there is the Non-Stop Music theme that has now outlived his. In 2010, the classical conductor Marc Williams told ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz that he much preferred the old CBS theme to Tesh's, which he described as "'90s music with adrenaline," but ultimately "a one-trick pony."

I am not qualified to say whether Williams is right or wrong about any of this, although as I have already admitted the extent to which "Roundball Rock" has homesteaded my unconscious, I would probably have to recuse myself even if I were. Tesh told me that when he offered the song to ABC, he was told that the network wanted to go its own way, to avoid reminding viewers of NBC. "Which I actually get, you know," he said. "But it's really not like the rest of the world works. Otherwise, why would people buy songs and put them in commercials, you know? You want to use the most recognizable theme, so people hear it and are like, 'oh, basketball is on.'"

A decade and a half after it was last heard on television, "Roundball Rock" still rings out in that way for several generations of basketball fans. Whether it deserves that, or how it came to earn it, is secondary to the fact of it. In a 2013 Saturday Night Live sketch—a discrete bit of it shows up in Tesh's Storytellers reel—Jason Sudeikis and Tim Robinson play John and Dave Tesh, and perform a version of the song with lyrics that are, mostly, "ba-ba-ba-bas-ket-ball/gimme-gimme-gimme the ball/because I'm gonna dunk it!" It's a funny bit, but it's funnier when you remember that, when it aired, it had been 11 years since anyone had heard Tesh's theme during an NBA game.

And yet, because it never left, NBA fans still hear it all the time. There are no plans on the part of any of the NBA's current broadcast partners to bring it back, and Tesh is busy enough that he has not pushed for a reunion. "I don't really wake up every morning thinking about it," Tesh told me. "But what I'd really like to do is maybe at the Finals, one time, if they asked me, I would love to come, just right at midcourt, maybe with an eight-piece string section or something like that, and just play the theme right after the national anthem. That would be a fun thing for me."

Maybe you, as I did, found that very easy to imagine. Maybe you, as I did, realized that you had, in some way, already been imagining it.

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