Yo La Tengo: What's the Score?

As many of you know, embracing sports, especially a major sport in your country (if you are in America it is Advanced to like baseball or football, but it is Overt to like soccer--especially if you call it football--or rugby). So it was with great delight that I read this article about Yo La Tengo, sent to me by an alert Advanced Reader. So is YLT Advanced? Let's see...

Pro: "The name Yo La Tengo comes from a story about miscommunication between Latin and American outfielders from the 1962 New York Mets."

Con: “I left sports for rock music at about 15,” remembers McNew. “I think it had something to do with the emergence of jocks. I liked sports, but at some point I just didn’t have much in common with anyone I was playing with."

Pro: “I think there are parallels between being a band and being a sports team,” says Kaplan. “Athletic comparisons and metaphors come up within the band a lot."

Con: “I had World Cup fever this year,” says McNew. “The whole game is a broken play. It’s all improvisation and guys trying to figure things out while they’re running as fast as they can. I like when we improvise like that when we play music.”

Pro: “TBS once used our song “Moby Octopad” on its NBA pre-season show,” remembers Kaplan, a die-hard New York Knicks fan. “But they used it as part of a Chicago Bulls montage.”

Con: “The first time I heard the Ramones at a stadium, it was a crisis for me because it was so wrong,” says McNew. “But maybe for the first person who played ‘Blitzkreig Bop’ at a sporting event, it was an act of subversion, but it caught on. Maybe he committed suicide over that because he couldn’t believe what he had done.”

Pro: “The roar of the crowd in sports literally is a roar. The entertainment roar is more like a ‘Wooo!’... We played a show at the Fillmore in San Francisco where we came out really strong, and when we stopped after the third song, there was something like a roar. I almost started crying.”

You make the call!