Blackness is inextricable from Iverson’s public persona there is no equal opposite, merely the absence of that scrutiny.
#Juice wrld album cover skin#
“White Iverson” is, after all, a contradiction in terms: the real Iverson’s public life has been defined by white America’s scoffing at and pathologizing his demeanor, his family, his skin and what he does with it.
See its video, where Post, nearly alone in the desert with a rented Rolls Royce that’s white like him, bares his removable gold teeth and runs his hands over the cornrows that he says inspired him to write the song in the first place.Īt the risk of making too much of a basically de rigueur simile-rappers likening themselves to ballplayers is nothing new-there is something sort of asinine about a white artist comparing himself to Allen Iverson.
It felt briefly like a curiosity, but soon graduated to obvious star presagement. You can practically hear “cornrows” (‘ That’s one word’) being added to the SI style guide.Ī decade and a half later, in 2015, Austin Post, who was born in Syracuse but grew up in a Dallas suburb, bubbled up online with “White Iverson,” a song of weightless synthetic air in step with what was dominating Soundcloud at the time, and would soon osmose its way into all of pop music. Those tattoos, which are referenced four times, join his hair and his rap music, “his untied boots, his floor-sweeping jeans, his untucked T-shirt and double-sized leather jacket” in painting a portrait of a man who, the magazine seems to believe, can only be made relatable through painful and painstaking backstory. I know he has 21 tattoos because the cover story, by the reclusive writer Gary Smith, takes great pains to get an accurate count. That’s the one where Allen Iverson, who was about to win league MVP and drag the otherwise middling Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA finals, poses shirtless with his arms crossed in front of him, holding bouquets of wilting flowers and baring most of his 21 tattoos. One of Sports Illustrated’s most memorable covers, at least from this century, is from the Apedition.
0 kommentar(er)
