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I listened to a lot of Public Enemy music in my younger days, and I probably would still listen to some now if my children weren't constantly yelling at Alexa to play Imagine Dragons or some sanitized Kidz Bob song.
Specifically, I wore out my cassette tape (yes, cassette) of their 1988 release "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back." The second track, "Bring the Noise," probably has more staying power. But the third track, "Don't Believe the Hype," was my favorite. Sometimes I would even fast-forward through the last bit of "Bring the Noise" to get to it faster.
Toward the end of what is essentially a critique of false narratives and portrayals of the group, Chuck D raps, "Some say I'm negative, but they're not positive," which is only about 3% of the song's lyrical genius but nonetheless is the part that came to mind recently.
I was trying to decide what to make of a thinly explained "study" attributed to a gambling web site that looked at the negativity of all 32 NFL fan bases on social media since the start of free agency this season.
It found that Vikings fans, particularly on Twitter, have been by far the most negative of any team in the last week-plus since free agency started — something I talked about on Thursday's Daily Delivery podcast.
There was no methodology or sample size attributed to the data, so I'm hesitant to lean into it much. But it did spark a couple thoughts:
*How do we define "negative" in the first place? There's a lot of nuance in modern fandom, and the line between passion and vitriol is not always clear. Is a well-constructed but contrarian point negative? If you tweet that the Vikings should draft a new quarterback, is that negative? If you suggest they would have been better off keeping Adam Thielen, is that negative?
If you create a Facebook group around the idea that the entire franchise should be locked in a garbage dumpster and fired toward the sun, is that negative? (Yes, that one is negative). But not everything is that clear.
*Are Vikings fans really that negative relative to other fans? Hard to say. When you live in self-constructed social media vacuum of like-minded people — for me, often people who follow the Vikings — you generally only see how one subset of fans behave.
But if you asked if Vikings fans are particularly angst-filled, I wouldn't argue against it. Sixty-plus years of generally successful regular seasons followed by bitter playoff disappointment in the dead of winter will do that to people, while semi-anonymous venting spaces accelerate a sense of urgency and desperation.
But in the end, everything is in the eye of the beholder, and labels are never 100% accurate.
Some say Vikings fans are negative, but I'm not positive.
