The Warriors are not greater than the ’95-’96 Bulls, who still have the best win-loss record of all time when you include the postseason. The Warriors have reached heights that the Bulls did not, what with Klay Thompson’s fourth-quarter devastation against the Thunder, and Curry’s overtime scoring record not a moment too soon, the duo’s expansion of range so absurdly close to half-court. The Warriors are impressive, indeed: their ball movement, their multidirectional threats, from the backcourt to the big men who are supposed to belong in the paint, men like Green and Iguodala, who can also hit threes and thus destabilize the way a defense balances itself, breathes, anxiously guards against one weapon while letting another sector of the radar screen slip into peripheral vision. With the Warriors, you must watch everyone, everywhere, all at once.
I don’t think the ‘95 Bulls had that kind of presence. And while Jordan was singular, no player, including Mr. Air, has ever had the accuracy and as quick a release as Curry. No one has hit shots from so far away, off balance, exploding past and turning off of a pick, stepping back and to the side the way Curry has done. Yet, the Bulls of that year remain the greatest team we’ve seen. The Warriors’ performance has simply been too uneven to place them at the top of the list. And I say that as someone who hated the Bulls back in the day. As a fan of Larry Bird and the Celtics, then the Detroit Bad Boys, then the Orlando Magic (whom the Bulls swept during the playoffs of their magical season), my favorite players were always facing off against Jordan, Pippen, Grant, Kerr, and the rest of that annoying, effective squadron.
This line of thinking is part of a larger sphere that, I suppose, consumes or at least visits the minds of many of us in our mid-thirties. As I watched the game yesterday with a friend, the topic of the ’90s, that greatest of decades in so many ways, came up. Specifically, we explored the question of whether the music was better back then. Once we began running down the list of the albums that came out in a five-year period, it was sort of overwhelming. Tribe’s Midnight Marauders and Wu-Tang’s first album came out on the same day. Elliott Smith’s first two albums dropped in ’95 and ’97, giving us a preview of sounds to come, suffused with a sadness and edge and musicality that still stands out. I remember how the In Utero tape played over and over in Scott’s attic while we zoned out on Road Rash for 3DO; I remember ordering Smashing Pumpkin’s “Disarm” on the jukebox at Little Italy Pizza in Groveport, while Zack Fields played Shinobi with a cigarette behind his ear and looked cool like he nearly always did. A few years later, he died after being sideswiped by a drunk driver out near Obetz, and they buried him, forever cool, in a tan Billabong hat and a perfectly matched suede button-front shirt. It was as dressed up as I’d ever seen him. And guys who never cried were crying there, and my ex-girlfriend and I talked as if we were still close, as if we would be close again. And his girl, Anna, skin tanned and hair bleached, was a quivering shade, gorgeous and destroyed.
And now we arrive at the heart of why, for me, the music of the ’90s, the sports of the ’90s, even the news of the ’90s will somehow always seem more profound and good and real than what is flowing into our screens and earbuds now. The past is packed with dust—the kind that causes mutations in memory, aches in joints, the kind that covers the surface of the world and makes things glow. Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush” is the song of my grandmother’s last morning in hospice, Wyclef’s “Yelé” the graduation night drive home down Sims Road, past the barn spangled in black spray paint pentagrams and the phrase Groveport Fabulous (after Mystikal’s hit, of course), Method Man’s Tical the bus rides to basketball games in Whitehall and Gahanna and Reynoldsburg, Digable Planets’ Blowout Comb the poolside gathering of confusion and aimless joy that was our early adolescent spread of towels in the grass, anticipating the night, fearing it might be eventless again, fearing that it won’t.
Sometimes I think I actually arrive at something like an objective assessment of cultural quality when comparing decades. But I’m beginning to accept that such perspective is impossible. For this decade, Kendrick Lamar is giving young people an introduction to the facts and the fire that 2pac gave me. Hearing about the extent of police brutality and the evils of the prison-industrial complex for the first time impacts young people deeply (some of them), and an attachment forms between that imprint experience and the voice or sound or cinematic vision through which it was delivered. Such attachments cannot really be debated, for they are not a matter of intellect, evidence, or empiricism. I’ve come to accept this, though I argue still for my decade, for my artists, for my idols, for it is this argumentation—never to be settled, almost impossible to move forward—that builds relationships between generations, cultivates appreciation for what past decades still have to say to us, helps the middle-aged to understand why this generation is worth listening to with a serious year. Though, I must admit, we of the Starter coat era, now, are far harder to teach than the truly young.