Brilliant, maddening, exploratory, exhaustive: all of these things could be applied to James Harden as well as the legendary jam band Phish.
Wildly talented. Insanely efficient, if not necessarily economical. Rambling, self-indulgent, offensive to some and taking as much time as humanly possible to get anywhere. Questionable fashion and abundant facial hair. Having a rabidly devoted fanbase. Constantly thinking about stepping to “The Line.”
All of these are objectively fair things to say about James Harden, who, despite a “slump” in which he is averaging a mere 29.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 7.1 assists per game on 56.1 percent true shooting in the new year, remains an MVP candidate as well as the primary driving force behind the Houston Rockets, currently sitting on the fringes of the title contention conversation and locked in a battle of mid-tier Western Conference playoff teams.
Harden is also one of if not the most maddening players in the NBA to watch. Because of the Rockets’ two-headed monster of The Beard and Character Zero, Russell Westbrook, Harden is constantly on TV. He does not lack accessibility in that sense.
Nearly every other night in 2020, from now until the presumptive second round, five-game flameout against the Utah Jazz, you can watch James Harden dribble in his calculated, needle-skipping-the-groove-on-the-record fashion for 20 of the Rockets’ 24 seconds on the shot clock before – “BOY!” – bursting backward toward the number line, and launching a step-back 3-pointer while simultaneously attempting to draw a foul.
The cadence to which we’ve become accustomed from Harden as he attempts to split open and melt the defense can be groan-inducing; the directions he signals to teammates can echo those of Phish guitarist and de-facto frontman Trey Anastasio, always a head nod or hand signal from a change in course of direction.
Harden’s offensive genius is evident and has been for most of his career; his maximization of the bounds of hand-checking rules borders on fetishistic obsession and is almost nihilistic for a sport touting itself as entertainment. Harden is the most basketball that basketball can be in 2020, a scoring machine who turns up triple-7s every time before spitting coins all over your floor, forcing you to clean up his mess.
Watching Harden just the other night — does it matter when? You know what he was doing — I began to think of another sort of brilliance in parallel, also known for acts of maximization, volume, skill and making Madison Square Garden-based entities their own farmhouse on New Year’s Eve (Harden set a then career-high of 53 points on Dec. 31, 2016, against the Knicks).
In almost four decades of existence, Phish has gone from being the Gen-X Grateful Dead to a fusion of cow funk and cotton-spun complexity to, even two hiatuses later, perhaps the world’s foremost live rock band. From their humble Vermont beginnings as the Dead’s jam band understudies, Phish has long capitalized on their live performances as the true manifestation of their artistry. Like Harden, their technical prowess is all-but-unparalleled even to their staunchest detractors, as they prove whenever they don a musical costume and perform another act’s album in its entirety on Halloween.
When it’s working, the nuances of their approaches to their crafts can be revelatory. Even when a third party anticipates the action — Harden lurching inside the line without going full-tilt toward the cup yields a step-back attempt; a second set “Tweezer” from Phish begets the closing “Tweezer Reprise” — the results can skew so wildly as to still shock and delight.
Harden can fake a defender so far out of his shoes that he has time to reflect upon the etymologies of multiple Germanic-derived words while considering the gentlemen’s club he may inhabit later that night; Anastasio can hold a single note during “You Enjoy Myself” for so long that he could pull open his phone and just buy a flight to Firenze.
As they ascended to the longform throne, Phish’s fan base grew, a technicolor snowball of neo-psychedelia that, despite its best intentions, can rub non-devotees the wrong way. As in the case of Harden’s fans, Phish acolytes will show you why they like what they like and, if you are dissatisfied or outright confused, they will tell you that “You just don’t GET IT.”
Fans of both prioritize a commitment to excellence, however longform it has to be, and sometimes at the expense of empathy. Basketball fans who found nirvana in the heady cuts and opportune passing of, say, the title-winning San Antonio Spurs of 2014 likely find Harden’s trampoline dancing almost vomit-inducing, while musical fans who appreciate the economy of a Smiths single or Beach Boys harmonies may take exception with the absurdities found in various live versions of “Harpua.”
As a result, fans of both more often find themselves in positions of defense from the jump, acknowledging that their favorite isn’t for everyone. It isn’t hard to imagine Rockets fans congregating on a Phish.net-esque board (hi, Space City Scoop!) to discuss their favorite step-backs of the season; despite their reputation as a genial base, it isn’t totally impossible to see Phish fans going to war with music Twitter should the band’s musical reputation come under any great public fire.
To many outside their respective globes, Harden and Phish represent mindless self-indulgence, a commitment to exaggerated decadence in the form of ostensible artistic expression. They epitomize an endless, hedonistic pursuit, akin to eating everything at the dinner table and then, for dessert, the table itself.
Harden is a singular offensive genius whose stash of tricks and grasp of the rule of law is self-evident, and a precious few are his superior at the sheer act of manufacturing points. As a band, Phish are almost telepathic in their collective delivery of shape-shifting music that transcends genres.
Irrespective of the rules, which have always changed somewhat within and between eras, no player in NBA history is better at the step-back 3 than Harden. Similarly, Phish’s penchant for playfulness and whimsy only thinly veils a virtuosity and dynamic synthesis of musical styles that is unparalleled perhaps anywhere in music. They have grown in each of their three eras, swapping out Allman Brothers covers for TV On The Radio and the countless crossover teases of contemporary pop saddled within their own jams.
In the parlance of familiar NBA Twitter arguments, Phish has carved out its space on the jam band Mount Rushmore. Harden continues to rail against the notion of aesthetically-pleasing basketball, but he is actually trying to win games. Phish is merely hoping to reach the hearts of listeners, one half-hour-long musical tangent at a time.