Hater Eraser
Veteran
‘I put the ice in nicest’: Kobe Bryant’s short and oft-forgotten rap career
foxsports Apr 12, 2016 at 10:15a ET
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Players Tribune editorial director Kobe Bryant will take the court for the final time when the very bad Los Angeles Lakers take on the marginally better Utah Jazz at the Staples Center on Wednesday night. He will play all of the minutes, shoot infinite shots, make at least a few of them, there’ll probably be a tear-jerking tribute video, and, fingers crossed, Brandy will sing the National Anthem.
As the fans cheer and the rose petals fall and teammates new and old congratulate him on his illustrious, two-decade career, there’s a good chance none of the highlights will include that time he rapped in Italian at All-Star Weekend in 2000.
To understand exactly how we got to this point, we have to go back to two years before.
With his basketball career ramping up and his #brand taking off, Sony was really trying to make MC Kobe Bryant happen starting the summer of 1998, during which Bryant lived with Steve Stoute, the biggest of big time record execs. Grantland’s Thomas Golianopoulos did a deep-dive into this strange period back in 2013:
Coming out of Philly, Bryant had been steeped in hip-hop culture, but rapping had always just been something to do when he wasn’t hooping. He counted Canibus as a major influence. He was also one-sixth of a rap group called CHEIZAW, a phonetic spelling and acronymization of "Chi Sah," the name of a gang in a Shaw Brothers kung fu film called "The Kid With the Golden Arm." The exact meaning of CHEIZAW is unintentionally hilarious, again, courtesy of Golianopoulous:
With the enormity of Will Smith’s success, Sony decided to steer Bryant away from RILL hip-hop and onto the pop route. And given a 20-year-old Bryant’s all-consuming need to be liked at the time, he went along. What was going to be a CHEIZAW posse album had turned into a more-marketable Kobe Bryant solo album, and with the right single and a big enough marketing push, "Visionz," due out the spring of 2000, was going to be Bryant’s "Big Willie Style."
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