Kobe Bryant: The Greatest Mixtape I've Ever Heard
By: Jordan Rose
“Some people just feel immortal until they aren’t,” were the first real words that got through to me on Sunday night. It was dark here in London, it was supposed to stop raining in the afternoon but it felt as though the clouds just released everything they had all at once. My friend and I cut our conversation short. He and I usually going back and forth chatting aimlessly, neither of us really felt like talking anymore. I don’t even remember what we were saying.
Kobe Bryant is dead, several families are broken, and the heavens are weeping.
Bryant’s career, passion and mamba mentality are integral cords in the score of my life. My childhood was similar to a lot of kids who grew up playing sports and mirroring the pros, except at first I hated Bryant, and for no real reason at all. Maybe it was his larger-than-life bravado, maybe it was his undeniable swagger, maybe it was because of how disrespectfully easy it was for him to put a ball through a hoop. Regardless I was a young, bonafide hater. I wanted to be better than Kobe, so I looked up to him as a hurdle that I needed to conquer rather than a hero. It wasn’t until I grew up and moved away from the game of basketball that I finally gained an appreciation for him. It’s easy to hate the un-acquirable, but he actually helped me learn how to refocus on the things that I do best. He made me realize that my goal shouldn't have been to try and ‘be like Kobe’, but to try and be the best version of myself.
If our lives were surmised into mixtapes when all was said and done, Kobe Bean Bryants would be one of the greatest mixtapes I’ve ever heard in my life. It isn’t flawless, not even close, but it never sought to be.
Kobe was a perfectionist who didn’t need things to be perfect, it was the process that was worth obsessing over for him, the mastering of mechanics even if the results might vary sometimes. His mixtape is fluid, cascading at times like a river into a waterfall, yet always staying on track downstream. Even at its lowest points, it never strayed away from its targeted message. Every song doesn't seamlessly flow into each other, but it still tells a clear story. But beyond that, what makes Bryant’s legacy one of the greatest mixtapes I’ve heard is that he always maintained creative control. Every victory and every failure was his. Everything he said felt important, every quote felt like a proverb, and every soundbite an addition to his already storied archive of quotables.
I’ve always been critical of how attached we as fans feel towards our icons. We inject ourselves into their lives despite the fact that they have no idea we individually exist. While I still don’t think that’s right, now I get it. Losing Kobe Bryant genuinely feels like losing an uncle. I never knew him personally, but I feel like he was never a fan of endings. Maybe that’s why his mixtape feels like it’s missing its B-side, the soothing second act. I don’t think that was ever his style in the first place.
Kobe instilled in me the mantra “all you need is one,” whether that be one bucket, one opportunity or one person betting on you in order to get going. All you need is one, even if you have to be that ‘one’ for yourself.
When talking about recovering from his Achilles injury in 2014, Bryant said that he looks at the scar on his foot and sees beauty in it because it’s a constant reminder of the journey that it took for him to get back to a healthy place. His loss has left a real wound on the hearts of his wife, two daughters and the many others who keep Bryant’s mixtape in daily rotation like myself. It doesn’t feel real that he’s gone because ‘Kobe’ didn’t feel real in the first place. He was a moniker, a symbol of vicious tenacity and a name understood across several languages. But when this wound heals—and it will—we too will have a beautiful scar. One that reminds us that our legends do die, but their soundtrack plays on.
