The Ballad of Isiah
This is a brief story about a piece of art I made 20 years ago.
In March 2006, Isiah Thomas was president of basketball operations for the New York Knicks, and he had made a serious mess of things. The roster was incoherent, it did not match what coach Larry Brown wanted to do, and there were few signs that the future was very bright, either, given that Thomas had traded away multiple future draft picks for the likes of Eddy Curry.
At the beginning of that month, the Knicks were 15-42, the worst record in the NBA. I was contributing to a sports blog run by my friend Zach, called Sportszilla and the Jabber Jocks (great Simpsons reference) and decided to write a song about Thomas. The best way to distribute the song, I figured, would be on a new-ish video platform with growing popularity called YouTube. So, over a day or two, I wrote and recorded the song, giving it the cheeky title, “The Ballad of Isiah,” then gathered a bunch of images and assembled a slideshow to fit under the music.
Once I’d uploaded the video and published a blog post with an embed, it quickly spread farther than just about anything else I’ve ever made. You can find mentions of the video on posts from around then, but nothing topped that it was mentioned in a New York Times article.
Years went by. At some point, I think because I had signed up for YouTube under a Yahoo email address that I subsequently deleted, I lost access to the account that hosted “The Ballad of Isiah.” It was still up, so I didn’t think about it much. That is, until a short time ago, when I discovered that the YouTube account had been deleted, perhaps because of inactivity and unresponsiveness, taking the video with it. I kicked myself for not downloading it, though I was also largely unbothered by the whole situation, thinking that there are lots of things that haven’t been preserved, and it’s not like I was making money off of it or anything.
But earlier this week, Zach sent me a message he’d received from a stranger, asking if there was any way to recover “The Ballad of Isiah.” The stranger said he and his friends had enjoyed the song and wanted to revisit it now that the Knicks were returning to the NBA Finals. Did Zach still have it? He did not, so he asked me if I did.
When he asked, I told him about the YouTube deletion, but a question popped into my head: I wondered if my dad still had the laptop I had used to make the video, because there was a chance it was still on the machine. I popped over to his house and after about 10 minutes of looking around, I spotted a big black boxy-looking thing on a high shelf. There it was, the Sony Vaio my parents had purchased for me when I started college in 2001.
We then started sifting through my dad’s stuff for a charging cord. I guessed I might have to buy an adaptor, but about 20 minutes into the search, miraculously, the original power cord turned up in a box full of other old cables.
I couldn’t remember the last time the laptop had been turned on. I know I had bought a different computer by early 2007, and I have all of my schoolwork from high school onward, so it’s likely I transferred a bunch of files once and then it hadn’t been powered up in nearly two decades. However, it worked just like old times, albeit with some kind of damage to the inside of the screen.
Windows Millennium Edition had a feature that let you change the default Windows font and colors to some weirdly illegible settings, and I immediately remembered changing them and feeling rebellious about it as a 19-year-old. My old folder hierarchy returned to me instantly, and my heartbeat picked up as I clicked down several levels to the folder titled “Blogs”. There it was: a folder titled “isiah”. I opened that one, and it was the full set of assets I had used to make the video, including the final file.
As I told my dad, I’m pretty excited to have recovered this material, because I like remembering that feeling of having a burst of creativity that other people seem to appreciate. On the other hand, I’m also a little worried he still had the laptop! It would have been no big loss had the computer been disposed of long ago, and these days I value tidiness, mobility, and ease of finding things much more than I value keeping every artifact of my existence — at least in the physical world.
Either way, I’m pleased to once again share “The Ballad of Isiah.” Enjoy!
(If you’re reading this in email, watch the video on the web page.)