Yesterday on Twitter, basketball legend and AIDs activist Magic Johnson celebrated his sixtieth birthday by releasing nine lists ranking various pop culture products. These lists included sports, exotic locales, and “people who have helped me in business and basketball” (there are two women on that last list out of sixty, but who’s counting).
Johnson stepped down from his position as Lakers president of basketball operations a few months back, apparently leaving him plenty of time for consuming and ranking things. Hey, more power to him. As John Cusack says in High Fidelity: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films—these things matter.”
Magic’s favorite place to travel is Amsterdam (for the drugs? The Van Gogh museum? Both, at the same time?), his favorite musical group is the Jackson 5, and his favorite film is The Godfather. Strangely, his favorite TV shows are, consecutively, 21 Jump Street and Three Stooges.
The ordering of these lists is a little unpredictable. The hip-hop list, for example, appears at first to be ranked by order of preference—but while Magic’s first three choices are clearly his best-loved, the rest are merely in alphabetical order. His top choices are certainly respectable: Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J, and Run DMC. Not bad.
See Magic’s full list of hip-hop favs below. Feel free to debate him.
