It seems that the recent doc The Last Dance has provided a renewed interest in the second most infamous A-list-athlete-related controversy of the 1990s: Michael Jordan’s supposed “Flu Game” of the 1997 NBA Finals, in which MJ may or may not have simply consumed a little too much pizza and/or alcohol prior to wilding out on the Utah Jazz the next night while looking…not great. This legendary night happens to be the subject of the latest track from another MJ: Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman, whose newly announced LP Boat Songs will arrive April 29 on Dear Life Records in the wake of the momentous lead single titled “Hangover Game” (I’ll bet you can guess what side Lenderman takes on the debate).
The driving lo-fi country twang of the single almost distracts the listener from the song’s real focus, which, again, is deflating popular accounts of the night like the one espoused by Jordan’s security guard in Last Dance, that MJ’s pizza dinner was poisoned by malicious Utahns. “Another less popular theory,” Lenderman explains, “is that MJ was hungover after partying and playing poker—one person says he was at Robert Redford's chalet, another says he was in Vegas—all night before the game. I liked the idea of [that] theory so I wrote a song about it. Remember that I am no detective, just a songwriter—and whatever really happened in Utah, Jordan still dropped 38 points and won the game."
Watch an appropriately ’90s-looking visual for the track below.
