Earlier this week, Linsanity reached the White House when President Obama claimed, in an interview with ESPN’s Bill Simmons, that he has followed Jeremy Lin’s career for years—his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, captained the Harvard varsity basketball team, and championed Lin long before he arrived in New York. During the interview, Obama wondered how coaches missed Lin’s talent in practice; Kobe Bryant has raised the same issue, saying that if he was a team owner, he would fire whoever failed to notice Lin.
Lin may be an instant international icon as an Asian-American athlete, but he has also become the poster boy for overlooked ability; how many people riding benches on other teams, or laboring in offices for that matter, have used Lin’s emergence as motivation, certain that if they keep plugging away they’ll be discovered?
But is Lin the only example of this phenomenon, or are there analogues in other walks of life? Most specifically, are there Jeremy Lins in the history of rock and roll? Superficially, it makes sense to point to someone like George Harrison, who didn’t really emerge as a songwriting star until after the dissolution of the Beatles. Of course, this is reductive—Harrison wrote classics like “Taxman” and “Within You Without You” during his tenure as a Beatle, and his coming-out party as a solo artist, “All Things Must Pass,” was by far his best work.
Or how about Phil Collins, who drummed for Genesis and provided backup vocals until Peter Gabriel’s departure let him move into the spotlight, first as the leader of the band and then as a solo star? (Even here, it’s not quite Lin-like—Collins stayed with the same band and stepped up due to a change of personnel: it’s more like Tom Brady taking over for Drew Bledsoe than Jeremy Lin arriving from what seemed like nowhere.) I posed this question on Twitter, and there were other suggestions, too: Bootsy Collins, who started in James Brown’s band before his stardom with the P-Funk empire and as a solo artist (though Collins was recognized as a huge instrumental talent while still in his teens; that’s why Brown hired him); Jeff Tweedy, who wasn’t necessarily tapped for stardom when Uncle Tupelo dissolved.
Who are your suggestions? Who is the Jeremy Lin of rock and roll? Discuss among yourselves, or tweet, or just think. There are many options in today’s media landscape.
Photograph by Boris Roessler/dpa/Corbis.
