Picture Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Each day Beast/Getty
When Mina Kimes appeared on ESPN’s Across the Horn throughout the pandemic—as she combined it up with a grizzled cadre of sportswriters throughout the nation from a makeshift house studio—you would catch an Easter egg perched above her proper shoulder. Gleaming beneath the manufacturing lights was a portray of Pavement’s third (and most troublesome) document, Wowee Zowee.
It is a deep reduce, even amongst indie rock snobs. Essentially the most historically acclaimed Pavement albums are its first two: Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Wowee Zowee, alternatively, is finest identified for its engorged runtime and reedy experimentalism, which obliterated the band's ascending MTV traction. In different phrases, it’s the kind of document you consecrate once you’ve already spent a lot of your life fascinated about Pavement.
ESPN is airing its first Tremendous Bowl in 2026; its workers consists of retired quarterbacks, game-tape bingers, and reflexive free-agency newsbreakers. However as Kimes emerges as an unlikely star of the jock universe, she’s nonetheless very a lot one in every of us: an indie child perpetually keen to place her style on show.
“I needed to scramble to place collectively a presentable TV backdrop,” says Kimes, reflecting on what it was prefer to shift her ESPN tv duties to her house on the peak of COVID, in an interview with The Each day Beast. “I stacked a bunch of books and crops on high of my dresser, after which put my Wowee Zowee portray—a present—on high of it, as a result of I used to be too lazy to correctly dangle something up.” And thus, a now-iconic setup was born. “Since then, I’ve modified my books a number of occasions, however I’ll at all times go away the Pavement portray in place, as a result of I like the way it seems to be, and I like the thought of a random Pavement fan sitting down for a beer at an airport someplace in America, squinting up at a TV, and asking, ‘Is that Wowee Zowee on ESPN?’”
Kimes, 36, joined ESPN in 2014, after spending a 12 months reporting on building moguls and division retailer CEOs at Bloomberg Businessweek. She was deployed as a options author for the web site and journal at the start of her tenure, spending afternoons with ponderous Soccer Males like Aaron Rodgers and Baker Mayfield, choosing their brains and ruminating on what she discovered.
Mina Kimes throughout “NFL Stay” on ESPN.
ESPN through YouTube
However over the previous few years, Kimes has slowly invaded ESPN’s tv product. She was a featured participant on the daytime speak present Extremely Questionable with longtime sports-media fixture Dan Le Batard. However within the ramp as much as the 2020 NFL season, in June, Kimes was given an analyst position on NFL Stay. Kimes’ soccer information is immense and indomitable, however her presence stands in stark distinction to everybody else on the present. Here's a Korean-American girl with an encyclopedic information of ’90s indie rock breaking down cornerback schemes with Keyshawn Johnson. That, my mates, is illustration.
Kimes can level to the precise second she was launched to a world of music past FM radio. It was the flip of the millennium, the summer season earlier than her freshman 12 months of highschool, and she or he was loitering round a Zia Data retailer in Phoenix. “Somebody who labored there placed on Fugazi’s Repeater. I had by no means listened to hardcore earlier than then, and it rattled my bones a lot that I purchased the album on the spot,” she says. “I nonetheless keep in mind listening to it whereas driving house. I had a CD participant beneath my driver’s seat, with a cable connecting it to the tape deck of my Caravan. The peak of luxurious!”
Like so many different younger folks fortunate sufficient to style the choice canon hiding in plain sight, Kimes was entranced. She saved digging by means of the again catalog, and shortly sufficient, she was binging on Minor Menace and Black Flag—two establishments of the American underground that lived and thrived for years earlier than Kimes was born. In some ways, she's an early case examine of the web’s capability to mint a legion of teenaged indie-rock aficionados: girls and boys who immediately wielded the heretical expertise to indoctrinate themselves with years of music historical past with out paying a cent.
"This was the summer season of Napster," explains Kimes. "which turbo-charged my journey of musical discovery for apparent causes. I went backwards in time, bouncing from post-punk to bands like The Remedy and Siouxsie and the Banshees. By the tip of my highschool profession, I used to be principally listening to simpler hangs—Constructed to Spill, Dinosaur Jr., Guided by Voices. It’s humorous to look again and understand I began with probably the most intense stuff."
To be clear, when Mina Kimes is on TV, she is nearly at all times speaking about soccer. Sadly, ESPN has but to dedicate a portion of their programming schedule to her document evaluations, although she does take time to inform me that Low’s Drums and Weapons is one in every of her favourite albums of the final 15 years. As an alternative, Kimes' indie-rock takes are teased out on Twitter, with a wink and a nod, identical to her furtive Wowee Zowee tribute. I've seen Kimes rank her favourite Pixies songs, recall a morning ritual involving Impartial Milk Resort, and exalt a stunning Superchunk cowl of a Magnetic Fields track. Hell, Kimes is even married to Nick Sylvester, a document producer who, in a previous life, penned among the most legendarily snarky Pitchfork evaluations of all time. (His pan of Jet’s Get Born is a private favourite.)
To be in love with impartial music is to always be seeking those that can converse the identical language. Kimes understands that, and it’s clearly understanding fantastically for her. One of many individuals who picked up her breadcrumbs was Bob Nastanovich, one of many principal members of Pavement. He reached out—actually befuddled to see his band’s most divisive work on show between Kirk Cousins takes—and Kimes now calls him a pal. "By no means let anybody inform you which you can’t manifest friendships along with your indie rock heroes by changing into an NFL analyst," she says.
The rise of indie rock fan-turned-ESPN star Mina Kimes ought to educate us, as soon as and for all, that sports activities fandom and indie-rock fandom are remarkably related creatures. Each are pockmarked with moments of each euphoria and disappointment, and each require you to debase your self within the title of group. Irrespective of which lane you select, when you're in, you will be there for all times. There aren't any jocks and nerds sniping at one another from throughout the lunchroom, there is just Ben Gibbard tossing out the primary pitch at a Mariners recreation.
"Indie rock nerds are in all probability like sports activities nerds in each good methods — ardour! enjoyable! — and the dangerous ones — gatekeeping," says Kimes. Like Dinosaur Jr. stated, we really feel the ache for everybody.