Edin Dzeko x Little Brother - Too Crowded

It’s great when you’re great.

You get recognition and success, accolades follow behind every step you take. It’s slightly less great when there’s other great people you have to compete with because their greatness can diminish yours.

There’s an era in hip-hop, and in football - where the scene was littered with greats. Greats at the peak of their powers, performing at such a high level with such consistency that it sometimes feels as though that was a different world to the one we now occupy.

For hip-hop, it was the golden age: That mid 1990s to mid 2000s period, where every year there seemed to be a number of classic albums which would impose themselves on our ears. The likes of Jay Z, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Common, Outkast, Nas, The Wu-Tang Clan, a young and exuberant Kanye West… So on and so forth. It was a period which was rich with so much talent, so much delightfully good music that if you were a newcomer trying to make a name for yourself at that point, there was never a harder time to do so.

Years later football boasted a similar golden age, in the centre-forward position. Let’s say it started in around 2008, got really going in the early 2010s and extinguished by the turn of the decade. In that 10 year stretch, you’ve got some of the best strikers to ever play the game. Luis Suarez, Sergio Aguero, Karim Benzema, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Robert Lewandowski, Fernando Torres, Didier Drogba, Robin Van Persie, Radamel Falcao… You get the picture. And there’s at least 10 names on this list which could’ve been name but for the sake of time and tediousness.

Both eras in music and football respectively have become immortalised by fans. They were the pinnacle of greatness, the zenith of talent. Nothing will ever compare.

But there’s not enough space at the top for everyone. And hip-hop trio ‘Little Brother’ and the formidable Edin Dzeko are two examples of people who found themselves in a time where, despite how obviously talented they were - they’re light was drowned out by others.

Little Brother was a group consisting of rappers ‘Phonte’ and ‘Big Pooh’ and legendary producer 9th Wonder. The trio agglomerated in North Carolina in 1998 - a region with very little to write home about in regards to its imprint on the hip-hop world.

In 2003, they released their first album titled ‘The Listening’. And as far as hip-hop albums go, it was a debut to be proud of. Laced with soulful and hard-hitting production from 9th wonder and obvious chemistry and lyrical skill from both Big Pooh and Phonte. But the album never broke through. It never escaped the hip-hop underground despite capturing the attention of the mogul Jay Z who recruited 9th wonder for a track on his album ‘Black’.

Two years later - seemingly unperturbed by the lack of commercial success their debut album achieved, the trio were back. This time it was with the album ‘The Minstrel Show’ and it blew their first project out the water. The beats were better, the vision and ideas behind the messages were more fleshed out, the rapping and synchronisation more incredible. But once again - though it received high critical acclaim, it couldn’t dent the official charts.

In a mainstream sense, hip-hop had moved on from acts like Little Brother. The genre was less about rapping ability, being a beacon to air out social injustices and more about making pop songs but dressing them up as rap. The idea of staying true to yourself in your music was thrown out for commercialisation and appealing to the masses - and Little Brother found themselves stranded, caught up in that transition.

Maybe it’s slightly unfair to compare Edin Dzeko to Little Brother. Because Dzeko has the titles and accolades that Little Brother never received. He’s won 9 major trophies in his career, scored nearly 400 goals and is his nation’s all time topscorer by a country mile… but has he ever got the flowers he’s been due?

Because Dzeko’s prime coincided with so many others’ primes, his stock was often cast away as an afterthought. He was never the most glamorous, didn’t pack the most aura or have the most enigmatic persona. He wasn’t unbelievable on the eye or doing crazy things on the pitch to make fans stand up - he just scored goals. Some great ones mind you, but most of them were just plain old goals.

And during that 2010s period he was never the striker at either of the biggest clubs he played for. Man City had Aguero, Tevez and Balotelli. Inter had Lukaku. Dzeko was always there, dependable as they come - but he never captured the average fan’s gaze because there wasn’t much on the surface to really gape at. But below the surface..

Dzeko’s credentials aren’t anything to turn your nose at though. It was him who started Man City’s miraculous comeback on the final day of the 2011/12 season against QPR. It was him in 2014 who grabbed 14 goal contributions in 10 games of World Cup qualifying to drag Bosnia & Herzegovina to their first ever tournament appearance. It was Dzeko who scored 30 goals and got himself another 10 assists in the 2008/09 season and spearheaded one of the most shocking footballing upsets of the 21st century as Wolfsburg pipped Bayern to the Bundesliga.

Dzeko’s numbers and his career speak for themselves. But they don’t speak loudly enough to keep up with his competitors who were all scoring goals for fun but also had that superstar-ness to them which the Bosnian never really had - through no fault of his own that is.

The same way that if you put pick Little Brother up and drop them 5 years in the past, there’s no doubt they would’ve become a household name in hip-hop - if Dzeko was put in a time machine and came out 5 or 10 years after he made his debut in 2005, he wouldn’t be ‘underrated’, he’d be a full-fledged legend of the game full stop. Because now if you look at the strikers in the world today, how many of them can you say were definitively better than Edin Dzeko was at his best?

But in some ways, both Little Brother and Edin Dzeko got the last laugh. As their rivals careers’ came and went, they stayed.

Little Brother, who are now a duo as 9th Wonder left in 2007 - last released an album in 2019. That means they’ve been together (through a lot of breakups and reunions) for a time period spanning three decades. That’s almost unprecedented in the hip-hop world. And it’s not as though the music they last made is outdated, the old rapper trope who’s still living in the 90s and can’t get with the times. Their newer music is still better than a lot of what others are putting down.

Edin Dzeko, as mentioned earlier - debuted in 2005. He’s still playing football in a top 5 league. Now at Schalke, after helping them win promotion after scoring 11 goals in 18 games - the 40 year old is entering his 24th season of professional football. And it’s not in a throwaway, retirement home league that most players run two after their talent has faded. He’s still at the top of the top.

Little Brother and Edin Dzekop’s lights may not have shined too bright when they were at their best due to the fierce world of battle they found themselves in, but they’ve been shining for longer than almost anyone else’s. And that counts for a lot.