Kevin Durant's career path, explained in musical terms

Many Warriors fans, myself included, have a hard time understanding why Kevin Durant would leave such a sweet situation with the Warriors to forge into the greater unknown with the Brooklyn Nets. But KD has always been intentionally transparent about his feelings; at least to the point he can articulate them.

I've come up with an analogy from the music world that fits like a glove, and oddly enough, is easier to relate to.

Kevin Durant = Neil Young.

Let's look at 1969. Crosby, Stills, and Nash (alias Klay, Steph, and Draymond) had all come from different backgrounds and groups, but they figured out that together, these three stars (on their way to superstardom together), could come up with the most beautiful three part harmony ever heard. They released their first album together, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and it stunned the world with its success, peaking at #6 on Billboard and eventually going quadruple platinum (2015 ring).

Meanwhile, Neil Young has his own pretty good career going. His second album also does well, going platinum but doesn't quite reach the heights of CSN, as "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" doesn't even crack the Billboard top 30 (Thunder 2012 finals). To the shock of many, he joins CSN and expands the already-supergroup. They were looking for someone great to fill in perceived gaps (keyboard playing), and even though it meant two lead guitarists in the group with Stills and Young (MVP's Curry and Durant), they were intent on figuring out how to play together.

Neil is perfectly happy to try to blend with these beautiful voices (game) and also to be just one of the Beatles - people know who they are individually, but they are all for one and one for all. They come out of the gate with a splash by playing Woodstock together (2017 ring) and then release the band's most successful album, "Déjà Vu" (2018 ring). The album was killing it in the charts and then, in reaction to the tragedy at Kent State (Dray's blowup), Neil writes "Ohio." In an unprecedentedly unselfish move, Graham Nash pulls "Teach Your Children" off the shelves as a single (Steph flying to the Hamptons himself to attract the MVP and then sacrifice his game for him), allowing "Ohio" to get the attention and crack the top 20 (KD's stellar runs with 40 point games when Steph was out).

This entire time, the members of CSNY continued to strike independent deals and release their own solo albums (shoe deals). This was not divisive... it's just the way things work. But however much Neil wanted to be just one of the guys and no matter how much they wanted him to be, many fans and critics complained that his fourth voice never really found an equal and balanced part. To them, "Déjà Vu" didn't really seem like a true CSNY album, it seemed like CSN songs ("Carry On," "Woodstock," "Our House", "Almost Cut My Hair") alternating with obvious Neil Young songs ("Helpless"). Neil started to realize that some people were never going to accept him as just one of the guys... it'll always be "CSN plus Young" and compared (sometimes unfavorably) to the greatness that was CSN without him.

Sadly, the band's attempt to follow up "Déjà Vu" with their next album "Human Highway" only got partially finished before bickering sank the band and Neil left (2019 Finals).

So to return back to my premise that we can understand KD better via Neil Young, let's imagine the conversation at the point Neil announces he's leaving.

Neil: Guys, I gotta leave the group.

CSN: But Neil, it's going great! Look at what we've accomplished together!

Neil: Yeah, it's been great, and I got the experience of having chart-topping singles with a band, but I think I'm ready to try something else.

CSN: Why would you try something else? What kind of person doesn't want to keep having septuple platinum albums like Déjà Vu? We can do this for years, man!

Neil: Don't get me wrong, I loved it. I just think more of it is just going to be more of the same. I want to have a different experience. Hell, I might write "Comes a Time."

CSN: Yeah, and you might write "Trans." Stick with a sure thing.

Neil: Sorry, dudes. I still love you and our time together, but I gotta do me.

What happens next? Neil goes on to have great albums ("Ragged Glory," "Harvest Moon," "Rust Never Sleeps") but also disaster albums ("Hawks and Doves," "Everybody's Rockin'", "Old Ways"). So there's highs and lows, but he gets to play with other people (fronting bands featuring Booker T and the MG's as well as Pearl Jam), and he still ends up going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, both with CSN and as a solo artist. CSN goes on to more success, but never the same level of success. They pretty much all pegged the meter with "Déjà Vu."

But there is one light further down the tunnel. In 1988, Neil agrees to reunite CSNY after he promises David Crosby he'll do it if Crosby cleans up his drug problem. True to his word, he comes back to the team for a few more albums. Still not the group's highlight, but frankly, that moment I spent right in front of them at the second Bridge Benefit in Oakland is one of my most treasured live musical moments ever.

I mean, it was breathtakingly awesome. So I got that going for me. And that's good.

Explaining the solution that breaks the loop in "Russian Doll"

The new eight episode Netflix series starring the wonderful Natasha Lyonne has a lot of people buzzing.  There are interesting interpretations of what it all means (here's a great one about how it re-creates the 12 steps), but for me, the puzzling thing was the explanation of how they found the way to break out of their loop.  It went by a little quickly and didn't make complete sense, and I felt with the effort they put into the show and making her an expert game programmer, there had to be more to it than noticing they could have stopped each other's death.

I transcribed the key explanation.

Ep7 - 24:26 left

[Nadia and Alan realize that time started looping after they both
had an opportunity to intervene in the other one's death, but
didn't.  Nadia could have attended to him in the deli, Alan could
have stopped her from getting hit by the car.]

Nadia:  Easy there Mr. Rogers.  This is not good or bad, it's just a
bug.  It's like if a program keeps crashing - the crashing is just a
symptom of a bug in the code.  If the deaths are us crashing, then
that moment is the moment we need to go back and fix. 

Alan:  But if we were supposed to help each other and we didn't, how
is that not a moral issue?

Nadia:  What do time and morality have in common?  Relativity -
they're both relative to your experience.  [pause while he looks
confused].  I need a visual aid.  

So our universe has three spacial dimensions so it's hard for us to
picture a four-dimensional world, but you know computers do it all
the time.  So lucky for you, I have the capacity to think like a
computer.  What's this?

Alan:  It's a rotten orange.

Nadia:  In a two-dimensional world it's a circle.  In a
three-dimensional world, it's a sphere.  But in a four-dimensional
world (cuts it in half)...

Alan:  It's still ripe!

Nadia:  Time is relative to your experience... we've been
experiencing time differently in these loops.  But this; this tells
us that somewhere time - linear time as we used to understand it,
still exists.

Alan:  So the moment in the deli when we first interacted...

Nadia:  Still exists.

Alan:  So we should go back to the deli.

Nadia:  To that same moment, and we re-write that first interaction.
Just like you'd fix a flaw in the code, then we run a unit test. 

Alan:  Is that a term that people should know, or...?

Nadia:  Basically we run a little program and we see if the bug is
triggered.

Alan:  And how do we know if it's triggered?

Nadia:  We die.  Then we go right back to the deli and we try it
again.

Alan:  You're pretty smart!

Nadia:  Thank you for finally noticing.

---- 

Let's break it down. 

1) "Linear time still exists." 

OK, that's established sci-fi... we don't know that you can't jump into another point in history. Or as Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, Ch. V said: "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once."  

2) "We experience time relative to ourselves." 

Yes, I agree. My example is more pedestrian but universal. When you're engrossed in something, time flies by. When athletes are at their best, they feel like time slows down. This would lead me to expect that her point would explain weird speeds in time, but that doesn't happen. But what does happen is that she sees a younger version of herself and that is a big clue that their mutual existence could be happening at the same "time." Also, I think bending time goes a good way to explaining why they can relive the same night again and again but still remember what happened the last time. Living that time still happened in their consciousnesses. They never say that, but I'll buy it. 

 3) "If we go back to the point where the bug gets introduced, we can rewrite the program of the universe by behaving differently." 

OK, a computer bug with an infinite loop keeps doing the same thing over and over and despite Nadia's bug fix at work on the fly, you have to shut it all down and start over to change anything. But showing it get fixed in live action is nice theatre, and it's a believable add to say that people with apparently free will (and can trigger alternate responses in others) can break out of the loop when they have free will to behave differently. Frankly, I like that a little better than the Mr. Anderson anti-viruses in "the Matrix" chasing down the sentient programs that want to break out. And I like it a lot better than the computer in "War Games" somehow learning that if you can't win at tic-tac-toe then you can't win at nuclear war, so it ought to just go override the nuclear programs. 

The thing that takes some pondering is "What is the logical place to restart a loop in meatspace?" It's entirely true that the point of the logical flaw isn't necessarily right where you go back to, so it's OK to go back further than that. But why loop back to early in the evening when they're both looking at their mirrors? I don't know... maybe it's the infinite path of light that goes back and forth between a person and a mirror. The universe loops back to another point with loops. Even better; maybe the universe goes back to the last point they were both in a loop at the same time.

4) "We run a unit test. See if we still die." 

A unit test is when you are trying to test a single program by seeing if what you put in generates what you expect out. What they do is more like a system or integration test... what happens when you put this rewritten code back into the universe? Actually, it's more like throwing changes right into production because when they get out of the loop, regular life goes on. But I guess the writers thought "We run a unit test" sounded geekier than "We try our fix in production." But it does feel like testing to break, try again, break, try again with no real consequence except time... and their nights are getting shorter, so that's cool. They probably also thought that fixing the running man in real time was a closer analogy for the ending.

5) The orange is rotten outside but ripe inside. 

I got nothing for that. It just seems to be a nice visual symbol that the world is wacked out and getting wackier. I get that it's supposed to illustrate an epiphany about four dimensions and since time is the 4th you shouldn't get too freaked out to know it's malleable, but I can't say why the oranges just rot on the outside in the later loops.

Just some thoughts I had. Would love to hear alternate ideas in the comments!