Brandon Roy is pretty late to the “appear in a rap video” trend. If pasty white Mark Cuban is doing one before you, you are tardy.
But Roy -- along with Atlanta’s Jamal Crawford -- is in the new video for Cali & Cavalli’s “What They Want,” which first showed up over at BlazersEdge. The music and video itself is pretty run of the mill -- they brag about making tons of money and how badass they are to a pretty simplistic rhythm.
Oh, and a guy rolls one up. Some 4:20. The Ganja. The mota. That’s marijuana for those of you over 40 reading this.
So in one scene you have Roy mugs for the camera, a few scenes later someone is rolling one up. I’m not going to run the video because of the NSFW lyrics (and this is still a national news organization with a book of standards and regulations, plus I really like my job).
Blazers edge caught up with Roy who apologized profusely.
“The first thing when I seen it, I was really disappointed with myself. I’m usually a guy who’s very conscious of what’s going on around him...
“It’s something I shouldn’t have been involved in. I don’t smoke marijuana. I don’t think kids should do it. I’m against those things. I just feel really bad that that’s something that’s associated with my name and my family. And that’s not what we’re about.
“I think the biggest thing is I don’t want to shine a lot of light on the video because it’s something that I don’t want kids watching and saying, ‘Hey, Brandon Roy was in there.’
“It’s a situation where I should have been more responsible. Usually I am. I don’t want to sound naive. Like, ‘Hey, I didn’t know nothing about what was going on.’ I did know the guys were shooting the video but I wasn’t participating in what they were talking about. I didn’t even know what the topic of their video was.
“They’re old friends. For me, I was trying to be nice but at the same time I don’t want to be a part of something like that.”
It’s not the association of marijuana and Roy that really is the issue, Oregon in general and Portland in particular are about as laissez faire on the topic as it comes.
But after the “Jail Blazers” era, people up there are pretty sensitive to their hoop stars being tied to drug use. No matter how tenuous the ties. But the fans there should not be getting all over Roy -- he’s one of the good guys. He owned up to it. He apologized. This is not a Lance Stephenson-level issue. Time to be laissez faire and move on to real issues again.