Even though their team had won, Knicks fans were anxious. It was May 7, the morning after the NBA team’s Game Two semifinals win against the 76ers earlier this month. But despite the victory, fans were terrified: OG Anunoby, arguably their best player in the playoffs, had left the game early with a hamstring injury.
Doug Berns, a.k.a. Duglust, understood the assignment. Excitement mixed with a heavy dose of anxiety is the natural emotional resting state of his team’s fanbase, so Berns, who’s known for his Knicks-themed cover-song recaps, settled on a remake of “What is Love,” the Nineties dance hit by Haddaway, with its relevant refrain: “Baby don’t hurt me.” He whipped up a chorus that spoke to the moment — ”Where’s OG?/Hammy don’t hurt him, no more.” The verses were his typical reportorial mix of injury report, box score, and larger storylines: “Brunson tough/Mitch not there/No Embiid/18 Mikal.”
The end result was classic Duglust: a Knicks-themed cover that both accurately recapped the previous night’s game and precisely captured the precarious, ever-changing emotional state of the team’s fanbase. The recording culminated with Berns turning the song’s wordless falsetto refrain (whoa-whoa-whoa-oh-oh) into a fan’s plea (“Can we get an update on OG?”).
“I would have hated to use [‘What Is Love’] in a loss,” says Berns, who recorded the basic instrumental track the previous summer and had been saving it for the right moment ever since. “But that injury element was the perfect feeling of, ‘Yeah, we won, but we’re all pretty concerned.’”
Over the past two seasons, Berns has become well known for his Knicks-themed covers, which come out after every single game since he started early last season. (He’s currently at roughly 200 songs.) The covers have become a cornerstone of contemporary online Knicks fandom, resulting in Berns meeting Spike Lee, collaborating with Ben Stiller, earning the attention of Knicks stars like Jalen Brunson and Mitchell Robinson, and earning praise from Just Blaze, the producer of Freeway’s “What We Do,” for his reproduction of the song’s beat for a recent cover. His Knicks parody music has even resulted in Berns filming a music video on the court at Madison Square Garden for “The Motto,” the song he wrote in collaboration with the brand New York or Nowhere.
“Doug is just so funny,” Knicks superfan Ben Stiller tells Rolling Stone. “He captures the nuances of every game…He always finds the hook of what happened that is funny, and the way he picks out details and turns them into lyrics is so smart. He also clearly knows ball and is a dedicated, true Knicks fan. Anybody who does what he does has to be.”
In a sport with a longstanding ties to music — major NBA figures from to Phil Jackson to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to LeBron James have compared the sport’s rhythm to music, and Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and Damian Lillard have all stepped from the court into the recording booth — Berns has become the ultimate synthesizer of the two worlds for his home team, causing The Athletic to recently dub him the “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic of New York Knicks Fandom.”
“I just want to respect these amazing songs that I choose,” he says of his covers, which he recreates, produces, and records all by himself by painstakingly tracking each and every instrument. The songs range from Eminem’s “Stan” to Prince’s “1999” to “The Girl from Ipanema.” He often records the instrumentals months in advance, but he writes lyrics the night of, or morning after, a game, intent on leaving the song’s precise meter and rhyme scheme intact. In Duglust’s universe, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” becomes “Closeouts, guys,” and the chorus of “Your Love” by the Outfield becomes a meditation on one of the Knicks’ stars’ frustrating tendency to commit careless fouls: “KAT, don’t hook your arm that way, my guy.”
A born and raised New Yorker, Berns, 38, has been hustling for years as a working live musician, playing bass for a variety of local bands. Since college, he’s been a member of the jam-funk band Emefe (their recent single is called “One City”), and he’s also carved out somewhat of a niche in New York’s comedy-music space, playing bass for both H. Jon Benjamin’s ongoing Jazz Daredevil bit as well as occasionally gigging with Hank Azaria’s Bruce Springsteen cover band.
When Berns records a track, he files it away as either a win song, a loss song, or a tune (like “What Is Love”) that could work for either. Some are obvious: When he cut Korn’s “Freak on a Leash,” he saved it “for a big nasty ‘L’ that really pissed me off.” He tries, whenever possible, to cover music from the city the Knicks’ opposing team is from, but some material is much harder to recreate than others. Berns starts cracking up when recalling the painstaking work of trying to recreate the intricate vocal harmonies of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” after a regular-season loss against Cleveland.
“Whenever I laugh,” he says during a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, “it’s because I’m thinking back to how funny this whole concept is: How absurd it is to use this very serious song about losing friends because we lost a game to the Cavs.”
When coming up with lyrics, Berns draws inspiration from, among others, the Knicks’ legendarily loquacious broadcaster Walt “Clyde” Frazier, whose rhyme schemes and verbose way of explaining basketball have greatly shaped the way Berns writes about the sport. As he’s progressed as a lyricist in his second season of recaps, Berns has tried to move away from strict stat recitation towards capturing the larger narrative or emotional arc. His recap covers either cement the celebratory nature of a win (“The schedule’s weak/I think we can go on a run,” he sang to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” after beating the Nets this season) or provide a collective catharsis after a devastating loss (see his rage-fueled cover of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” featuring Stiller, after last year’s postseason loss to the Pacers).
“It’s that damn serious for all of us,” says Berns. “It’s not just, ‘The game’s on.’ For the fans tuned into my recaps, they went through the same emotional rollercoaster I did.” When he records, he says, he’s asking himself: “What did it feel like to watch the game?”
For Berns, like any songwriter dealing with messy emotions, that means moving past the rawness of initial reactions to a given game. Much as a singer who recently went through a breakup might need to write their way through some awful songs before arriving at something more nuanced, Berns, who describes himself as a “degenerate, twisted, absolute diehard” level Knicks fan, knows he needs to move beyond what it first feels like after a brutal loss.
“The initial fan reaction is just bile when stuff goes wrong,” he says, “and you have to learn how to temper that.”
Berns came up with his Knicks recap idea a few years ago after starting to burn out on the toll that gigging three nights a week around the city was taking on his personal life. He remembers a post-gig conversation about intellectual property that helped spark the idea: “I need a piece of my own,” he remembers thinking. “It’s funny to be a parody artist saying that, but I wanted to find a way to make a creative stamp of people knowing I’m a skilled musician, that I’m unafraid to put myself out there in the world. How am I going to do that? It ended up being this Knicks recap process. But then, all of a sudden, people start to see what I’m able to do.”
Berns is still working through the same financial issues facing any online creator, or musician, carving out a name for themself online. Though his Knicks recaps have led to partnerships and opportunities (including scoring a milk commercial), he says the videos themselves, which take hours to produce, record, and film, don’t bring in any money. Berns has ideas for how to continue to grow his audience and build off his recap videos, including writing more original basketball-themed music.
“I love the Knicks, I want to give the fans this experience, and I also want people to come along with me as an artist and see where my stuff goes,” he says. And as his favorite team continues its postseason run, Berns pledges to continue to channel the fanbase’s collective emotional experience, both joy and anxiety, often both at the same time, just like he did on “What Is Love.” “I’m the same Knicks fan I’ve always been, very emotional,” he says. “I try to be optimistic, but it’s hard sometimes.”
Stiller sums up Berns’ gift succinctly. “He gives Knicks fans a way to therapize after a tough loss or celebrate a great win,” says the actor, writer, and director. “He really brings the community together.”
