Walk into almost any stadium or arena in America and something is playing. Not sometimes — always. Between the hype tracks, the public address announcements, and the synthetic energy piped through the speakers, there is no unfilled second of air, according to a new column in American Thinker by Greg Maresca. The result, he argues, is less game atmosphere and more of what he calls an “auditory ransom note.”
Maresca’s target is not any single sport. It’s the playlist itself — a set of roughly a dozen songs that gets triggered by every timeout, every injury stoppage, even a player tying his shoe. The music, in his telling, hammers away “loud, relentless, and aggressively generic.”
Even Happy Valley Isn’t Spared
For a Penn State audience, Maresca’s complaint lands close to home. Beaver Stadium boasts the Blue Band, which he describes as the most synchronized source of campus pride around — fight songs, fanfares, halftime epics, postgame performances. And yet, he writes, the stadium sound crew still feels the need to carpet-bomb every third down with Sheck Wes’s “Let’s make some noise,” as if 100,000 people needed a reminder to get loud.
That is the article’s central tension: crowds are capable of generating drama on their own, but silence is treated as an existential threat. If the speakers go quiet for even a few seconds, Maresca jokes, people might drift off to check their phones or start wondering why a bottle of water costs about as much as a Netflix subscription.
He rattles off the familiar categories fans know by heart — the pump-up riff, the obligatory classic-rock stomp, the EDM drop that sounds, in his words, like a dishwasher malfunctioning. Some of these tracks are so banal, he writes, that they rival the Nittany Lions’ own very predictable offensive playbook from last season.
The Song That Ate the Stadium
The column spends most of its energy on one track in particular. “Sweet Caroline,” Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit, began its stadium life as a quirky, spontaneous tribute during a Red Sox game at Fenway Park in 1997. Maresca notes that the rest of baseball, the NFL, college football, English soccer, and even Australian rugby eventually jumped on the bandwagon.
That proliferation is precisely the problem. When every venue leans on the same soundtrack, Maresca argues, it stops feeling like tradition and starts feeling like a predictable cliché — “musical wallpaper,” as he puts it. He calls it a musical Esperanto: loved by some, tolerated by the rest. Ask most fans why they sing it, he adds, and they have no clue.
The song’s melodic simplicity, once a strength, now reads to him as a weakness. The chorus — “So good, so good, so good” — gets shouted so often that it has become a parody of itself, a karaoke chant devoid of context, belted out by people in nacho-stained jerseys. It has, he writes, become the musical equivalent of stale popcorn.
As for the lyric “touching me, touching you,” Maresca calls it formulaic, forced, and exhausting — a line that has aged, in his memorable phrasing, “as well as unrefrigerated coleslaw.” He also raises a question specific to Penn State, writing that given the university’s recent history, it’s a mystery why this particular track hasn’t been quietly escorted off the premises.
Maresca isn’t alone in his irritation. He cites Matt Reigle of OutKick, who called the song “a lump of sonic excrement” and lamented its “boring, lazy melody.” He points to Bob Latham of SportsTravel, who coined the phrase “Sweet Caroline, No” and argued that the song’s ubiquity has stifled musical innovation in sports. Others, Maresca notes, have dismissed it as overplayed, saccharine, and vaguely creepy.
Turn It Down, Let the Crowd Speak
The closing argument is straightforward. In a world where sports are supposed to be about authenticity, local pride, and unique fan experiences, Maresca writes, “Sweet Caroline” is a relic and long overdue for retirement. His prescription: turn down the speakers and let the crowd find its own voice through the natural rhythm of the game.
For Penn State specifically, he proposes a new chant — a play on the university’s famous “We Are” call. The fitting one, he writes, is: “We are … over it.”
The column, published September 26, 2026, closes with the outlet’s standard appeal for reader donations, framing its cultural commentary within a broader defense of speaking one’s mind. That housekeeping aside, the substance of Maresca’s argument is narrower than a general attack on stadium music: it’s a case that the soundtrack has stopped serving the crowd and started substituting for it. Whether fans agree likely depends on how they feel when the opening notes hit and 100,000 people reach for the chorus — again.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/exiling-sweet-caroline/