For the Team

“After the Chargers started to win some football games,” says Patrick Bernard of SD reggae act High Tide, “it was time to bring out our playoff song, ‘Chargers on a Roll.’ ” On January 3, band members Chris Murray and Forest were cruising the parking lot at Qualcomm Stadium passing out free CDs with the song.

Sample lyric: “We got Chris Chambers on the left/ Vincent Jackson on the right/ Let the Rivers flow or just hit Gatesy all night.”

Around that time, local rapper Young Mass posted his own Charger-fan football song “Never a Touchdown” on MySpace:

“Say bitch!/ you might get a field goal out of this/ but never a touchdown/ never a touchdown.”

“We sent the single to Chargers defensive co-captains Shawne Merriman and Jamal Williams,” says Mass collaborator 40ozChris. “We thought it would be a great song to pump up the defense before games or at halftime, but we never heard back. We also sent it to local sports-talk radio station 1090, to the morning-show team of Scott Kaplan and Billy Ray Smith, thinking they could use the track when they interviewed Charger players. No response there either.

“We tried cutting a radio-edit version,” says 40ozChris, “with some creative effects inserted in place of the explicit content — more interesting than bleeping-out or silencing. But, I guess with lines about girls putting their ‘backfield in motion,’ I’m thinking even the radio-edit was too sexed-up for the Chargers or the radio station. But we had to put it out there. For the team!”