I've been listening to a lot of The Mountain Goats lately, and their new album "Beat the Champ". I don't know why I've started having such an interest in this album, it never scored really high on my Mountain Goats album-meter until now.
Coincidentally, I learned that one of my coworkers in the parking garage turns out to be a huge pro-wrestling fan. We ended up watching a WWE match yesterday on his phone as we watched cars depart from the Mary Poppins show at the Ohio Theater.
I only found out the truth of wrestling as a performance about a year and a half ago. Before that, if I ever started pondering it, I would rack myself crazy wondering why/how people would/could have beat up people for a living. The idea of having so much hatred and adrenaline was foreign to me. Luckily, the mask was pulled from my face via the Radiolab episode "La Mancha Screwjob", and it all clicked. The sport was for entertainment much more than it was for raw guttural feelings of hatred.
Ever since, it's enticed me to why pro-wrestling is entertaining, how people look at it as being "good or bad", and what about it exactly makes people flock to it. I mean, it's so over the top. Yelling, fireworks, large, almost cartoonish ironclad fonts for their logos and advertising. Are we actually going on pure aesthetic here, or are we just being extremely trolled? Is the sport's ridiculousness why we should enjoy it? How meta are the producers getting? How about the fans?
Going back to the opening: The Mountain Goats' album explores a lot more than simply pro-wrestling. "Beat the Champ" uses the sport as a lens through which many other deeper issues and themes emerge. Relationships with family members and friends, to dealing with internal strife and the feelings of trying to make it in this world, the album delves into those places that I feel I am in right now.
I sat there in the garage, thinking about how much of this world is performance, and how much of it intersects with reality. Of how difficult it is sometimes to discern that line. and those times when you can, and can't. Much like my younger self, ill acquainted with what wrestling truly is; life often seems like reality where it may actually be a performance.
Then that begs the question: What about all those who are a part of the wrestling world? The producers and wrestlers themselves are obviously onto the game, but what about the fans? Do they all take part in this higher level thinking entertainment because they know it is fake? Or is it really fake? I've long been a fan of saying authenticity is bullshit, and this may be one place where that statement might have some sort of cohesive argument behind it.
Few fans seem blessedly ignorant to the fact it's mostly staged. It appears as though many people forward to the performances. Certain move sets, antics, and personalities, not to simply see people beat the crap out of each other. So can we still say that is fake if fans are still deriving positive entertainment from the performance? I would say no. Their experiences are real, and they still come back to watch the matches, and keep up with the sport. They enjoy it.
And I think I'm starting to too.
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