After a late night I did a rare
thing and slept in. Part of me feels like I wasted the morning, but most of me
just feels like I needed the rest.
Disc 1032 is…Beat the Champ
Artist: The
Mountain Goats
Year of Release: 2015
What’s up with the Cover? Wrestling in all its ridiculous
over-the-top cartoon glory!
How I Came To Know It: This album was #89 on a list
pulled together by Paste Magazine of “Top 100 Indie folk albums of all time.” I went through that list pretty meticulously, and “Beat the Champ” was one
of my favourites. It also introduced me to the Mountain Goats.
How It Stacks Up: I ended up liking the Mountain Goats a whole
lot. I now have six of their albums, with plans to buy at least two more. Of
the six I already have, “Beat the Champ” comes in second or third, depending on
how I’m feeling about “Tallahassee” at that moment.
Ratings: 4 stars
The
Mountain Goats is pretty much John Darnielle, and John Darnielle is a mad,
musical genius. “Beat the Champ” is him at his most mad and inspired both
thematically and musically.
Like a
lot of Darnielle records, “Beat the Champ” is a concept album, in this case built
around professional wrestling. Darnielle returns to his boyhood, and the joy he
would take going to see the local circuit wrestlers in California. On the
surface it doesn’t seem to be a topic that would hold your attention. However, Darnielle
is so good at intertwining the stories and imagery of wrestling into deeper
explorations of his own psyche it works.
A lot of
early Mountain Goats has sparse production, usually just a single organ or
guitar, but on “Beat the Champ” Darnielle brings in horns, sounding flourishes
to make the whole ridiculous pageant of wrestling come to life. It then contrasts
all that excitement with quiet confessional songs that turn the same imagery
inward where they become metaphors for our internal struggle between our public
face, and our private doubts.
My
favourite song is “Foreign Object”
which is about exactly that; an illegal object that the wrestling villain (or ‘heel’)
would use to even the odds against the hero. The triumphant horn section is
juxtaposed against the villainy of the cheater.
While the
wrestling is fake and staged, Darnielle’s investigation of their personalities,
and their personal triumphs and difficulties, is genuine. “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” tells the
story of the hero, saving the day for the good wrestlers as he comes off the top
rope, dispensing justice.
At the
other end (of both his career and the album), “The Ballad of Bull Ramos” catches us up with a wrestler long after
his career has ended, now just another truck driver. An old man, he is mostly
forgotten but still has flashes of his former greatness, such as when his
doctor recognizes him. It is a fleeting glory, but Darnielle does a good job of
showing that it still matters. The song is a love letter to the joy these men
once gave him, but at a deeper level it’s an examination on aging gracefully.
“Heel Turn 2” strips things down to an insistent
guitar strum, filled with the anguish and frustration of a life unraveling. The
plaintive chorus of “I don’t want to die
in here” repeats over and over, as the singer desperately tries to hold
onto the hero birthed inside of him years earlier while sitting ringside watching
Chavo Guerrero. The song ends with a two minute piano instrumental that could
have ended up self-indulgent, but instead is exactly what you need after all
the pent up emotion that comes before it.
The
album moves around musically, sometimes pulling from R&B, sometimes from
folk music and on “Fire Editorial”
even taking a trip into jazz. Even with all these styles, the album never feels
cobbled together, but instead has a natural flow and solid pacing.
The
wrestling themes fade and blur again and again into questions of identity, and
what it means to be a good person. On “Unmasked!”
Darnielle sings like he’s whispering you a secret:
“Crowd’s half gone, just a few
hangers-on
Come to see me finally tear
through the stitching at last
And you don’t care, you almost
look relieve down there
Like your free, like you can
breathe now
Like you’ve sawn off your cast
Just one more sleeper to see
through”
“And by way of honoring
The things we once both held dear
I will reveal you.”
It isn’t
just a song about a wrestler taking his mask off later that evening after the
show. It is a song about how we all wear our masks, and take our turns trying
to be the hero, while sometimes secretly feeling like the heel.
As a kid
I watched wrestling, but long ago gave it up as contrived and silly.
It had been so long I had totally forgotten how much joy I used to get out of
all that silliness. “Beat the Champ” not only brought those old feelings back the
surface, it made me see the wrestlers as people, and not just characters for my
amusement. Then the album went deeper and took those lives as a foil for
examining how we should live; coming off the top rope like Chavo Guerrero, and
aging with grace and dignity like Bull Ramos.
Best tracks: The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,
Foreign Object, Heel Turn 2, Unmasked!, The Ballad of Bull Ramos
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