SONG OF THE DAY: John Bena

Every wack fuckin’ rapper on Earth now has a song named after some shitty fuckin’ wrestler. Used to be you could make a list of wrestling references in hip hop and be excited, but fuck man, it’s like a PWI 500 of shitty ass songs that are just trash verses but then somebody samples one line of Curt Henning from youtube so they call it Mr. Perfect and think that’s clever. Everybody’s so fuckin’ tired creatively. Y’all fuckin’ suck. Try harder with your wack asses.

Nonetheless I enjoy Westside Gunn, even though he’s beat this wrestling reference horse to fuckin’ death. Wish ECW was actually still around, and actually not a sub-entity of WWE, so that like Westside Gunn could show up with the Gangstas to battle whatever little flip-floppy white asshole tag team y’all pretend are super amazing in a double barbed wire cage match in the ECW Arena. If rap is too corny and derivative, wrestling is too fake woke, ignoring the fact that pro wrestling’s bread and butter demographic is proudly and fiercely ignorant folk, not the woke. Way more people sitting in a Trump rally than a hipster coffee shop next to the comic book store. Internet communities have falsely made us think we don’t have to exist in the regular world, which is still a giant piece of shit. You can’t walk through a day IRL without stepping in the shit. Online makes you think a better world could exist. You overlook the fact humans are fucking stupid.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wrestlemania 20

The wrestling storylines today are mostly just the WWE storylines, and that storyline’s largest manufactured arc is that somehow the Royal Rumble leads up to Wrestlemania season. This of course is all trash storylines compared to back when wrestling was a myriad of regional promotions ran like degenerate improv theater, where the writers were basically outliners and the ridiculous characters who fell through the cracks into the wrestling business fleshed out the details, often times outlandishly. What I’m saying is despite the resurgence in digital appreciation for the wrestling arts, the WWE is fucking boring. And it always has been. But if you tell somebody that, they get mad at you, if they are a wrestling fan. But being a wrestling fan and thinking the WWE is great is akin to saying you love having sex but all you’ve ever had is straight missionary. You have barely even explored what it means, and to be honest, haven’t even gotten to the good stuff.

But we are also America, a prudish culture that has built this myth that we are bold because of our freedoms. Yet most people are afraid to express themselves in any true fashion, and thus the repressive expression of the WWE is perfect as a performative act of quirkiness. But in actuality, it is no coincidence that Vince McMahon’s wife Linda is part of Donald Trump’s governing team. The WWE and Donald Trump are fraternal brothers, and the pretend change “drain the swamp” antics of Trump which have given us open fascism are the result of years of social conditioning that the WWE’s professional wrestling has given us. All this didn’t happen overnight – we were primed for decades.

Anyways, it’s Royal Rumble weekend, which is a buffet of boring chemically enhanced performers, mixed in with faded stars of yesteryear, meant to create a nostalgic pop in the greater markdom, in order to spark a desire to give half a fuck about the upcoming Wrestlemania, which pretends to be a Super Bowl of sorts, thus tying the Royal Rumble to Wrestlemania build-up into Super Bowl weekend, and the twin sports entertainment arms of American fascism (football and wrestling, neither of which is actually what it claims to be).

We are not doomed, but we’re way more fucked than anybody seems willing to admit. There will be a period of nihilistic degeneracy, as exemplified by this Westside Gunn (and Griselda Records crew) track named after Wrestlemania 20. I am too old now to look forward to this period, but fuck it, you play the hand you’re dealt, even if the dealer is dealing from the bottom of the deck, your entire life.

SONG OF THE DAY: Dean Malenko

DEAN MALENKO and CHRIS BENOIT 1995 over SWEET STAN LANE and BEAUTIFUL BOBBY EATON 1988 (texas death match 2 out of 3 falls) ***; LUKE WILLIAMS and BUTCH MILLER 1985 over THE GANGSTAS 1994 (street fight stretcher match 2 out of 3 falls) ***; EDDIE GUERRERO y LOVE MACHINE ART BARR 1994 over MEXICO’S MOST WANTED 2001 (mesas escaleras y sillas match 2 out of 3 falls) *******; THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 1986 over SABU and ROB VAN DAM 1997 (brass knucks scaffold match 2 out of 3 literal falls) ****7/8

DEAN MALENKO and CHRIS BENOIT 1995 over LOS PASTORES 1985 (no rope exploding barbed wire time bomb death match 3 out of 5 falls) *****3/5; LOVERBOY DENNIS CONDREY and BEAUTIFUL BOBBY EATON 1986 over LOS GRINGOS LOCOS 1994 (no rope exploding barbed wire steel cage match 3 out of 5 falls) *******19/23

DEAN MALENKO and CHRIS BENOIT 1995 over THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 1986 (orgone bomb tesla coil no rope no time exploding space antimatter dark fusion death match 5 out of 9 falls) ******3/4xINFINITYdivided byOBLIVION

MOTYOTD: Backlund vs. Adonis (January 18, 1982)

So let’s be honest here – wrestling is gay. And I honestly don’t mean that as a pejorative against it in a toxic masculine way, but the homoeroticism hidden (or not even hidden) just under the surface of professional wrestling has always been there, all the way back to the days of black-and-white Gorgeous George spraying perfume and prancing about the ring in the classic days. But also before it admitted it was show, in the mid ‘80s, that homoeroticism played out in weird ways, where the forced morality of good and bad enforced toxic masculinity in order to repress the very homosexuality the theatrical exhibition was likely spiking increases of. Lolol, pro wrestling is mad problematic, but so is life, so fuck it – embrace the problematic nature of existence and try to find good ground to exist upon that doesn’t fuck up anybody else’s potential good ground.

I never cared for Bob Backlund. He’s a middle management looking body builder fucker from up north, perfect khaki pants and white polo shirt demographic that would’ve been my supervisor but now is being phased out because the overlords have figured out they actually don’t need middle management any more, so the khaki pants and white polo shirts are becoming radicalized as internet foot soldiers in nationalism/racialism/sexism/allsortsofism. Thus they are now are postmodern bad guys, obviously. But back in 1982, they still had solid middle management jobs, were working towards retirement, drove a Camaro or Mustang, or fuck man Corvette if they really came up and was doing it right (and white). And they were WWF champion, which was still an F not an E because it was sport not entertainment, and panda bears hadn’t armbarred the trademark away yet.

Backlund was a late “real” era champion, in that he was a good guy to the crowd (who it must be remembered is always trained, throughout the decades in pro wrestling – whatever the crowd likes, they have a certain amount of say in it, kind of, but mostly they are being trained, and neurological triggers are being activated; it is called “psychology” by marketers but it’s neurology, the science is getting there to back this up) because he was no-nonsense, simple wrestling jackets normal ass trunks, came out and wrestled goddammit, no funny business. None of that gimmick bullshit, but once Hulk Hogan came about due to Vince McMahon cocaine visions of world conquest, it was like Nirvana video on MTV making hair metal obsolete. Backlund was done for.

But he was still on top at this point in our chronological romp through these Wrestling Watcher Matches of the Years project, and he was very much not about that stupid shit, and also not about that gay shit. Which brings us to Adrian Adonis, who hadn’t yet become the overweight “Adorable” cartoon he would later become famous for. At this point, he was a bad ass biker daddy, which also flirted more than just a little with gay man stereotypes. Between him and Adrian Street, the name “Adrian” was always marked as likely sexually experimental in my young brain, which probably thought “gay” in derogatory way back then, to be honest, because that’s how I was trained back then. But at the same time, lolol I was really into wrestling, and I also was always very artistic, and I’m almost certain my dad thought I was maybe gay at one point in my early adulthood because all I did was write poetry and do collages and weird shit like that, not work on chainsaws and shoot things. And also I’m thankful we don’t see homosexuality as this on/off switch any more and know it’s more of a spectrum, because no lie, I’m not attracted to men much at all, hardly ever – I mean I see a man, and think he’s handsome from time to time but never do I want to hug on a dude. But a woman doing things to me and playing with my ass? Hey man, I’m not complaining. But by 1982 standards, that means I’m gay.

Well, what I’m getting at here is in a public spectacle that below the surface appeals to unexpressed sexuality at that point, Adonis as bad guy in leather daddy get-up is hella triggering. He is managed by Freddie Blassie, in sequined outfit of all evil managers, poisoned by their own vanity, and is the number one challenger to simple normal Bob Backlund. Normal good ole guy next door who works down at the hardware store and drinks a couple of beers a week not too much just enough to be a normal good ole guy Bob Backlund. So leather daddy Adonis, a literal Adonis, is not only challenging for a fake world championship, but he’s challenging sexual norms. “Bob Backlund, one of the finest conditioned athletes in the world today,” says a young Vince McMahon, who just wants to get to work, and has already taken off his simple green jackets, and is loosening up. But Adonis takes his time taking off his leather in stalling way, and already is bad because he doesn’t get right to work.

Adonis is not normal, and you can hear catcalls and whistles from the crowd, mockingly suggesting Adonis is a beautiful woman. This is repressed homosexuality releasing itself like a tea kettle in toxic spectacles. It is Backlund’s job to repress this homosexuality, and Adonis’s job to degenerate the proceedings away from societal norms. Man, I fucking love wrestling. It is the most beautiful trash culture to anthropologize on Earth.

They have multiple collar-and-elbow lock-ups that no one man wins, and the ref hilariously tries to get in the middle of them physically when on the ropes, and it is the force of American law attempting to separate normal American men from homosexual urges. But this is America, and we claim there is freedom, so normal American men in the form of Bob Backlund must be confronted with this degenerate temptation, and they must conquer it, without resorting to breaking the law, at least in ideal. Sexual deviants don’t become champions, at least not in 1982.

[The irony of having a trash degenerate President who openly embraces his heel status, all while pretending to speak for the Backlund class of middle management normies, in completely pro wrestling performative way, is not lost on me. I feel like it was a natural parallel that the Reagan Era of global corporatism happened the same time wrestling essentially admitted it wasn’t “real” but entertainment, but went on with the show anyways. The show was more important than the reality, and in the mid ‘80s that was shocking for wrestling to admit, and in fact many other promoters hated Vince McMahon for embracing that line of business tact. But 30 years later, with the petri dish of digital communities allowing all our degenerate neurologies to go full-bloom, everything is performative. The show is always more important than the reality, for all of us in most every fact of our lives, to the point we stage pictures of food, use hashtags to activate algorithms for random ass thoughts to be carried into other people’s “streams”, and reality itself has been warped to where what is reality is no longer always very real.]

In terms of wrestling, Adonis is a masterful staller and exaggerated flop arounder, which works great with vanilla ass “I’m a real wrestler” Backlund, because an armbar by a bodybuilder is nothing without the recipient waving his other arm around crazily and kicking his legs up in giant steps trying to escape only to take a face plant onto the mat. There is literally a six minute segment of this match that is simply Backlund applying a wristlock and armbar on Adonis, who bounces around and rolls on the mat and tries to get out the ring and never escapes anything. Is Backlund attempting to force Adonis wrist from showing any signs of effeminate limpness? I don’t know. I doubt the depth of homoerotic repression was that consciously deep, but one can never tell with pro wrestling, because it is the most illegitimate art of all – decades of deviants and carnies combining their mad creative skills into cultural kimchi which you could not figure out how to explain to aliens if they arrived on this planet and decided to ask you why you were watching this shit in your living room.

After a brief moment of Adonis trying to get on the offense, we are back to Backlund tugging on Adonis left arm, doing sit ups, with the crowd counting, and hoping he rips the gay guy’s shoulder out its socket. Adonis rolls over and takes command, but almost immediately loses it back, because Backlund – just a normal guy who the crowd loves – moves out the way of a corner charge, and then is right back on that same left arm, the odd arm, the submissive arm of this leather daddy freak sullying up this noble wrestling sport. Backlund is also bleeding from his nose, it should be noted, so this is no easy battle. There is collateral damage to normalcy for having to repress deviancy. Normalcy becomes ever so slightly less normal.

Adonis finally catches Backlund with a hard left fist, knocking Backlund down, but Adonis immediately, nice and slowly, in exaggerated motion with ever so slight touch of effeminacy, shakes the hand like “wow… that really hurt.” It really is amazing heeling going on here by Adrian Adonis, in ways far too subtle and slow-boiling to work nowadays, with our shorter attention spans and need for immediate gratification, not to mention overall sensory desensitization due to overstimulation.

Well goodbye subtlety, because that bastard Adonis ends up busting open Backlund, and our hero our champion OUR REGULAR FUCKING DUDE NEXT DOOR is a bloody mess, being manhandled by this man of questionable intent. Is this part of his deviancy? Is non-procreative sex not enough for this horrible Adrian Adonis? IS HE GOING TO BEAT OUR GOOD GOD-FEARING JUST DONG HIS JOB WHITE CHAMPION INTO SEXUAL SUBMISSION?

No. No he is not. Backlund finally flips out, tosses aside his legal behavior, and begins pummeling Adonis viciously with closed fists. The ref is trying to break them up and get the ref to take a look at Backlund’s cut, because 1982 wrestling was still real, and there was a ringside doctor who might call the match. In fact, he does, and the bell is ringing. But Backland is still attempting to repress Adrian Adonis, still refusing to have been bludgeoned by this deviant. Doesn’t matter, the law has been tested, and though Backlund remains champion, his normalcy is blemished, his image has literally been bloodied.

This is liberal progress – Adonis has won the match, and tarnished Backlund’s golden image, but Backlund remains champion. Lolol, wrestling is so fucking twisted. As our we. Neither of these things will ever change, no matter how woke we become. To be human is to be a true and living problematic fave.

MOTYOTD: Rhodes vs. Flair (September 17, 1981)

The internal jihad of creative ambitions is Art vs. Commodity. The innate desire to make art has existed as long as humans have, and in fact many theorize is as close to that God nature as we can get in our existence, long before there were towns or cities or economies. The act of making commodity of art was later, after some of these so-called civilized steps had been taken collectively. I think about this a lot, especially when I undergo the task of writing a bunch of nonsense stream of conscious philosophisizing gibberish about something like professional wrestling for free on an open and ancient looking website, when the commodity thinkers (and thoughts planted into my own mind) tell me “you should be writing a book” or working at building some sort of *career* with whatever the fuck it is I do. Except I’m not compelled necessarily to do the things that such actions would require. I tend to read ridiculous nonsense, from throughout history, way more than I read novels, which are a relatively new genre if we’re thinking long-term. Ibn al-Arabi wasn’t writing novels, nor was Aristotle or Avicenna or Tu Fu or Santoka or and so on and so forth.

This relates to this project and tonight’s match because I chose the Wrestling Observer match of the year awards as a list to remark upon because Dave Meltzer has encouraged his year end awards to honor greatness in terms of the art of the theatrical fighting act, more than the commodity, although he gives mixed signals about this due to his penchant to speak so heavily about what draws and shit like that. But ultimately the goal seems to be the positive superlative “of the year” awards are supposed to go to excellent shit, not just something that sold a ton or generated more revenue. And being from the southern NWA territorial days, specifically the Mid Atlantic region (which I watched religiously at 12:00 pm on Saturday afternoons on channel 6 out of Richmond, and then would try to stay up late until like 12:30 on Saturday nights to catch World Wide Wrestling – their second hour of TV – on channel 13 out of Lynchburg), Ric Flair is the true God of this Professional Wrestling. There is no equal. None. I mean sure you can be a completely immersed wrestling dork and make well thought out arguments about how someone else might be better artist in the squared circle, and have valid examples to prove these arguments, perhaps not beyond reproach but well enough I ain’t gonna argue with you. But when it comes to taking that internal jihad of Art vs. Commodity, and becoming a master of both sides, yet somehow still being more of an amazing artist rather than just a commodity, nobody has excelled at that like he did.

The 1980s in professional wrestling were a philosophical battle itself, one that echoes my comparison to this internal jihad, because World Championship Wrestling was led more by that Art argument (in my opinion) as exemplified by Ric Flair. Meanwhile, the WWE was pure commodity, at least once Vince McMahon’s demented genius took over the program, complete with cartoons and cereal and music videos and well-known wrestling names repackaged as trademarks-filed new characters. This was exemplified by Hulk Hogan and Hulkamania, which was purely a marketing angle that was repetitively beaten over children’s heads as they grew up that eventually the marketing took hold and Hulkamania was real, in a manufactured sense. Ric Flair was Art, and Hulk Hogan was Commodity.

Thus, as commodity, you can easily find Hulk Hogan’s first WWE title victory over the Iron Sheik at Madison Square Garden, both in owner hosted format with the WWE network, and also quickly bootlegged over and over in video formats online, where commodity is circulated as fast and free as possible.

Art, however, is harder to find. This 1981 victory by Ric Flair over Dusty Rhodes, as shown on TV in Greensboro, North Carolina, for his first NWA World title reign, I could not find in its entirety that easily. In fact, I gave up. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Maybe the WWE owns it and is sitting on it, which is weird in itself because it means Commodity has won the Art vs. Commodity jihad if actual art is possessed legally by an entity which had nothing to do with it in the first place, and then shelved to increase Commodified Value for some later point. That’s actually really sad.

Ric Flair did not become the greatest because of marketing. He traveled the Mid Atlantic region with unparalleled charisma, as Mid Atlantic champion (the first step), then U.S. Champion (the next step, and one that legitimized regional star as World title contender), and he did by criss-crossing the Carolinas and Virginia for years. He survived a plane wreck and came back more charismatic than ever, and his star kept growing and growing. Though a Minnesotan by birth, he put in the miles on the roads and the years in the region to become a naturalized Carolina man. (Not sure on his stance on waving his shirt around his head like a helicopter, though.)

The story behind this match is Rhodes already had signed a rematch with Harley Race, so he perhaps was looking ahead to that showdown. Flair was a heel in the Carolinas, and Rhodes a hero in Florida, so this took place in Kansas City, Missouri, which at that time with the territorial system, meant it was somewhat removed from immediate attention of local fans, so the good/bad dichotomy could be blurred just slightly enough for the live crowd, who were obviously pro-Rhodes, but not out of control like they would’ve been if this was a home match for either man. It is almost as if it were neutral ground for their characters at the time.

There, of course, is a long sequence where Flair has Rhodes clamped down in a Figure 4, and Rhodes does not surrender, does not get counted out, but his knees are weakened by the move. He finally reverses it, and Flair breaks, rushing out the ring for an early career version of his mad dash up to the top rope from outside the ring, but Rhodes catches him and goes for a suplex.

But Rhodes’ knees are too weak, and he crumbles underneath Flair’s weight, who lands on top for pinning position and gains his first ever World title reign, in a way at this neutral territory that is not outright bad or good for either man. The time stamp tells me this was a 20-minute match but that’s twenty minutes I’m not going to get easily inside this commodified internet.

The details of the art are lost for the highlights, the big moments. Even within the context of this piece, I’ve taken what was a 20-minute match condensed to a 3-minute video, and broke that down further to a bunch of words and a few five-second gifs. And to what end? Shouldn’t I have been working on a novel? Outlining a fake world instead of writing about a fake one from almost forty years ago? But what is the point of any of that? To make money by creating commodity from the words that shoot into my mind without thought? Who the fuck cares? Fuck novels and published books and projects with purpose that ends in some sort of bank deposit, which seem to be getting more and more meager anyways. Even the commodities have been chipped away, so that the worker gets less and less while the conduit through which these works are delivered gets more and more. In the Art vs. Commodity jihad, Commodity is winning super fucking hard right now, to the point that shitty Art seems amazing to us, and we throw around the word “genius” about every one-project wonder we accidentally stumble across on our social media feeds.

And while all this can be depressing if you get lost in meritocracy myths and believing that mark Sisyphus’s delusion that there is purpose to life, it also does not matter, because if I have a haiku event, and a small crowd of people are gathered to share their words, their own little literary snippets of self art, and I say something about how we shall all “whoo!” like Ric Flair, people from all walks of life know what the fuck I’m talking about. That is the essence of Flair, in a single syllable, and it has transcended commodity, and no person or entity can ever truly own it, despite all legal claims otherwise, and to Whoo! is to be free of all that bullshit. Fuck you commodification of all creative impulses, and fuck your claims of intellectual property colonizing every creative act since the beginning of American time. Whoo, motherfucker. Whoo.