Heel Turn 2

There are some kinds of art that I only like to read about. For years, I used to check in with the best Game of Thrones recap writers, despite hating Game of Thrones. These recaps told a story that I liked better, a fandom for a show that might as well be imaginary. They mixed elaborate, nonsensical exegesis with a story of blood and war – they flipped subtext and text. This is why the whole Goncharov thing made sense to me. I never parsed it as a joke about fandom, so much as a plain reference to the fact that a lot of people do fandom this way. Either they don't care about the original work, or they've just come to independently enjoy the fandom. The original work, for them, is just the sand that feeds the pearl.

This is to say that I've just read two great books on pro wrestling, a thing I don't much like actually watching, and now I'm thinking again about Beat the Champ, the Mountain Goats' great midcareer album about wrestling through the ages. I was planning to just write an essay about Beat the Champ, but I need to talk about the books first, because they've helped me to understand the album better and see what it is and isn't doing. Ring Master by Josephine Reisman (writing under a previous name – what is it about trans writers that we always come out one day too late to change our name on our debut?) is a critical biography of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, a man who's led a frankly insane life, and the era of wrestling he's presided over. The Squared Circle by David Shoemaker is a book of essays forming a loose history of 20th-century wrestling, with a focus on its sad and ghoulish side.

Both books are superb, though both strike me as needing one more editing pass than they got. I wanted Reisman's already richly opinionated book to be even more forceful, more judgemental, to close the deal on how much McMahon sucks. Shoemaker's is just too long, and in its disjointedness and repetition, it shows too much of its roots in a column called "Dead Wrestler of the Week." The two complement each other, though, neatly evening out each other's deficits as well as giving a sense of two schools of wrestling thought. Shoemaker sees kayfabe – a wrestler's implicit agreement to pretend that the outsized violence and the storylines are real – as a fairly binary thing. Over the years, its hold has weakened, but you're still either following it or breaking it. For Reisman, there's "old kayfabe," the pre-1980s code of silence, and "new kayfabe," which goes a level deeper: behind the obviously fake story on the screen, there's a "real" story of corporate drama and personal betrayal among wrestlers and management, which fans can access through an intricate web of hints and conspiracy theories. A wrestler can break kayfabe by the old rules, but uphold it by the new ones, by (i.e.) darkly hinting that he's lost a scripted match because his boss hates him. This new vision has a lot to do with the McMahon family – as real-life owners of a virtual wrestling monopoly – writing themselves into a bunch of fictional storylines whose nihilistic theme is always that your boss is a heel, but the house always wins. Go ahead and boo him. He welcomes it. He owns you.

One thing all this does is create a culture where nobody believes you when you say you're hurting, and if that isn't America, I don't know what is. Wrestling's elaborate submission holds and the supernatural impact of its punches may be choreographed, but as Shoemaker explains in one of his hardest-hitting essays, of course the pain is real; you're always colliding with things, getting thrown to the ground, you can't fake that stuff. Wrestlers kick each other's asses for money, and the company dictates how often and how hard – but they're paid as independent contractors, like Uber drivers. They don't even get health insurance. They're also under pressure to work through a constant barrage of fresh injuries, which means painkillers, and then uppers to counter them. Everyone ostensibly got off steroids in the eighties, but they sure as hell look like they still are. The company doesn't officially know about all this, and definitely doesn't care, and that's why these guys are dying at 45 of heart attacks and overdoses and worse.

Wrestling is not just a recognizable caricature of American work because of the fake contractor stuff and the way the company requires self-destruction but will disavow its results; it’s also that it’s created a system wherein people are trained to disbelieve anything a worker says about their conditions or their pain, and instead to view it through the lens of a detective game or conspiracy theory. And this brings us to Beat the Champ, an album about work.

John Darnielle was in his late forties when he wrote these songs, i.e. the classic age of wrestler death. With the exception of a few specifically autobiographical albums, the man mostly writes fiction, which is to say he writes autobiography on a spiritual level. (As a fiction writer who has no interest in writing autobiographically and tries to avoid it whenever possible, I unfortunately know how true this is.) Beat the Champ catches him at something of a crossroads, between the thematic and sonic heaviness of his early 2000s work and the lighter, often more fancifully themed albums that have come after. I'm reluctant to ascribe this literally to changes in Darnielle's personal life, though Beat the Champ does contain the first of Darnielle's affable songs about his kids, and probably becoming a parent changed some of his outlook on art. Mostly, though, I'm guessing he evolved into a different kind of songwriter because he was becoming a novelist around this time, and his obsessions have been channelled in different ways since.

Being a transitional album with elements of both 2007 Darnielle and 2023 Darnielle, Beat the Champ works in a wide variety of registers. Its only uniting factor is that it's about wrestling, and also about love, whether that's a fan's love for an wrestler, a wrestler's love for their art, or the love a wrestler feels towards their opponent during the intimacy of a fight (it's not a crowded field, but this is by far Darnielle's most homoerotic album). Some songs take place fully within kayfabe, as with the exuberant "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero," about growing up believing in kayfabe-as-religion as a way of coping with the terror of childhood. Some, like "Foreign Object," are straight-up goofs about the joys of fake violence. Others are realist portraits ("Luna," "Southwestern Territory") of wrestlers living their non-kayfabe lives, or a kind of morality play that has nothing to do with morality ("Hair Match," "Unmasked!"). By this last, I mean that he's exploring the realness projected by wrestlers, the special realness inherent in high camp, which has great symbolic weight even when nothing in particular is symbolized. Darnielle is, as I've said, one of our straighter songwriters, but he knows camp.

I'm sorry to say this, but sometimes the obvious thing is true: Beat the Champ is kind of an album about the life of a touring musician, the exhaustion, the glory, the studied performance of real feelings. It's not that Darnielle takes wrestling as a metaphor for art. He is always very clear about recognizing wrestling as an art. With its semi-improv storylines and semi-choreographed action, wrestling is best understood as a kind of theatre (which, as Shoemaker points out, makes it all the weirder that wrestlers don't get to unionize with the Screen Actors' Guild). It calls on a wrestler's full physical and rhetorical powers, their ability to freestyle to a camera about what they're going to do to their opponent and why, and then their close collaboration with their opponent to make everyone's moves look their best. Like all good artists who aren't writing autobiographically, Darnielle draws on the emotions of his job to imagine someone else's job.

He's also writing about self-destruction, of course, and how self-destruction and work go hand in hand; how both musicians and wrestlers are expected to live on drugs and adrenaline, and in a subtextual way (the album never overtly goes here) about his own history with drugs and self-harm. The wrestlers of Beat the Champ all kind of want to die, so they've found a job that will kill them. The narrator of "Choked Out" shouts joyously about how much he loves having his windpipe crushed, how losing consciousness in the ring gives him a personal thrill, a sense of professional pride ("Most of the boys won't ever cross this line!"), even oracular powers, in a laugh-out-loud bleak sort of way ("I can see the future! It's a real dark place!"). This narrator is proud of knowing a secret, which is that all jobs are basically being choked out, and he's making the world's only honest living. To his mind, he has no choice but to be cut down by the world, so he may as well revel in the privacy of pride – and in knowing that some of his secrets are his alone. "Everybody's got their limits," he tells us. "No one's found mine."

To me, the really central theme of this album is an artist's private satisfaction – the brief moments when we know we've done a good day's work, and the audience's reaction, cheers for a face or boos for a heel, doesn't matter at all. Beat the Champ is a parade of characters who are champions, and who spend their days getting beaten. Sometimes their work comes to nothing at all, as in "Luna," whose narrator is watching her house full of wrestling memorabilia go up in flames ("names in ash/big names"), or "Hair Match," whose narrator leaves a show tired and depressed, spending the album's last moments in the parking lot: "You look up at the stars/and all the cheap cars"). In these moments, the artists don't have private pride, they don't have anything at all, it's been knocked out of them. What they have is emptiness, the question of where work goes when we've finished it. But they'll pick themselves up, at least in most cases. They'll feel that pride again, or they'll die trying.

I've spent the last several weeks of my life reading and thinking about wrestling, but when I try to watch it, I don't understand a damned thing about it. It's like watching someone else's game of Super Smash Brothers. Part of this is the fact that you can't just jump into an artform, you need to grow up with it or painstakingly learn it as an adult – there's always a learning curve before you can understand what makes art good. But I'm not sure that I'll be able to transcend that learning curve; wrestling is also an artform that repels me – I really mean this in a value-neutral way – even as the story behind it obsessively compels me. In this, it's possible that I understand it better than I think I do, because the meta-story also seems to be what captivates moden wrestling fans. We know ourselves through wrestling, even if we hate what we see. It compels us because it's our own story.