Celebrate your inner child with The Mountain Goats’ ‘Beat the Champ’

You’re either down with wrestling as entertainment or you’re not. The recent death of Rowdy Roddy Piper either means something to you or you’re in the “Rowdyroddywhat?” camp. You’ll either like The Mountain Goats’ latest album about wrestling or—no, wait, you’re just going to love it. Such is the greatness of John Darnielle’s love letter to the world of wrestling. Beat the Champ is a layered, fanatical, lush album that celebrates the glory of wrestling and explores the darker corners of Darnielle’s relationship with his stepfather.

 

In “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,” Darnielle pays homage to Guerrero as a father figure in one breath while slamming his awful stepfather in the next: “You called him names to try to get beneath my skin . . . He was my hero back when I was a kid/You let me down but Chavo never once did.”

 

The orchestration and energy of the songs mimic wrestling as they tumble from low whispered narratives in “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan” to explosive tracks like “Choked Out.” As a whole, the album is a flashlight flickering down the tunnel of memory to Darnielle’s childhood living room, where “before a black and white TV in the middle of the night . . . I’m bathed in blue light . . . I need justice in my life, here it comes.”

 

That look in the eyes of a little boy as he leaps from a high perch to land an elbow drop between the shoulder blades of an unsuspecting father below—that frenzied, foaming, playful rage that serves as a life force for boys ages 6 to 14—that’s this album. It craves justice and a voice. It growls, “Let’s wrestle!” right before landing the People’s Elbow. The album is great because Darnielle knows that at our core, all of us have a little bit of that boy in us who wants to know the satisfaction and marvelous justice of landing a solid punch. We all want to beat the champ. 

 

This review appeared in the November 2015 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 80, No. 11, page 40).