The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (19 page)

I also don’t want to hear any country-bumpkin music. The arena you’re fighting in isn’t a honky-tonk, and you aren’t in
Tayxus
. You fighters are all too young to have ever been in an actual honky-tonk, anyway. So enough with the awful country music. There’s too much twangin’. There’s too much steel-guitar playin’. And there are too many country hunks pourin’ out their precious little hearts about the girl they lost or their home in the woods or the deer they shot or the job at the plant they lost … or some other stupid, contrived story about living life up in “dem der hills.”

Just so you know, every time you walk out to a bad country song you are conjuring a single image in the minds of all those in the audience. That image is of a seventies country-music queen with a shellacked mega-pompadour who is wearing a far-too-tight floral-patterned polyester pantsuit garishly decorated with rhinestones. And when those in attendance plug their ears in an attempt to block out your assault, they hear that country-music queen in the back of their heads, wailing and whimpering about how her
mayun
got released from the local pokey and done run off with some other country strumpet who had more teeth or higher hair. They know her song well because that’s what Uncle Hermes—the uncle who liked to give lots of uh oh-feeling hugs—played when he’d take them up to the cabin for long weekends. So while trying to block out your insipid choice of a walkout song, they have to relive painful childhood memories.

Are you proud of this? It’s not like you’re keeping it real. Most of these country songs are written and performed by people who no longer live in the country, if they ever did (unless you consider Beverly Hills or a penthouse apartment in New York the “country”). With that said, I have to confess that I actually like country music, but I have no illusions about it or its place in the sport—that place being
nowhere
. If at this very moment you are thinking to yourself, “But Chael, you come out to a country song,” I want to inform you that I am simultaneously thinking, “That’s none of your damn business.”

With country music out of the way, I want to address the whole Mexican thing. OK, you’re Mexican. God bless ya. I’m all for your sense of cultural pride, but when some guy walks out to mariachi music, I feel like I’m having dinner in a bad Mexican restaurant. As you begin your walk toward the cage, I always squint to see if one of your cornermen is carrying a plate of sizzlin’ fajitas (plate’s hot, folks). What makes it worse is that you don’t actually listen to that music. Your iPod is full of the same gangsta rap and up-tempo, modern music as every other fighter’s. You play mariachi music in your leisure time and while training as often as you wear a sombrero to the airport. And why don’t you wear a sombrero to the airport? Well, because it would look …
stupid
. All I ask is that you take that same rational mentality and cross-reference it with an image of yourself walking out to music that sounds like the “Casa Bonita” episode of
South Park
. I want you to really see and hear yourself, just as we hear and see you. If you do this exercise as I have instructed, a light bulb will most certainly flicker to life in your head and you’ll stop with the mariachi music. I know this will leave you with nothing, but I’ve got some suggestions. If you want a song that speaks to your cultural pride as a Mexican, can be considered good music, and won’t make the crowd smirk and giggle at your lackluster attempt to hammer home your inappropriate commentary on your cultural identity, try “Saint Behind the Glass” or “Will the Wolf Survive” by Los Lobos. Give those a listen. You’re welcome.

The same goes for the whole Irish thing. You know what I’m talking about—the bad tin whistles; the screeching, bleating bagpipes; the self-conscious, single-minded lyrics and pathetic singing. Enough already. You’re Irish. We
get
that the English raped your grandfather’s sweet, sweet pride and that potato famine sucks. Can you play something as you make your appearance that isn’t repulsive or make us uncomfortable with the self-dramatizing, self-pitying tone intended to remind everyone that the British heisted a third of your country? (I’m not taking sides on that one—at least not
yet
, not in this chapter.) Every culture has its gripes, and bad music that illuminates those gripes, but we’re at a
fight
that we paid
money
to see. It’s your job to get us hyped for the fight, not make us feel pity or guilt or indignation because your dear departed great-great-grandmama lost her “four green fields” to the Redcoats a hundred years ago, or however long ago that was. Most of you fighters boasting about your Irish heritage have never even
been
to Ireland, much less lived there. Under such circumstances, using the whole Irish Pride thing seems a trifle
^*
silly, and more than a little lame and disingenuous.

Let me share a little secret with you: On fight night, as you walk to the cage, at that moment, we don’t care about your self-appointed Gaelic-ness. Maybe tomorrow; maybe the next day; maybe never. That’s our choice. So stop. If you absolutely cannot resist the temptation to try stealing a little of the romanticism of the “old country,” at least make it upbeat and listenable. Deal? Again, I am not going to leave you high and dry, my dear sons of the old with sod between your ears. Try something from
The Snake
album by Shane MacGowan and the Popes. I will even tolerate “Going Back to Boston” by the Drop Kick Murphys. Forrest comes out to that; didn’t help much when I beat him via triangle choke
^*

Moving on to gangsta rap. Again, I am going to share a truth known by apparently everyone but you. You are not a gangsta. Neither is the guy who made the music you are walking out to. He either owns a mansion somewhere in the hills or a triplex in a doorman building. Truthfully, he probably owns both. He also has an army of servants, which includes at least one personal manicurist. It has been well over a decade since there has been any interest in, or cultural cachet attached to, gangsta rap. You missed the boat, stupid. Remove all that crap from your iPad and stop living in a fantasy world. You aren’t fooling anyone. We know you are not hopping in your “six-fo’” and doing drive-bys postfight. It’s ludicrous. Enough.

Now, before I get to my lists of good and great walkout songs, I feel I need to get slightly more specific, just in case you have been brainwashed by popular culture into believing a bad song or bad band is actually a good song or good band simply because you have been told it is good a thousand times. For example, groups like Buckcherry, Wolfmother, and The Darkness will always suck, no matter how hard they are pushed by an A&R imbecile. I would go deeper into why and how they suck, but there are two other terrible bands that need much more attention.

Aerosmith and Metallica—the two biggest frauds in popular rock music. Let me start with Aerosmith, one of the great puzzles of modern culture. They were dreadful in the 1970s—their main claim to fame was a singer who put scarves on his mike stand. He just couldn’t, well,
sing
. The guitarist is equally atrocious. He has spent forty years making a living from the first thirty seconds of “Walk This Way,” which is, when you actually listen to it, just really, really mediocre. No innovation, no artistry, nothing.

Thankfully, Aerosmith disappeared in the ‘80s, but for some unfathomable reason someone at MTV decided they were “cool.” (I still wonder if it was just a programmer’s sick, twisted prank that got out of control.) They flung Aerosmith at the MTV generation like a rabid zoo chimp flinging a handful of excrement through the bars of its cage at an unsuspecting eight-year-old child; sadly, most of it stuck. Then, the band decided to do a duet with Run-DMC, to show how rock and rap had come together—a cynical, obvious, boring exercise in cross-marketing shenanigans. Rock and rap were
already
together, decades before this; go find, and listen to, “Hot Rod Lincoln” by Johnny Bond.

Aerosmith was awful, is awful, and always will be awful. They just relentlessly tell the world how good they are. No Aerosmith, ever.

Now let me dissect Metallica. They were an awful thrash-band from San Francisco or thereabouts going nowhere until someone at a record company began paying “special attention” to them for reasons that are best left ... undiscussed. They have metastasized over the years into a bloated, stupid, annoying bunch of balding, bloated boobs. But every metal magazine puts them on every cover for some unknown (or should I say “undiscussed”?) reason. And on every cover they’re wearing their stupid rock-and-roll sunglasses on their “heavy-metal mean-mug” faces. They are rewarded each time they churn out a crappy, derivative record—which thankfully happens only every few years. Their singer spent a fortune on singing lessons that obviously didn’t take, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to “scoop” notes on every phrase, causing him to sound like a drunken businessman doing karaoke to Christina Aguilera at her worst. Metallica can be summed up like this: self-mythologizing, self-impressed, relentless, awful, with the most annoying, mullet-sporting “fans” of any band.

God, I wish Aerosmith and Metallica would do a tour together and end up with a suicidal airplane pilot. So
no
Aerosmith or Metallica, ever. No exceptions.

“What then, Chael?” you may very well be asking. How canst thou lead us out of our creative musical wilderness and into the sonic Promised Land, like a latter-day Moses? I can, my children; and will. Read on.

At this point, I feel I have done a decent job describing a
bad
walkout song. The deeper message I wanted to convey to fighters with my tirade is this: The music you pick is not for
you
. When choosing music, do not select what
you
would like to hear or what
you
think will make you cool or special. I know you don’t have the mental chops to come up with a list of priorities yourself, so Uncle Chael will provide it. When deciding on your walkout music, you need to consider, in this exact order:

1. The fans.

2. The event.

3. The quality and relevance of the music.

4. Your personal taste.

So now that I have gotten my point across—in the understated, respectful, sensitive style you have quickly become accustomed to—and we can agree unanimously that I am correct, perhaps we can spend a little time on the subject of good walkout music: what it is, what it means, and how to identify and access it yourselves.

Walkout music should be enjoyable to the ears, be appropriate for the setting, and convey a sense of the fighter’s mission. It should have a good opening and then a buildup. It can’t blast off at a hundred miles per hour like most bad metal because then it has nowhere to go. It just drones along, boring everyone to tears. Tempo wise, both too fast and too slow are equally lethal. Time changes are good (which kills all of reggae, thank God), but too many time changes become annoying. Remember how long you’ve got to walk, and find music that entertains and, seriously, do try to tell a story in that time frame and make a conscious effort to represent something
real
. Look for music that is original but not obscure, engaging but not oppressive, energetic but not hyperactive.

It should also be a big-room song, if you know what I mean. It should sound good in an arena, not just in your headphones. I love songs like “Operator” by Jim Croce or “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot, but they’re not big-room songs. Two examples of big-room songs are “More Than a Feeling” by Boston and “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey.

Just remember the vibe, the event, the nature of the spectacle, and the
context
. I will grace you with some suggestions, starting with a handful of good songs, and then concluding with Uncle Chael’s Top Ten Hall of Fame Walkout Songs. Enjoy.