The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (23 page)
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Authors: Chael Sonnen
BOOK: The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment
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 | “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk” by the Pet Shop Boys. What a song. Listen to the opening. Then listen to Neil sing “What a performance tonight/Should I react or turn out the light?/Looks like you’re picking a fight. …” |
 | “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. This would be especially entertaining if the fight is on a Friday. |
 | “You Could Be Mine” by Guns n’ Roses. For all you fans of Gn’R who were ready to hang me from the yardarm a page or two ago, here’s a great song. It’s much better than “Jungle” in every way; not just as a walkout song, but as a song in general. Listen to them together. Compare and contrast. Acknowledge the obvious. This song just kicks ass . Try to time your entrance into the ring as Axl shrieks “Don’t forget to call my lawyers with ridiculous demands!” |
 | “Heads Explode” by Monster Magnet. The heads of the people in the crowd will explode too. |
 | “Go With the Flow” by Queens of the Stone Age. What a song, and the single-best rock video in the history of mankind. Talk Uncle Dana into showing the video as you walk out; it is a masterpiece of sex and death. When the chick squeezes the blood out of a human heart onto her chest right on the downbeat, you see a genius filmmaker at work. |
 | “Work to Do” by the Isley Brothers. Incredible opening, fantastic song. Remember what I said about picking a song that tells a story? Well, listen to this song. Imagine what you’d be telling the crowd. |
 | “Killed by Death” by Motörhead. Lemmy, with his best Motörhead lineup, just destroys. |
 | “Chinese Democracy” by Guns n’ Roses. Yep. Another Gn’R song. About 100 musicians, three or four guitarists doing solos. The album this song is on became a much-delayed laughingstock, but this particular song is just amazing, with a brutal, killer opening. Listen before you give this choice a dismissive, smug little chortle. Then admit I’m right. This is one of the best Gn’R songs ever , and a great walkout song to boot. |
 | “It Don’t Come Easy” by Ringo Starr. Holy Mother of God, if you could ask for a better song than this to walk out to, I don’t know what it is—except, perhaps, the next song on my list, of course. Great big-room opening. George Harrison, who wrote this song, playing a sublime guitar lead-in, and then, the words. When it comes to telling a story about fighters or fighting, well, what else could you say, in a few words, that could be clearer than “It don’t come easy”? |
| God, I love this song! If I wasn’t such a superstitious, patterned, inhibited, pathological wretch, I’d walk out to this myself. As it is, I tried desperately to have one of my idols, a fellow fighter, walk out to this. (I can’t tell you his name, but let’s just say it may, or may not, rhyme with “Candy Routure.”) He’s come out to different songs over the years because he isn’t psychologically trapped in a dysfunctional marriage to a song he despises and is embarrassed by—like someone I know, whom I see every morning as I brush my teeth. I truly believe that if he had come out to “It Don’t Come Easy” rather than whatever forgettable, puerile crap he walked out to when he fought that big ol’ slab o’ cowardice Brock Lesnar, he would have killed him. That lucky punch the bloated, brush-cutted Lesnar landed would have been deflected by the karmic energy of a song so closely aligned with Randy (ummm, I mean, that anonymous fighter, who changed the sport and is the most popular, inspirational fighter ever), his life, his work ethic, and his journey. | |
| Which leads us to … drumroll, please … the grand champion of walkout songs. |
 | “How Soon Is Now?” by the Smiths. The first time I heard this song I thought it must have come from another planet; yet at the same time I felt it had come from a portion of my soul I was afraid to access for fear that it would drive me mad. Easily the single-most original, astonishing, and brilliant song of the last quarter-century. It confronts and describes issues that fighters are the living, breathing incarnations and victims of. The song is a throbbing, relentless, inexhaustible welter of loneliness, insecurity, and morose self-pity, sonically crystallized and packaged, then disguised as a brilliant pop song. If fighters could be captured in a song, it would be this one. |
| Even the video is great. A cheesy attempt at art, it comes across as an insincere, self-conscious artifice. Shot in black-and-white, it shows the Smiths in concert at the height of their powers: Johnny Marr, the genius behind the music, playing the guitar, as a shirtless, skinny Morrissey pinwheels his buggy-whip-thin arms and howls in that bizarre, unique, minor-chord warble, “I am the son and the heir/of a shyness that is criminally vulgar/I am the son and heir of nothing in particular. ...” That’s fighters, ladies and gentlemen. Not heroes. Just a bunch of shy, lonely, insecure basket cases that destroy themselves and one another for the benefit of total strangers, for a little money, and for the feeling of acceptance and approval, from people they will never meet. (I call it the “good little dog syndrome”). The song “How Soon Is Now?” succinctly encapsulates exactly what it is that motivates fighters. It tells the story of our journey. It is a brilliant, unique, fantastic song, and hopefully, someday, some fighter with more guts than me will have the nerve to walk out to it. |
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