There are other things in A-D’s life besides fetishizing Spacehog albums and mocking Tool fans. A-D also reads (currently splitting time between Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs and a compilation of Kevin Smith writings called Silent Bob Speaks), goes to the cinema (Wedding Crashers is the funniest movie I’ve seen since Old School, and March of the Penguins should be a shoe-in to win the Oscar for Most Fucking Adorable Thing Ever), and enjoys baseball (A-D roots for the last-place New York Mets and secretly resents fellow blogger and Washington Nationals fan the Husky Gentleman).
Speaking of sports, A-D also watches a lot of professional wrestling. Perhaps that’s an overstatement: I’d never shell out the fifty bucks for the various pay-per-view extravaganzas, but I’m more than willing to invest my time in the free television the WWE has to offer. I prefer Monday night’s RAW to Thursday’s Smackdown!, but I’ll watch just about any of it. Recently, RAW added a segment to it’s line up called the “Diva Search,” which is basically the WWE version of a beauty pageant/reality show, where eight women compete to see who can be the sluttiest, and the winner gets a bunch of cash and a job with the WWE as a wrestler/manager/valet/glutton for punishment. It’s pretty exploitative and more or less just an excuse to get hot looking women to jiggle around for twenty minutes of airtime a week, but that’s not even my biggest concern. My biggest concern lies in the music associated with the show.
It should also be duly noted that the WWE will often give things theme songs. Remember all those bad sorta-rap metal bands from a couple of years ago? They’re still huge in the WWE universe. The last pay-per-view’s theme song was from a new album by Trust Company, and RAW itself opens up every week with a track by a band called Union Underground. It’s normally pretty forgettable and usually just blends in with the generic rock of the wrestlers’ entrance music, but something jumped out at me this past Monday when I realized that the theme song of the “Diva Search” is Audioslave’s “Be Yourself.”
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Does this strike anybody else as odd and vaguely inappropriate? This is official, mind you — the on-air commentators pimp for the Audioslave album every time they play the song, and the album art is clearly visible on screen. But knowing what we know about Tom Morello, do we think he’s cool with one of his songs highlighting a wrestling-related cheesecake contest? And while I’m not a student of Chris Cornell’s lyrical stylings, I do have to wonder if this sort of thing is what he had in mind when he penned “Be Yourself.” Maybe that’s the subliminal, inspiring advice the WWE is giving to the contestants — “Be yourself, it’s all that you can do.” Or maybe not.
I feel like this kind of thing happens a lot on television. Remember when the Red Sox won the World Series last year, and Fox underscored images of Boston celebrating with Beck’s “The Golden Age,” which is not only a slow, dour song, but also a suicide ballad? Sure, he says “Let the golden age begin,” but even taken out of context, it’s still not all that festive.
What do you think? Is Tom Morello secretly a wrestling fan? What are examples you’ve seen of songs popping up in unlikely places?
Also, to A-D readers! Got a beard like Rick Rubin? Does your dome resemble Billy Corgan’s? Do you think heavy mascara makes you Brandon Flowers’ stunt double? Think you resemble a rocker? Show us your mug and let us decide. Send a high-resolution .jpg image file and your phone number to [email protected] with the subject “Seeing Doubles.” This is a new Spin feature, so let’s start it off right!
