Blood Pooling On The Canvas

The Mountain Goats “Werewolf Gimmick”

I love the way John Darnielle writes about wrestling because he’s so zeroed in on the exact thing that makes the contrived theatricality of the sport resonate with young people who feel powerless. This song is sung from the perspective of a vicious heel, and is basically just him ranting about tearing apart every babyface hero in his path. The audience is meant to identify with the face, but I think the ravings of the heel make more sense for a lot of young dudes, especially the ones with a lot of anger and fantasies about humiliating the people who have made them feel small and weak. Darnielle really gets into the bluster of this character, and in doing that he draws a line connecting a lot of other similar things – movie monsters, comic book super villains and anti-heroes, heavy metal stars, rappers, anonymous asshole trolls on the internet – that indulge the same fantasy of overwhelming strength and gleeful sadism.

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