Yanno what I love? Professional wrestling. Why? Because I just do. I'm not some emasculated eurotrash or never-made-it-never-will indie geek with a podcast who feels the urge to justify his likes and dislikes to total strangers 'cause I'm trying to convince myself they have some higher artistic merit. I know it doesn't. It's pro-wrestling. It's total brainless low-commala entertainment in which grown men in stupid costumes pretend to beat one another up while grifting for money and sometimes beat one another up for real. I like it 'cause it's cool; the same way some folks like cars and other folks like sports they're naïve enough to think aren't worked. Anyone who tries to peel the layers back and dive deeper in has an agenda to push.
That said, wrestling kinda sucks nowadays. You've got two whole generations of malnourished, left-leaning twinks who are more concerned with recreating moves they've seen in video games and bitching about low ratings on Twitter than putting in the work to get halfway decent at their chosen profession. We live in an age where people unironically believe Bryan Danielson is one of the best to ever lace up a pair and Hulk Hogan is an embarrassing relic of the past. Gimmie a break. The ultimate red pill is that based god Kevin Nash was absolutely right about everything - the majority of guys under 6'4" and 230lbs are not believable main eventers; being entertaining is more important than being athletic; characters sell tickets, not matches; the top draws have every reason to selfishly protect their spots as they're the ones earning the troupe their pay; the moves in the ring don't mean a damn thing unless you train the audience into thinking they do; and the ultimate goal of every pro-wrestler should be to make as much money with as little physical effort as possible.
We must RETVRN.
A little over sixty years ago, one of my favorite matches took place. The Japan Pro-Wrestling Alliance (or Association according to the brain trust at Cagematch.net) was Japan's first of many, many wrestling groups. With some places like Mexico and Europe it's hard to pinpoint exactly when the concept of pro-wrestling crystalized but it's very cut-and-dry with Japan as it was imported post-WWII by the likes of Karl Gotch and Lou Thesz and caught on rather quickly as soon as native hero Rikidozan (ironically Korean by birth) was established as the local star to beat back the evil gaijin Americans currently occupying their land in a much needed escape valve for collective cultural tensions. Sorta like how the Hogan era in the WWF was all about America defending itself from the looming threat of nuclear annihilation through the power of bulging muscles and rock 'n roll and the Austin era was all about a collection of surly individuals kicking back against the rise of an increasingly bland, corporatized, politically correct America that seemed to have a hate-on for the common working man.
But socio-economic conditions and larger political ramifications don't mean a damn thing if the art in question cannot stand up on its own in a vacuum. And that's how I judge wrestling matches. Are they fully functional stories taken on their own from bell to bell? A great crowd and a hot angle can give a real boost to a bout but once you step through those ropes and are given eight-to-sixty minutes to tell a story, whether or not it succeeds or not is up to how good you and your partner are at pantomime.
Rikidozan's villain-of-the-week is Dick Beyer, under his most popular guise as The Destroyer. Dick Beyer is lowkey one of the best pro-wrestlers to ever do it. The man understands how to work a live crowd better than most performers ever dream of. Terry Funk and The Rock are the only two off the top of my head who are in the same league... and he might honestly smoke them both by way of doing so while wearing a mask and relying almost exclusively on body language. He's the Lon Chaney of the squared circle. How good is Dick Beyer at his job? He's the only heel to ever receive a national award for his performances.
Describing the beats of the match is unimportant as the real action is what happens between the moves. The flawless way that they play with the audience. The way that The Destroyer is always moving, chatting, engaging the crowd even if locked in a legscissors. The way Rikidozan teases his big overhead chop finisher. Everything is logical. Everything is built up. It's a perfect blend of realistic sport and exaggerated theatrics. You could know nothing about these men going in and understand them both perfectly by the time it's over. And of course the biggest bump is saved for the finish.
Web of Spider-Man vol. 1 #31-32; The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 1 #293-294; Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man vol. 1 #131-132 (Oct. - Nov. 1987)
Rating: A+
Despite a lot of my favorite pieces of media being overtly dark and cynical and my favorite genre of entertainment being grown men kicking one another in the face until one of them can no longer stand, I myself am not a cynical person. Darkness, I reason, only exists to contrast and frame the light. The great artists always understand this, either intellectually or instinctively as a matter of observable fact - Homer, Rembrandt, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Akira Kurosawa, The Ramones, et cetra. As such I'm not really a fan of the "Dark Age" of comic books - that period from the late '80s through the early aughts in which American superhero comics (most notably D.C. and Marvel) overindulged in the occasionally grim overtones of the preceding Bronze Age and thereby lost the context as to how and why those darker moments worked. They were exceedingly rare and always had long-term character consequence. Heroes are supposed to win. If not physically, then always morally. Any piece of fiction in which the villain manages to eek out a W against the protagonist in both columns is to be regarded as nothing more than an occasionally interesting curiosity bereft of any true artistic merit. All "high" art is morally informative and makes a clear statement. All "low" art either lacks a moral foundation, subverts a preexisting one, or is "up for interpretation" as to its meaning.
Yes, I am telling you there is an objective right and wrong way to tell stories.
Do it incorrectly and you end up with the last 25 unreadable years of Marvel Comics.
Do it properly and you end up with something like Kraven's Last Hunt.
It's an Excedrin(TM) evening.
The story of Kraven's Last Hunt is a simple one, though perhaps not as simple as the back of the trade paperback declaring it "THE ULTIMATE TALE OF REVENGE!" A newlywed Spider-Man reflects upon the dangerous nature of his vigilante work and the multiple friends, allies, and enemies he's lost along the way. He's ambushed by perennial B-lister Kraven the Hunter - who's totally off his tits on jungle herbs - and subsequently blasted with a rifle and buried alive. This is only the third or fourth worst thing to happen to Peter Parker that afternoon. Kraven then dons a copy of Spidey's black suit (this takes place after the original Symbiote storyline - fans just loved the look so much that Peter for some reason keeps wearing a spandex replica of the alien parasite that almost killed him) and proceeds to beat the sauce outta street thugs so badly he puts them in traction. In his quest to prove himself superior to his foe, Kraven hunts down and single-handedly subdues the cannibalistic serial killer Vermin, whom Spider had previously only beaten with help from Captain America. Spider-Man awakes after TWO FULL WEEKShave passed and PULLS HIMSELF OUT OF THE GRAVE in an iconic moment. Spidey reunites with Mary Jane and then confronts Kraven, who is so mentally gone by this point he refuses to fight and instead siccs a captured Vermin on him. Kraven witnesses a weakened Spidey get his ass kicked by Vermin and only intervenes when it's obvious even to his depressed, drug-addled mind that Spidey is not so much fighting for sake of vengeance or self-defense as he's fighting to keep everyone else in NYC safe from Vermin possibly escaping. In one last morally uneven move, an utterly deflated Kraven unleashes Vermin back into the streets of NYC before leaving a confession for the police to find and blowing his brains out with a hunting rifle. A heavily roughed up Spider-Man is left to track down and capture Vermin on his lonesome. Which he of course does. Then he goes back home to his wife. Kraven is subsequently buried right next to the grave he dug for Spider-Man.
He's home.
The synopsis does this tale an injustice. The plot itself is good. It's the execution that makes this one of the all-time great comic storylines. There isn't a single panel wasted across all six issues and all of them are gorgeously rendered by Mike Zeck, Bob McLeod, and letterer Rick Parker. The persistence of rain, sludge, and lightning in this storyline is perfectly utilized as are the small little rat and spider motifs. Every character servers a purpose both narratively and - in a rare move for a superhero comic - symbolically as well. Spider-Man, Kraven, and Vermin compliment one another in poetic ways.
Kraven is the man who believes himself to be a beast; a man not unlike the Conan the Cimmerians of latter fiction who feels constrained and defeated by the modern world and its trappings, wishing to exercise control both over it and himself by flaunting the savage part of himself. He is a man who wishes to be a beast and wishes to see others as such. He fails in this endeavor and is broken by it as that is simply not the way the world works and his fellow men are not how he wishes them to be. Defeated, unable to accept that he has been wrong about the world and unwilling to change his mindframe to match, he takes himself out like a coward, falsely believing there to be dignity in it.
Vermin is a beast that was once a man. A monster not unlike a Gollum who's more pitiable than fearsome. He also probably eats babies not unlike a Gollum or a sasquatch. Much like Kraven he's ill-equipped to fit into society. However, whereas Kraven merely believes himself to be incapable of fitting in with the modern day and longs to be more of an animal, Vermin is that wish come back upon itself. He was a man. He became a beast. The world terrifies and confuses him - as it does Kraven - but the tiniest bit of his humanity still wishes to connect with his fellow man. But he cannot. He is a monster. A beast. Something whose very nature is functionally antithetical to the civilized world. He is the inverse and extreme of the Hunter. Still, though he is captured and constrained, it never once enters his mind to kill himself. He's an animal. An animal only wishes to live, by any means necessary.
Spider-Man is our protagonist and, as is fitting, possesses what the antagonists do not. He is not a beast. He does not perceive himself as being a beast. He is a man, through and through. In the most poignant moment of the entire storyline, as Peter is dragging himself out of the grave with nothing but the love of Mary Jane to carry him through the fear, he mocks the very idea that he's some mythical spider being - he's just a man who is doing what he thinks is best the best way he knows how. There is no spider; there is only Peter Parker, human being. Kraven's failure to understand this - how any man would wish to simply be a man with a wife and normal responsibilities - is what defeats the antagonist in the end. Peter's ability to not be cowed by fear and to think two steps ahead is what allows him to capture Vermin in the end. And his reward for all this? To go home to his wife. To be Peter Parker, human being, loving husband, for one more day. And that's honestly the best any of us can hope for in this life.
Just a shame that nobody in Marvel Comics has apparently read this storyline and we've been dealing with interdimensional spider totem crap and multiverse theory for the last twenty-odd years.
I could go on and sing the praises of this book for hours and not properly relay just how amazing this storyline is. This is not so much a superhero saga as it is a poem in the form of one. Every line, panel, page break, and box format is constructed in such a way as to nail home the overarching themes of confinement, fear, and, ultimately, the triumphant love between a normal man and his wife. Absolutely essential reading both for Spidey fans and people who are looking for a happy medium between dark subject matter and nuanced execution.
Why yes, there are several collected graphic novel reprints.
QUOTES
"There is no Spider-Man. He's a mask. A myth. A lie. Oh, sure, it'd be great if putting on a costume could miraculously change the man underneath. But it can't. I'm not Spider-Man. I'm just... Peter Parker." - Spider-Man, giving us the real shit
"yum. yum. yum." - Vermin, after eating some poor chick
"All these years you've misunderstood me. You thought I was larger than life. You thought I was magic. You thought I was madness. Some creature that crawled and spun and hid in shadows. That mocked and tormented and reveled in darkness.Idiot! There is no spider! There's just me! Just a normal guy - who got tapped on the shoulder by fate. Just Peter Parker: That's my weakness. That's my strength." - Peter Parker, reiterating for those who didn't get it
"I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid. Yes, I am. But there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong - as long as I don't turn back. As long as I do what's right." - Spider-Man, defining heroism
I dunno what this has to do with entomology but ok
Have other people reviewed this album? Why yes. RazorFist's Metal Mythos episode on the band in question goes more in depth than I care to. I'm neither a journalist (perish the thought) nor an expert on the group in question. In fact, I find the entire premise of doing a text review of a purely auditory artform to be an exercise as pointless as, say, making a film adaptation of a story that only works because it's a commentary on the medium it's originally presented in. But I'm of the mind that I'm a better human being than Zack Snyder. Failing to clear that low hurdle I'm merely some goblin jerk with an opinion. And that opinion is that W.A.S.P. rules ass. One of the best metal bands out there, period. Up there with Accept as one of the most consistently great, too. The first five albums these guys dropped are all essential listening; a feat matched only by the immortal genre codifiers that are Black Sabbath. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the first album my favorite band produced. Expanded addition, with originally planned intro track, of course.
I'm on the prowl and I watch you closely, I lie waiting for you
Well, I'm the wolf with the skeepskins clothing
I lick my chops and you're tastin' good
I'll do whatever I want to to ya, I'll nail your ass to the sheets
I'll power-thrust 'til the sweat starts to sting ya:
I F**K LIKE A BEAST
Originally left off the album due to being too risque for the general audience and sold as a limited release international single in one the more brilliant marketing bids the metal genre has ever seen, this infamous track is... honestly one of my least favorite the band has done. It's overexposed and honestly just not as catchy or heavy as the other stuff on the album. It's a meme. A novelty. Blackie Lawless seems to agree with me as he hasn't performed it live since the Bush era, following his spiritual rebirth into the second or third most unfathomably basedChristian metal act out there.
Three guesses as to who the most based of the bunch is
That and it's just plain overplayed. Ironic, huh? You'd think this is the only song these guys ever recorded according to some fools in the metal scene. Well I hate to break it to you but these guys aren't RATT. They're not Cinderella. They're not Velvet Revolver or Buckcherry any of those other dweebs who stumbled upon one catchy tune and ran it into the ground - they're W.A.S.P. and they rule ass.
This same tune would be later reworked - in my opinion to immensely better effect - on their fourth album The Headless Children in the form of mid-album killer track 'Mean Man'
The superior lead single to this album. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. It's punchier, tighter written, and leaves the listener feeling better than they came in. Overplayed? Oh, absolutely. But if you're gonna be a killer band that only has one song that gets consistent radio play, you could be much worse off.
It could also be the worst song your band has ever produced.
An exemplary hair metal track. As in it does what it does so well that it's practically a stereotype of the genre. You could play this to any set of people between the ages of seventy-five and eleven and they'd be like "Yeah, that's definitely an '80s hair metal tune." Then they'd ask you to crank it again. If they had taste. If they don't they're not worth the effort and cannot be trusted to manage money or carry simple tasks to term. Use this to vet dates and business partners. It's a foolproof method.
Solid album filler track. Honestly not wild about it one way or the other. Your standard sex-drugs-rock-n-roll anthem. Narrowly avoids the pitfall of becoming a lame rock-n-roll song about rock-n-roll by not listing it by name. Rock-n-roll songs that are explicitly about rock-n-roll have a 95% chance of being utter garbage. I have no idea why that's the case but it is. If I had to guess it'd be the diminishing returns of nostalgia and the seemingly perpetual state of all good music existing solely in the past because of it. Hell, even Family Guy landed an uncharacteristically accurate joke at the expense of this phenomenon.
Okay, so we've established that W.A.S.P. can S.P.E.L.L.. It seems to be one of their favorite things to do. I'm glad that this new generation of scumbag bad boy dropouts take their vernacular exercises so seriously.
Hard for me to really rate this one. The tune and lyrics individually are decent enough but put together they have this really dirty, awful vibe. It just makes you feel like a total dirtbag in a way that usually only Bryan Adams manages to pull off on accident. And I don't mean a vaguely suave Razor Ramon type dirtbag who hangs out at bars to pick up easy slatches either. I mean the kinda dirtbag who haunts his old high school parking lot in his beat up Firebird despite having dropped out three years ago. Utter, unrepentant douchebag music.
A blackboard jungle - toe the line the rulers made
A homework hellhound screams at me: MAKE THE GRADE
Tick tock, three o'clock - I'm sitting here and countin' off the days
A fire bell is ringin' hell and I'd sure love to see it blaze
(BURN IT DOWN)
(School daze) School daze, I'm here doin' time
(School daze) School daze, my age is my crime
(School daze) School daze I'm here doin' time
(School daze) School daze, I'm attendin' Hell High
Every child who's ever gone through the American public education system can attest that it sucks. It's too long, half of the teachers have no idea what they're doing, you get forced to do homework almost every night, and you learn nothing practical after age fifteen unless you take a shop or home econ class. Honestly, Thomas Jefferson was on to something. Basic education like being able to read and write? That should be for everyone. Anything that requires tutoring above a ninth grade level? A kid outta show some initiative to deserve that. The world is full of overeducated idiots nowadays who'd better serve themselves and their fellow man by picking vegetables or tarring driveways than opining on concepts they clearly do not have the faculties to comprehend, let alone examine with any depth.
But enough about me, time for the music.
It rules. Everything about this song works. The introduction with the Pledge of Allegiance comes back in one of my favorite bridge drops this band has ever done:
Truly this is what the word "banger" was meant for, Gorilla. Brings a tear to my eye. Absolutely perfect. A masterpiece of metal from start to finish. A truly immaculate hunk of evil, dirty metal. I love it. I love it. I love it.
Oh crap it's a ballad. And a great one at that. Blackie Lawless gets to show off more traditional pipes in this one. Kinda seductive, ngl. I'd have sex with Blackie Lawless if he sang to me like this. Even though he's explicitly trying to twist my soul to the dark side with this tune.
You'll begin to notice that this album is very bottom heavy. Pear-shaped, if you will. And I mean that in a good way. This album has a fat, strong ass. It's a bold Latina woman who ain't never gonna leave you once you get married and insists she make the taco shells at home in the toaster oven instead of buying them in the store like the senseless gringas do. A bold, daring, but all the same uniquely sensitive Spanish speaking werewolf woman who always waits for you to get home from work with
Thrash metal time. I physically cannot stop from headbanging when this one comes on. It's one of those.
I know they're going for demonic energy but it honestly comes off more like goblin energy. Impish, petty evil. That's honestly the reason why most of W.A.S.P.'s lame rock-n-roll songs about rock-n-roll work. They're explicitly about scummy, bad behavior and they very seldom glamorize it. These are songs about things you should not be doing. It'll become really, really obvious come their fourth and fifth albums that you are not supposed to emulate their behavior.
The tune from RAGEWAR. Bask in it, folks. Bask it its glory.
Again, note how it never actually glamorizes any of the demonic imagery. Expressly told from the POV of a terrible force that you'd be a fool to idolize. A lot of lesser metal acts fail to maintain that distinction. This is what puts W.A.S.P. above a Motley Crue, Warrant, or Ghost in that regard. And I like all those bands to some extent - they're just not thematically even album to album (or even track to track) with their presentation.
I'm a mark for this song. A mark for this whole album, really. It's just something I like. Do I have any groundbreaking insight upon it or any witticisms set aside for each individual track? Not really. Which is probably why I'm gonna change the format the next time I attempt an album review. There's really only so many ways you can say "This works well as a piece of music. It is fundamentally sound and the lyrics meet with the instrumentation in such a way as to enhance both". Perhaps going track-by-track in detail is not terribly feasible. Because getting however many pages in and realizing you're just gonna start repeating yourself is a type of torture. And the torture never stops.
The b-side to the 'Animal (F**k Like a Beast)' single. Definitely a b-side. Yup.
Nothing wrong with it, nothing outstanding. A solid filler track. Rolls off nicely. It's like a toothless version of future W.A.S.P. great 'Restless Gypsy'.
That's right folks - two decades before Ghost started doing excellent metal covers of random tunes as hidden tracks on their albums, W.A.S.P. did the same. It's a gimmick that I'm glad is making a comeback. Bands that actually do have a unique sound should do covers. I do wanna hear what different artistic takes on the same material sound like. Maybe one day I'll even do an entry where I compare versions of 'The Great Pretender' or 'House of the Rising Sun' to see which is my favorite. (Spoilers: it's Dolly Parton and Joan Baez's versions respectively.)
This is almost a perfect cover.
I have no bloody idea what handcuffs have to do with this song, though. Really should've left that little aside out of the final product, guys. Takes it down a full letter grade for me, honestly. It's almost as pointlessly egregious as Limp Bizkit's additions to 'Behind Blue Eyes'.
Upon the insistence of my fellow men (well, dragons mostly) I have decided to begin a proper blog. A place where I can slow drip my thoughts onto a page and array them into something approaching a cohesive sequence of logical inputs and outputs. Easier read than written, I assure you. Blogspot was selected as the dropping ground for this thermonuclear spazz-out as I'm too much of a Boomer (born 1992) to utilize such websites as the popular globalist spyware platform or the popular Red Chinese spyware platform and instead feel that the only trustworthy websites are those that have stuck around from the Clinton era. It's not my fault that 1999 was objectively the last great year in human history - or maybe it is and I just don't know it yet.
Besides, I used to have a couple blogs here where I'd spew out both really bad high school poesy and contextless pro-wrestling match ratings. Both have long since cast into the black hole of cyberspace deletion.
Oh hey look it's Bill Clinton's half-brother!
If this seems like a glorified vertical slice that's because it is. You are witnessing me testing out the capabilities of this site in real time. Yes, even right now. Hours, days, maybe even years or decades removed from initial publication. There is an unending ouroboros of goblin men on Stairmasters writing out blogs as you read this. They're all the same blog. This is they.
There is no way to end this post (for it is a test and has already either passed or failed its initial run and the only means of knowing for certain is to shunt it out into the cold, cold world.
