#38 - The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ

The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ (2015) (Merge) 

This topped my list of favorite albums of 2015, but that year was, to quote the musical Spring Awakening, totally fucked. I spent January through December in full on death anxiety mode as I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, went through two radioactive iodine treatments each with a week spent in isolation, and a gnarly neck dissection where I spent almost a week in the hospital, three weeks recovering at home, and all I got was a lousy scar that looks like a drug lord tried to assassinate me and left me for dead but I survived, dammit. Beat the Champ and The Tallest Man on Earth’s Dark Bird is Home (more on that one later) were my companions through the periods of isolation, and Beat the Champ in particular was a wonderful distraction. In fact, it’s the reason I started watching pro wrestling again. I was a huge WWF fan in the late 90s when wrestling was resurgent, but I lost interest once the Monday Night Wars ended when WWF bought WCW. From the isolation chamber (read: my old bedroom in my parents basement) I checked out the WWE Network and the rest is history. My fandom was renewed. Thanks, John Darnielle.

Despite being a Mountain Goats diehard, this is weirdly the only one of their five 2010s albums to make the list. I’m not sure why that is. All Eternals Deck contended, and while I love all of their records, it might be that I have such a strong connection to the records from the 00s (Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree in particular, both of which are likely Top 10 of the century for me)that these are just like a fun bonus. Beat the Champ has a special place due to it being my partner in trauma, but I think Darnielle did a great job covering all of these different perspectives and fascinating elements of the wrestling world while also making an album that felt as personal as everything else he does. “Heel Turn 2” in particular is one of the absolute songs of the decade, and I have a real affinity for the jaunty “Foreign Object” where Darnielle gleefully sings, “I’m gonna stab you in the eye with a foreign object.” He canonizes legends like Chavo Guerrero Sr and Bull Ramos with these sweet tales of men living through countless battles to enjoy their old age, and pens one of the most deeply moving tracks in his catalog in “Unmasked,” about a masked wrestler booked to lose a mask vs. mask match and set to reveal his face to the world. Darnielle showed that there was grace in something as barbaric and impolite as professional wrestling, and that’s just what he does. He shines his light on the dark corners of the world and shows you that there is worth in these hidden places. That’s his great gift as a storyteller (his two novels--2014’s Wolf in White Van and 2017’s Universal Harvester--are as good as you think they would be) and even though his records don’t quite takeover my mind, body, and spirit like they used to, it still gives me tremendous comfort that he’s out there working his magic.