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No way is Kobashi overrated on that when he has 3 of the most brilliantly laid out matches ever to his name between 6/9/95, 1/20/97, and 6/12/98. If anything, I think the intelligence behind his work is underrated. You can pop in any decent random AJPW or NOAH 6 man like, say, the 9/03 one against Takayama, and you'll see a level of crowd interaction and character work far beyond anything in WWE tags that follow the same awful formula every damn time.

I agree on Brody having become underrated. I wouldn't call him the greatest brawler ever or anything but I really like the guy's unique aura as this crazy brawler who could go hold-for-hold with the best when he wanted to. I'd call his 3/88 Jumbo a smartly laid out slow burn type match and not something that deserved to get voted the worst match on the AJPW 80's set. He also had some really fun tag work that got left off the set for whatever reason, like the 12/83 match with Jumbo/Tenryu and the 12/84 match with the Funks.

If I'm paying $60, I should get at least as good an experience as what I can get just searching for random matches on Youtube. I feel ripped off that I got it expecting to watch some old territory stuff not easily available and instead they seem focused on recent PPVs and Raw soap opera shit that's already all over the usual video streaming sites that can I download from and not deal with annoying buffering problems. You can't even say it's mainly the music editing since they have a shitload of material from Classics on Demand they can easily put up.

Things to keep in mind with Kobashi/Kawada 1/19/95 1. It happened 2 days after the nearby Kobe earthquake 2. The show nearly got cancelled 3. It wasn't televised All those things tell me that a draw was probably booked at the last minute. With no TV and the area still in a pretty bad shape, I'd guess that the guys just wanted to give the fans something great and memorable rather than it being Baba trying to cut the legs from under Kawada of whatever.

I don't agree with that generalization at all. Look up Daisuke Ikeda vs. Takeshi Ono and you'll see 4 minute match that still manages to be very engaging with a clear beginning, control segments, and even some big nearfalls. It may actually be my 2010 MOTY regardless of length. I'll admit you're not going to see that quality on throwaway TV matches, though.

What I disagree with is your implication that cringing and thinking it's awesome are somehow mutually exclusive things. Whether it's Andre carefully building to a single basic bump or Yuko Miyamoto doing a moonsault off a scaffold, the idea of creating a convincing impression that a guy is hurt is a pretty fundamental part of building a match, so I don't see any reason to not look at head drops as just another way of creating drama even with the studies telling us how bad concussions are. I'm also pretty sure the WWE style of having guys on the road year-round trying to wrestle entertaining singles matches poses a lot more risks with the drug addictions than puro guys mostly coasting through tags and going all out for the last match on the tour.

I don't really understand this mentality. I mean, if you refuse to watch it, it's not like it's like it's going to make the videos go away or reverse the effects that wrestling that style has already had on guys. Going online and condemning dangerous looking spots also isn't going to stop arena fans from continuing to pop big for them. After all, even when we're talking about reeling in new fans, the matches that generally get recommended the most and have the highest success are ladder and TLC matches built around crazy stunts. I'd argue that instead of there being some "workrate dogmatism" (lol) created by some obscure RSPW guys, there is just something about watching these athletically impressive or death-defying spots that appeals to some primitive part of the brain and creates the same unparalleled excitement seen while watching slugfests in boxing or MMA. WWE may have been able to condition fans to accept a less violent style, but I doubt that visceral quality so fundamental to wrestling's appeal can ever be entirely learned away.

Just got this and I'm kind of confused about viewing the old school house shows on this. I read before on here that all the house shows were up but I only see a handful on my iPad app. It would suck if that's all they have since I only got it to watch some early 80's Andre and Backlund matches and don't give a fuck about watching the soap opera shit.

If appearances don't matter, you're saying you'd get the exact same enjoyment out of Kawada if he wrestled his entire career in a chicken suit.

Ignoring the fact that I have yet to see a convincing argument for why "PED's" like HGH and testosterone should be treated differently than any other supplement, people are being way too hard on Sonnen. I mean, you're kidding yourself if you don't think there's a huge number of guys equally desperate to win using their own illegal stacks who haven't been caught and that's a fact that most sports fans seem to willingly ignore when they celebrate the high level of competition sustained by these athletes. I question how much this hate is from people who really would want to see a "perfect world" with PED's completely gone and a much less entertaining resulting product, as opposed to people who are simply being worked into buying Sonnen's heel act. To use analogy, pretty much every male in porn is on Viagra or some similar drug that they may have gotten through some questionable means, but I don't think anyone truly wants it to stop knowing it would make a much worse product. To me, the only wrinkle that Sonnen getting busted for HGH and EPO adds to the narrative is that the guy truly was doing whatever he could to support his family through his in-ring performances, and I don't see why he should be hated for that.

Vader's AJPW run is really underrated stuff. Even I kind of underrated it when I was first going through 90's AJPW, but on rewatch the CC 1999 final with Kobashi and Misawa dome match both came across not only as strong candidates for Vader's best match but for the best matches worked in a big man style period. It's easy to look at it on paper and see it as just another testament to the greatness of AJPW's 4 kings, but what really makes it impressive is how Vader still managed to put his own distinct touch on those matches and forced the AJPW guys to bring back some of the great subtleties that the style had slowly been moving away from.

Couldn't you say that about a lot of the other blade jobs getting mentioned? The Eddie JD 2004 one, for example, was basically just the result of a botched blade job following an unprofessionally hard chair shot, and it had a pretty similar outcome to the one I mentioned with Eddie passing out backstage and going to the hospital. You can say that there's a lot of dramatic elements present in the JD 2004 match that you don't see in a deathmatch, but that seems like it would be different thing from what the OP was asking about in just the straight-up most brutal blade jobs ever.

In terms of sheer sickness, I don't anything beats Nick Gage's injury at Tournament of Death 2009. IIRC the guy actually died from the blood loss and had to get resuscitated at the hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRLVuYSggyY

Actually, if you bring "real sports" into the conversation, it becomes even more obvious that a world championship is just a marketing gimmick. To go back to the boxing example brought up before, there are shitloads of world titles in that sport and even the organizations commonly recognized as "legit" do all kinds of shady shit like giving guys titles to help market them or making up extra belts to make some money off sanctioning. It's pretty much boxing's worst kept secret that there's tons of corruption and greed involved in the world title business, but people just go along with it because it's part of the fun of the sport. I'd argue it falls more in line with your ideal of "suspending reality" to just go along with what promotions bill as a world title than to come up with ways to exclude certain promotions.

I remember Phil Schneider once making a good point that if you decide that you're going to talk about pro wrestling as a work, it makes no sense to view champion status as anything more than just another gimmick to entertain fans and make money. Setting up some arbitrary and ill-defined criteria to exclude certain champion gimmicks makes about as much sense as doing the same to decide what counts as a "true" biker gimmick or even a "true" ladder match.

I agree that it can be pretty interesting to look at a bunch of matches of guys and look for patterns or see they adapt to different environments. That's not something I'm arguing against. What I'm not a big fan of is when you take it a bit farther than that and you're assembling huge ordered lists of guys or talking about matches in terms of being carry jobs. That's something that I think is impossible to come up with any satisfactory answers and that kind of takes the fun out of watching the illusion wrestlers try to create. An example I like would be the Kobashi/Honda GHC title match. I watched it around the time of Ditch's best of 2003 when there were a bunch of people talking up Honda's performance and even calling it a "Honda carry job," and I pretty much went along with that consensus. I liked the match but I also didn't get into it much just because I didn't really notice Kobashi doing much and I prefer matches that are more 2-way affairs. When I rewatched it after seeing Kobashi's AJPW run, not only did I mark out for the match but my interpretation also completely changed. Honda was still awesome but I also realized that Kobashi was also pretty brilliant because he was a guy who, up to that point, basically made a career out of taking the spotlight and it was a match where he showed he knew how to step aside. Honda certainly did "outperform" Kobashi in common terminology but saying Kobashi was "carried" misses the point because the match was there to show off Honda. I don't know how you could account for something like that if you're doing a ranking but it also raises a problem I have with rankings in that, even when we're taking an analytical mindset, so much of what we interpret as "great" is simply from what we're getting worked into thinking.

The problem I have with focusing on individual wrestlers is that wrestling is cooperative by its nature. It's not like a sport like boxing where you can see a guy just pick someone apart and point to that as a great performance. As Loss seemed to imply, the greatest carry job would be one that doesn't even seem like a carry job at all, or where it looks like the guy doing the carrying is the one getting carried. There is just so much that goes on backstage there's no way we can identify how much a match is something a guy came up with and how much is from some agents. Even in boxing people will admit that a guy's trainer plays a massive part in his performance. The other thing is that I never see serious boxing fans try to look for some non-existent baseline instead of just talking about individual performances. Human behavior is not static and what you see when a guy steps into the ring is the result of an endless number of causal forces rather than something that can be traced to a single person. That element is acknowledged when fans preface their predictions with phrases like "If he looked as good as he did when..." or "Unless he pulls out a miracle..." Even if you saw every match from a wrestler that's available, you wouldn't have a profile of how "great" they are as much as you would have a narrative of what they did across various nights. I just don't see how it could be more productive to go over an artificial narrative of a guy's career in vague generalities over discussing the specifics of a match.

I actually agree with this entirely. I've run into a similar problem with music where the soloing by Pete Cosey and Sonny Fortune in Agharta really makes it an amazing album to me, but I'm not sure if I should credit them for playing or Miles Davis for being the one who assembled the group and directed their playing. I don't know the answer, but wrestling is even more difficult to judge since you don't even know who is putting the whole thing together or to what extent. One big example of that would be Giant Baba, where most people here seem to agree that he played some role in putting together basically the best matches ever wrestled, but the true extent of his contribution has been a point of argument here with no definitive answer. As you say, it is pretty difficult to watch without getting some favorites, but I've found that just leaving those guys as my acknowledged favorites and stop worrying about what's a carry job or who the GOAT has let me enjoy matches a lot more.

Definitely, since the whole "art games" deal he builds the article against basically serves as an extension of what you're saying about there something more to a great work of art than just pleasure. A really good example he brings up of where that leads is modern art, where pleasure has been thrown out the window and you just have these guys who could never hope to measure up to any of the Renaissance masters finding ways to circle-jerk at how deep their half-assed shit is. It seems ridiculous and it's rightfully become shunned by the general populace, but that's pretty much where you're headed when you decide great art is more about finding deep "messages" over providing enjoyment.

The guy actually doesn't try to hide that most of his points are basically just him applying things already said by Nietzsche in 19th century to the 21st century. When you emphasize originality as much as academia does, there's only so many sensible things that can be said until it gets to where you're just saying stupid bullshit to fill the page. That a point may be old has no relevance to its validity.

You really should give that icycalm essay a serious look instead of rejecting it off-hand just because you don't like the language he uses. Really, it seems every objection you have to his view has already been addressed by him. Here's a quote from him that refutes this idea that great art somehow "rises above" enjoyment a lot better than I ever could This viewpoint is also pretty similar to what's been argued by people who've actually done scientific studies on why we bother with art that makes us sad. Magnum/Tully falls exactly into that category of something that's tragic but still enjoyable. As you say, it certainly does bring out negative emotions, but it does so in a very controlled fashion and telegraphs it in a way where anyone who watches it knows exactly what they're getting into. It's a straight example of what is talked about in that quote in how it completely throws out conventions of civilized behavior and presents man at his most animalistic. As you say, the resulting point where you're left questioning society's image of a man is where the "energy discharge" happens and the pleasure is created. A match that just creates negative emotions with no pleasure would be something like a 2012 Kobashi match. The guy tries all he can to turn back the clock 15 years, but his body just doesn't cooperate. In comparison to the controlled environment of Magnum/Tully, a hero being unable to overcome his age and giving a terrible performance is something spontaneous. It's no different from actually being disappointed in real life and we respond appropriately by calling his performance "sad" with none of the pleasure we'd get from tragedy. Admittedly, the line between sad and tragic is a lot more blurry in wrestling than other art forms. I found Undertaker/Lesnar to be a pretty amazing tragedy on par anything from the Greeks while most hardcore WWE fans just saw it as sad. In contrast, I'm sure a lot of non-hardcore fans would be completely turned off by Magnum/Tully. Still, I think the point is clear that wrestling simply uses negative emotions as a way of providing enjoyment, just like any other art form. Lastly, you misinterpret me in saying that I think videogames and wrestling are more "shallow" than other art forms. Far from that, I consider videogames to be inherently the highest art form in existence because the interaction allows it to reach levels of immersion that other art forms simply can't reach. Wrestling is right in 2nd place to that since its entire goal is to pull the audience into a deep passive immersion while stripping away anything that could interfere with that. When I say art should be enjoyable, entertaining, fun, or any other synonym for pleasure, I mean that applies to every art form is existence and it would be a step back to think there's anything else at work. It would be ludicrous call art "shallow" for being enjoyable when that's the sole reason we like art at all. You can praise Magnum/Tully without acting like it's somehow "beyond" what common sense tells us art should be.

The difference is I don't think anyone else is having the discussion but the thirty or so of us? yep, whereas practically the entire modern indie game scene is a response to that infamous ebert piece mentioned above. there are a number of self-conscious Art Games that don't even try to be fun to play, and i'm not sure how i feel about that. i'm also with childs - treating commercial vs. artistic success as a dichotomy is intellectual laziness. it often seems to come from older folks who don't "get" modern pop culture and the wider trends that developed its values. complaining about autotune really isn't different from the way a previous generation would say ONLY REAL INSTRUMENTS = REAL MUSIC, for example. The "art games" business is the stupidest thing. A game that doesn't try to be enjoyable isn't art, it's just a shitty game. The purpose of art is immersion and the immersion is what creates the enjoyment. The true art games are not the ones billed as such by ignorant hipsters, but the games that are simply the most enjoyable to play. If you ever study poetry, you learn pretty quickly that the greatness of a poem has little to do with some deep "message" behind it and is simply a matter of the emotions that it creates. Sure, you can put in interesting ideas but they're merely a means to an end. If your purpose is to create social change there's no reason to not just write a free essay instead of encasing your "message" inside some literature you're getting paid to publish. The topics discussed over whether guys wrestle for money or of whether the medium can offer up any "messages" or other pretentious shit are ultimately irrelevant to the question of if wrestling is art. That is, if its purpose can be to immerse fans within its simulation, which it definitely does. If we pretend art needs to do some other spooky stuff like "heal other people," I guess that means a bottle of aspirin is a work of art.

Agreed. Pro-wrestling isn't music (hell, not even pop-music), pro-wrestling isn't litterature, pro-wrestling isn't cinema, pro-wrestling isn't painting. Pro-wrestling doesn't express anything. It's not an art. At best it's a craft industry, and some great workers are terrific craftsmen. Pro wrestling is the very definition of art. It's along the same lines as literature, movies, TV, etc. It expresses emotion, creates an engaging relationship with the viewer, tells a story, etc. Those are all facets of art, and wrestling is a tremendous form of performance art. Agreed. If anything, pro wrestling is one of the highest art forms in existence because its sole focus is on generating raw emotion while leaving no room for any of the pretentious bullshit seen in something like contemporary painting. Also, Matt's point doesn't even make much sense considering that (to paraphrase an old tomk post) the goal behind many of the masters of classical art was to make money and get pussy. It didn't seem to go over too well last time I linked icycalm's On the Genealogy of Art Games, but the guy does a really job destroying the mentality seen in El-P's post and showing it as a recent development from people who just don't want to accept recent and popular art forms not only have artistic merit, but are actually better than older ones. I think factoring in drawing would be very useful in assembling a HOF or MOTY comps just because, since individual tastes can vary so much, a wrestler/match's popularity gives you about the only clear metric available to see how well it can appeal to the overall fandom and, thus, the chances of it appealing to whoever checks out the HOF/comp. In terms of being brought up when analyzing matches, I agree that it's basically a cop-out and that we should just analyze wrestling with the same depth we'd give any other art form. There's a lot more that can be said to sell someone on a match than "people loved this at the time."

I should come out and say that I don't think this at all. Later on tonight I'm uploading a podcast in which I rate The Steiners vs. Hiroshi Hase & Kensuke Sasaki from the 91 WCW / New Japan Supershow ****1/2 and in defence of the match argue that it has a ton more psychology that people give it credit for. I say something along the lines of "the thesis is too easy, if a match is a spotfest I think people default too quickly to assuming there is no compelling storyline or psychology, but this match has both of those things ..." I didn't want to set up a false dichotomy when I said that. I think a lot of guys on this board would even see me as a MOVEZ guy. I was just saying that it TENDS to be the case that the guys who are pushing this line of things "advancing" with time keep harping on about athleticism. And although athleticism = / = MOVEZ, they kinda go hand in hand don't they. Moves being the demonstration of athleticism. By your own posts here, it seems that you think athleticism is tremendously important. But I think a lot of people here (including me) would argue that it's much much less important than psychology and storytelling. It's not an either / or thing, but the fact it's continually brought up as evidence of "standards improving" creates the dichotomy, because people who think old wrestling is as good or better than wrestling now are going to be pointing to superior psychology, storytelling and match structure. ----------- But honestly, your argument is like saying music in 2014 is better than music from 1960s because bands now have better guitars and better equipment. For me, it's a nonsense argument and I can't really relate to it. If it's NOT like saying that, then maybe explain how it isn't. "The basics of a good song never change. Melody, rhythm, harmony. But the methods used to accomplish these things change & evolve. That is what you guys are failing to accept ... But the methods to skin the song cat have evolved & changed over time, with better guitars, better production methods and computer programmes being *some* of those things. That also does not always equal more exciting songs, by the way. But it does mean that bands are capable of doing all sorts of things they couldn't do before." Would you co-sign the re-write? Please, http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_the_genealogy_of_art_games/#partii Read the first few paragraphs of the second essay and maybe you'll understand things a little better. Also, for that "gameplay" shit, here's this http://insomnia.ac/commentary/gameplay/ What you're basically saying is that art, whose purpose is to create immersion, isn't getting better by having tools available that enable it to reach a higher level of immersion. If the technology doesn't matter and it's all STORY~! there's no reason that we should have ever evolved past books. That makes no sense. To tie this into wrestling, just think about those terms you are using, "psychology," "storytelling." If wrestlers choose to do a move with a face value attached to it of inducing a shocked psychogical state, how is that not psychology? Who the fuck would want to listen to a storyteller recount a narrative in plain monotone when you have the option of seeing someone do it colorfully and with energy? No matter how you slice it, those graphics are part of the game. If not, you're saying you'd be fine with watching matches built around weak/shitty looking punches if the "story" is good.

I think we agree on more than we disagree. If I'm reading your posts right, you're arguing that there is no objective standard because everything just comes down to tastes or "biases." I'm just taking that a bit farther by saying that those "biases" can be broken down into different ways of interpreting, which are in themselves by the viewer's prior experiences. Since people are constantly having new experiences and fans with new perspectives are coming, that's how I see that standards can change. To bring this into where the topic seems to be headed, that WCW cruiserweight thing you mentioned is a good example of how standards can change in ways that have little to do with advancing athleticism, since it's understandable that in the 90's when people were still popping for big men that a large section of fans would have a hard time taking juniors style seriously, but then a few years later with the rise of MMA and De La Hoya doing massive PPV buys, Rey Mysterio and Jeff Hardy become two of the biggest stars in the industry. You can pretty much break everything worthwhile that can be said about this topic into this: 1. There is no "objective standard" to evaluate matches, only subjective interpretation 2. Interpretations are shaped by prior experiences 3. New experiences mean interpretations can change 4. Therefore, standards can change How can there can be disagreement about something so simple? Some of these replies I've read in this topic from people who do seem to think there is some objective standard are ridiculous. We can't say it's not "fair" to go back and reinterpret Eddie/Malenko without 1995 eyes because they weren't working for "1995 eyes." Saying that they were would imply that they were working for anyone in the world in 1995, even with people with no prior experience watching wrestling who would have no idea about the symbolic value behind any of the moves. Would it be "fair" for such a person to evaluate Eddie/Malenko? If not, exactly what prior experience would they need for it to be fair? It's nonsense to try to assign some objective criteria for evaluating wrestling. Wrestlers have matches to entertain people who want to be entertained and that's it. Saying "it's not fair to say this match isn't good in 2014" is absurd because you're basically saying "It's not fair to say this match didn't entertain me in 2014." I don't have a WON subscription so I have no idea exactly what were the Meltzer comments that spurred on this argument, but I would like some elaboration on what people mean in saying that he sees "no value in re-evaluating old footage." Is he saying that there is something wrong with people watching old footage and forming different opinions than what he had at the time? If not, I don't see where the problem is. If we accept that there is no objective criteria, the natural conclusion is what I mentioned before where me calling a match good means the same thing as "this match entertains me." If Dave says that Brody entertained him in the 80's then he entertained him in the 80's and nothing can be said to change that because no one here is 80's Dave. I don't see why some people have such a hard time with this.