El-P

ZSJ is trying his best to steal the MVP status from Ishii. Terrific match with Ibushi, who looked better than he has in the last few matches. Ishii gave one of his selling masterclass in an excellent outing against KENTA. Nagata vs Takagi was also excellent and a mighty fine replacement for Naito. Nagata is what, 53 ? He's way into that "greatest post 50 years old workers ever" conversation. The lesser be said about the other two matches the better. Next day for A Block is gonna be super rough (plus Nagata won't be there, instead we get... Bushi... yikes) apart from the main event, as there will be a curiosity as whether the usually waste-of-time guys can be carried to something good or at least not offensive (Great O-Khan has the best chance), so less easy fast-forward.

I don't watch MMA and know jackshit about it, but the segment itself came off hot. Paige Van Zant seems like she could be fun to have around and Masvidal looked like a star. On the other hand, after the awful Wardlow match, I have no desire whatsoever to see another bad shoot-style match involving Jake Hager. So, jury's out on this one. Lambert as Jim Cornette (and every boomer wrestling fan) has been awesome, I can have him as a manager every week forever.

Everyone wants to forget the neck tattoo even exist. Every AEW fan has PTSD from the neck tattoo. The neck tattoo doesn't exist, like Indiana Jones 4 and the last Star Wars trilogy. The neck tattoo should be blurred on TV.

The one case that has always fascinated me, and much more now, is the infamous Malenko vs Benoit match at HoggWild 96. First off I talked about how crowds should not be judged at all, but this is a special case as this was not a pro-wrestling fan crowd at all, but still. But the thing is, the exact same match happening in Korakuen Hall or the ECW Arena at the exact same date is probably a great match. But in this context, I have no idea what to make of it. It's a very unique case of course, but it's a fascinating one to me.

Holy shit didn't see this one coming !

It is. I don't mind supernatural stuff, I don't even mind when it's done in a straight camp way (and I mean, I was eating up the LU stuff). The Alexa Bliss stuff is something I suspect a part of me would actually enjoy if the execution/production was not so WWE (watched a bunch of it on Youtube, so there goes the "social media numbers mean something" out of the window !)

Wasn't that Lawler's deal too ? Not sure in his case it was just to not seem too old to headline though...

Ashley Valentine actually sounds like a cooler name than Charlotte Flair, which does have a gimmicky feel to it (the Charlotte part next to the Flair last name). Of course it's not as odd, in a way, as Dominik Mysterio !

Three words : Reality TV show. At the time when the Elite, which is basically the foundation of the promotion as far as what the style goes, was finally placed as heel main-eventers (which is their best act, Young Bucks especially are natural heels) and finally getting the focus (after a year of Jericho & Mox on top), Cody was seen as aping WWE shit, in a move totally contradictory with the philosophy and taste of most of the AEW audience. Then you add the incredible tone-deaf jingoist promo during the Ogogo feud, which ended up being a fail, and you get Cody going from beloved TV champ to a guy who looks out of place in his own promotion.

Omega & Page vs The Young Bucks is probably the match that had the deepest psychology ever in term of storytelling. Like, the amount of layers was just out of the world (but at the same time anyone could enjoy it, hell, I did not get all of the layers, I had to read about them later from people who paid better attention and with better memories). And that's not an exception at all in their body of work. The idea that they are just doing spots for the sake of it is a complete misunderstanding of their work. Also, the idea that pro-wrestling is only about the inner narrative is extremely reductionist. I've said it before, pro-wrestling stories are not exactly super interesting in themselves. Most of the times it's actually pretty mundane, when not totally dire and tired (not to mention the repetition of the exact same tropes in classic southern tag-team wrestling storytelling for instance, makes the responses just as Pavlovian as people popping for a gratuitous table spot). Excluding the form of pro-wrestling, or making it a secondary element, to concentrate on the infamous "storytelling" is simply erasing a huge part of what pro-wrestling is all about and why it can be so great. The "lol mOveZ" meme was funny for about two minutes in 2007 or something, but when it became an "argument" it has tremendously hurt the perception of pro-wrestling in some circles, including this board (not to mention it was a way to disqualify de facto people who would love a certain approach and paint them as stupid, and with poor taste basically, as the appreciation for supposedly "smart work" is also a way to gain some social capital, as a famous sociologist would say, in the little society that is the internet pro-wrestling fandom).

The question is, did they ever need to ? A hostile crowd is not something you see everywhere, and it has been pretty much a staple of WWE thanks to their ridiculous booking. John Cena has been a master dealing with (semi) hostile crowds. As far as indifferent (or simply tired) crowd goes, the exemple I use over and over and over again is Raven vs Saturn at WWIII (I think) 1998. Crowd is *dead* at the start of the match. By the end the heat is molten, peaking with the infamous Kidman turn. Raven = genius.

Of course it is. There was a study about pop music that stated that more or less people got settled in their ways at about 35 and past that point they really weren't open to new things. But the beauty of knowing that you (I mean you and I and everybody) are biased is that it's the first step in eventually seeing through those bias and avoid them as much as possible. In a way the last few years with me as been a process of unlearning what I thought I knew (always gotta ask yourself "How do I know what I think I know ?"), and it's an incredibly liberating process. Fact is, I was brought up on early 90's pro-wrestling, I basically checked out for a while in the early/mid 00's, which really doesn't help, but now I'm very comfortable with the idea that I've seen the best pro-wrestling I've ever seen happen in the last 5 years. And I'm 45. So yeah, it is a part of getting older, but it does not *have to* be. Agreed. The thing that is clearly undersold with Meltz because he's very polarizing and you're either a haterz or a stan apparently, is that he has learned first hand from some of the smartest people in pro-wrestling, including Terry Funk and Jim Cornette. Like him or not, he's not just some dude. One of the most interesting anecdotes he tells is how he learned very young that the whole "believability" thingy was totally relative when his friends from Mexico were telling him how US wrestling looked totally fake and phoney (yeah, those words again). Or stuff about Terry Funk telling him to study Japan because they were always more or less 5/10 years ahead of the curve. Like I said before, there is definitely a meta aspect to the Bucks & Omega (but that's part of their own identity and not a global generational thing, although they are not the only ones, Orange Cassidy comes to mind to), which is a new thing. I mentioned Thesz being goofy and comedic at times as a reference to the so-called "believability" of the "old-school".

I have no idea what the hell happened on this PPV reading this thread (apart from Bliss being jobbed out in her hometown), but it looks like a "so bad it's good" case. And it almost gives me the urge to check it out...

Glad you bring up Savage, I think about him *every time* when people talk about Omega doing goofy faces and gestures. Yep, this. Also, pro-wrestling has nothing to do with believability, it has to do with acceptance. Plenty of stuff in pro-wrestling looks dumb as fuck, awkward, or just plain nonsensical in a straight physical way (the way people move, bump, go along with spots, sell), the question is not about it being believable or not, the question is about whether it's accepted by the crowd or not. If it is, then it doesn't matter if it looks "phoney" or "not believable", there is a dialectic between the move (which can be anything, a spot, a sell, a facial expression), which is really nothing more than a sign, and the viewer. And BTW : Yep. That's another thing. Let's stop judging the crowds as if there were the "good" fans (the ones who provide "real heat", whatever it's supposed to be) and the "bad" fans ("This is awesome!", "fight forever!"). That's just awful (and yes, I have done it myself too, but it's never too late to change). That's basically a not so subtle form of classism in the context of pro-wrestling fandom. When you are judging a crowd to argue a point about a worker, that means you have no argument whatsoever.

And I'd bet you anything that if Tenryu and Terry Funk were 50 years old in 2021, they absolutely would do it ! And people would got batshit insane for it. I mean, Ricky Morton did it at past 60 and Dustin Rhodes has made the Code Red a part of his arsenal, so, it's totally in line with the kind of workers they were/are and their mentality.

Wait, you Aussies (it isn't a bad word, right ?) use the word thongs for flip-flops ? That's funny, French use it too (written tongs) ! And of course we call thong a "string" (en français dans le texte), because that makes all the sense in the world, right...

Isn't this like the greatest picture ?

I don't have to agree with those reasons though, especially when they seem to be pretty entrenched in a very normative discourse, which is something, like I said, I don't really care for anymore (I used to, I don't anymore). And we should always be wary of our own good faith, I in good faith said tons of stuff I absolutely disagree with today (including about, well, those guys and contemporary pro-wrestling in general as I stated way earlier). The thing that made me change my mind about a lot of things (and that goes way beyond my pro-wrestling tastes/opinions) was working on my own cognitive bias, and it's an everyday thing, really, it never ends. This may explains that indeed. You always hear the most vocal minority indeed and it does twist the perceptions. As far as pro-wrestling being overall better now than it ever was, that's an opinion I share, yes. But that doesn't mean I don't think there wasn't absolute greatness before.

And why not ? I mean, I'm sorry but why should it be, by default, an unacceptable idea ? Because that's where the issue lies. For some reason, the idea that these guys are, forget "the best ever", simply some of the greatest workers ever is apparently unfathomable to some in ways that triggers them. And I get "not getting it" or not even wanting to contemplate it, because for instance when I heard people talk about how Okada vs Tanahshi was the equivalent of Kawada vs Misawa (and maybe even better) years ago, my first reaction was "How dare you !" and I would not contemplate that idea whatsoever. Right now, I don't find it shocking at all and I find my first reaction to be pretty ridiculous. But I had to work around my own cognitive bias and habits to begin to change my own perception of how things work and why they work the way they do. Like I said in the Tamura vs Han survey thread, any prescriptive approach of pro-wrestling I have zero time for anymore. It's just too much of a subjective thing. I'm much more interested in a descriptive approach, first of all because it's much "easier" that way to try and reach for the most objectivity possible (although it's never really attainable), and also because it's basically more interesting to try and understand how things works rather than "Do I agree with it or not ?" (because really, who cares ?). The last big lesson I received was when I was doing my reviews of Taker matches at Mania, during the infamous streak of epics. It occurred to me that it did not matter whether some stuff were the most suited to my own taste, when taking the right amount of distance from my own bias I was able to get why some stuff were indeed rightly called great and a success despite me not being the biggest fan. Plus this way I was able to actually enjoy them more than I would have otherwise, so it's a win-win.

The issue I have with this argument, which I have heard before, is that generally speaking, people who blast Omega & the Bucks (to take the biggest offenders, but you can throw in modern NJPW in general, Will Ospreay, Adam Cole and the likes) usually say "This is shit, this is not how pro-wrestling used to be done and should be done, it's insulting to compare them to the actual great workers in history", while you very seldom hear (and honestly I have *never* heard it) people who love Omega, the Bucks and whatnot shit on the great workers of the past (and why would they, as OJ said these guys are the product of 25 years of studying and loving all those great workers and geeking out on the internet about them). It's pretty much a one way street.

Christian Cage being called "old-school" is something that is pretty amusing to me. When the late 90's/early 00's came, with them came a new generation of workers who did not, at all, work like their predecessors. Christian was one of them. The very way he was moving inside the ring felt foreign to me. He absolutely wasn't like Tito Santana, Bret Hart and even Shawn Micheals, not to mention Savage or Flair. He did bizarre looking moves and tons of dives. The structure of his matches did not look like anything close to what I was used to. And it wasn't really the stuff Benoit, Malenko & Eddie were doing in WCW either (and that I had seen in NJPW earlier in the decade). With Edge and the Hardys, Christian Cage is the picture boy from that first generation of guys who had this "indy" feel to it, before the first generation of ROH came on the scene. The fact his style of work, which has evolved over the years of course, but remains very different from what I was used to when I discovered pro-wrestling, is called "old-school" or even "classic" demonstrates too things : 1/I'm old. Fuck me. 2/"old-school" is only relative. In 25 years, 18 years old guys will talk about the Omega/Ospreay stuff as "old school, boomer (I mean, whatever term they'll use then) pro-wrestling from back in the days" and it's a given some people will refer to this period as the "old-school mentality". For Lou Thesz, the ever credible and oh-so-believable NWA World Champion, Ric Flair was a clown who was business exposing and doing nonsensical trampoline-looking shit. One of the funniest and actually most accurate thing I've heard about this was the Best Friends joking (in those segments the Bucks used to tape in hotel rooms) that the next generation of workers will be "Lock up, 450 !!!!!!!!". There is historically an evolution of pro-wrestling that goes toward quicker, more athletic, with more spots and more *spectacular* and physically demanding spots. Mind you, not *everybody* is going this route (Okada built his entire style around a fucking dropkick and a short clothesline, in US wrestling it's the equivalent of borrowing from Jim Brunzell & Jake Roberts, to stay in the 80's state of mind, but of course the complexity and actual structure of the matches are absolutely contemporary), but that's the way it goes overall. Which isn't just a pro-wrestling thing, it's very much linked to many many sociological, economical, physiological elements. But that is the way it goes. And the "back to the basics" approach can only be both a reactionary movement (like every retro stuff in pop music, not that it's necessarily bad, but it definitely clutch onto an imaginary norm from a golden age, which is always the most "bourgeois" kind of attitude, because it's always about the past and defending the status quo) but also a very relative experiment, because every generation has its own idea of what the old-school is. And of course, totally self-aware, in essence (he cannot be otherwise, their can't be spontaneity in trying to recreate something that isn't anymore). Hence, the fact Christian Cage being considered like this very much old-school kind of worker kinda strikes me as odd to me because my mind has discovered pro-wrestling goodness with Curt Henning vs Tito Santana. This is old-school, not Christian Cage ! (but of course it's not, because what is really old school is Ray Stevens, except it's not etc etc...)

I googled it. Learn something everyday. I really enjoy Robbie Eagles BTW. I guess Billie Kay & Peyton Royce are gonna show up in IMPACT eventually. They'd be right at home there too.

*raise hand * Actually, knowing myself, I'd be Orange Cassidy in lazy mode.

Promoted by Coach Tony K., from sleaze thread fame. Yeah, I mentioned it before, but the fact Mox got familiar with Japanese deathmatches the same exact way as I did (saw the Cactus Jack pictures from Japan on WWF TV and Terry Funk in ECW, bought the IWA King of Deathmatches tape) really struck me in term of how much this generation of pro-wrestlers are basically like "us". They are the product of the culture we were all (speaking for the boomers on this board) an active part of. Or simply phones. But mostly 4K screens, for sure. I think somewhere there's also the Internet culture of memes showing up in the middle of this. I mean, Orange Cassidy is totally a meme pro-wrestler. And meme absolutely play on recycling pop culture trash and clashing bizarre aesthetics, which also gave us the vaporwave scene in the 10's. When I think about it, Blue Meanie X Lemmy X Japan X meta... Yeah, maybe Kenny Omega is the first vaporwave pro-wrestler.

I've been thinking about something for quite a while, is that pro-wrestling is actually getting more and more real as it evolves. What they do inside the ring in term of actual physical stuff, because of the complexities of the spots and sequences, the legit strenght spots (in a match with Jeff Cobb for instance), the flying that has never been as crazy as it is today, the pacing, the stiffness in some cases, all of this is infinitely more real than it ever was before. And as the audience enjoys it for what it is, the need to be "believable", whatever that even meant (because really now let's be serious), is getting more and more irrelevant because there is no need to believe what supposedly happens, because what actually happens is real. The most unrealistic it gets, the more real it actually is and the more straight (both as in direct and also honest) the relationship between the performance and its audience gets. I find it fascinating that something that was born as a fraud and total pretend carny game at the beginning has basically evolved toward a form that has no care for any kind of "realism" and no care for believability anymore, because it doesn't need to, as the pretend as turned into an actual reality, with an honest value of its own.