Cast of thousands
But we were the real two
And when I’m alone
Before a mirror late at night
I will reveal you
I will reveal you–Unmasked!
The most recent Mountain Goats album, Beat the Champ, is a song cycle about professional wrestling. Paste magazine interviewed singer/songwriter John Darnielle and asked him if he would ever write a novel on the topic. He responded with ambivalence.
Darnielle: The thing to do would be to believe it. Most of the time when people write about wrestlers, they want to talk about the conflict between the actual person and this character and so on and so forth. Whereas I think Wrestler’s Cruel Study did this — had the character be the character, like believe that Kevin Sullivan is into the occult. And if you believe that stuff, then it’s more interesting than I think some human interest angle of the man behind the mask.
Paste: Yeah. You should work on that.
Darnielle: Because the mask tell you more about the man than the man ever can.
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