Before the Deluge: The Early Beatles and the Art of the Possible

There is a curious blindness that often afflicts hindsight, a flattening of the past beneath the weight of what followed. We look back through the smoke of revolutions, and what was once incendiary appears quaint, even cute. So it is with the early Beatles.

“Please Please Me,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” — these are songs that the modern ear, dulled by decades of sonic experimentation, is tempted to dismiss as merely cheerful, merely pop. That is the verdict of the latecomer. This was my public verdict when I first heard the Beatles in junior high — but in private, I kept the guilty pleasure of loving those songs all the same. Perhaps more.

But to hear these songs rightly, one must return not to the fullness of the Beatles' later years, but to the emptiness they filled:

In 1962, the great fire of 1956 still glowed faintly in memory. That earlier year had unleashed a torrent of American vitality: Elvis Presley snarled and shimmied his way into history, Chuck Berry wrote the teenaged myth in three chords, Little Richard screamed theology into dance halls, and Jerry Lee Lewis pounded the piano like it was a rival lover. It was a year of glorious rupture — where the raw, rhythmic, racial undercurrents of American music surged into the mainstream. Rock and roll was not merely entertainment then; it was insurgency.

But revolutions age quickly in commercial cultures. By 1962, the aftershocks of that eruption had begun to fade. Elvis had entered the army, been softened by Hollywood, and emerged safer. Chuck Berry was mired in legal trouble. Little Richard had briefly retreated into the pulpit. And Jerry Lee Lewis — yes, by then — had largely imploded under the weight of scandal and exile, his career derailed after marrying his 13-year-old cousin in 1958. The dangerous edge of rock and roll had not disappeared, but it had been sequestered, gentrified by teen idols and diluted into safer forms.

What remained on the radio was a fraying patchwork: Tin Pan Alley sentimentalism, doo-wop forms nearing exhaustion, and a parade of polite white crooners murmuring borrowed soul through lacquered smiles. The production was smooth. The voices were clean. The dial was safe.

In this context, the Beatles did not enter as heirs to a stable tradition. They arrived as a shock of coherence — a self-contained unit that played, wrote, and harmonized with energy that felt at once old and utterly new. They were not revivalists of 1956; they were revolutionaries of 1963, resynthesizing the fragments of American invention into a form that Britain, and then the world, could claim as its own.

These fragments I have shored against my ruin.
— T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

The early Beatles songs, far from being naive juvenilia, were compact detonations of musical intelligence. Consider “She Loves You.” It begins, outrageously and explosively, with the chorus — a move still rare in songwriting. It shifts perspective into the third person, breaking the solipsism of teenage love songs. And it ends not with resolution but with reflection: “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” Even the final chord — a jangling major sixth, as my musical friends have informed me — felt like a door flung open. And indeed it was. The world had changed.

“I Saw Her Standing There” is no less radical. Its bass line, stolen with cheerful abandon from Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You,” is itself a translation of Jerry Lee Lewis’s left hand — the rock and roll canon funneled through the neck of a left-handed Höfner bass. The guitars – both are essential - are sharp, percussive. The vocal is shouted and swung. It is proto-punk in energy and attitude: raw, fast, unapologetic. And all of this, recall, on a debut album.

Bob Dylan, whose praise is never lightly given, once said of the Beatles’ early work: “They were doing things nobody else was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.”

That word — valid — is telling. The Beatles were not experimenting for novelty’s sake. They were expanding the permissible range of pop music while still working within its bounds. This was invention under constraint, and it takes a higher artistry to surprise within the limits than to disregard them.

What the Beatles did in these early songs was reassemble the fragments of American popular music — Everly Brothers harmonies, Berry rhythms, girl-group emotion, R&B vocal style — and bind them with a new kind of wit. Their gift was synthesis, but not imitation. The Beatles were not “influenced by” these forms; they subsumed them. They took Chuck Berry’s swagger and made it choral. They took the Everly Brothers’ close harmony and placed it atop hard-driving backbeats. They dropped the piano and sang with British accents, refusing the mimicry of their predecessors. They even added handclaps.

They created, in effect, a new genre — not just rock and roll, but something that could be called band-pop: a self-contained group that wrote, played, and performed as one, blending sophistication with adolescent joy. This model would become the default structure of popular music, but in 1963, it was unthinkably fresh.

It is only because of what followed — Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road — that these early miracles are taken for granted. But one cannot reach “A Day in the Life” without first discovering that a pop song can begin with a chorus, or end on a jazz chord, or explode with a “Yeah, yeah, yeah” that feels like youth itself shouting its arrival.

We live, today, in the long shadow of this early work. The melodic minimalism of punk and the Ramones, the punch of power pop, the anthemic, supersonic folk of U2, the postmodern pastiche of indie rock — all descend, in one way or another, from the form the Beatles forged while they were still being mistaken for a fad. Even The Clash’s late fusion of punk and reggae owes something to the Beatles’ early instinct for uncompromising synthesis — a restless belief that music could pull in every influence, every cultural signal, and still ring true.

These early songs are not preludes. They are the big bang.

And so we ought to listen again, and know the place again, for the first time. Not through the lens of later grandeur, but with simple gratitude and ears tuned to the small, spare room at EMI’s Studio Two; to the sound of young men – from Liverpool! - in matching suits, playing harder than they needed to, and laughing at the edge of musical history.

Not yet mythic. Not yet mystical. But utterly new.

Cody Rhodes: the Chekhovian man & Mythic Agent

The Cherry Orchard

Is one of Anton Chekhov’s many plays showing not dramatic action, but a kind of atmospheric ache.

In The Cherry Orchard, the house is sold offstage. The orchard is lost offstage. And in a final, quiet cruelty which is also strangely merciful, the forgotten servant appears from offstage in the final moments to lie down and die. Throughout The Cherry Orchard, the play’s most decisive events remain invisible, heard only as echoes or intimated through gesture. What remains onstage is not dramatic action, but a kind of atmospheric ache: the passage of time, the texture of loss, the slow unwinding of presence.

Peter Szondi, in his Theory of the Modern Drama, takes Chekhov’s formal decisions as evidence of a deeper historical truth — that drama, understood in its classical sense as a unified action culminating in resolution, had become impossible in the modern world. The world could still be performed, but not resolved. Characters could still speak, but their words no longer bore consequence. The theater remained, but drama had entered a state of metaphysical fatigue.

The same can be said — surprisingly and convincingly — of professional wrestling in what I will here call the Nachkayfabe era.[1] If Chekhov was writing plays after the death of drama, wrestling in this late phase performs conflict after belief, gesture after narrative coherence. It retains the form, even the trappings of the traditional dramatic struggle (wrestling matches, staged to look competitive), but everyone — wrestlers, promoters, fans — now knows that that center no longer holds. And like Chekhov’s theater, contemporary wrestling’s most compelling power comes not from hiding this collapse, but from showing it, stylizing it, even ritualizing it.

Consider the case of Cody Rhodes. In early 2022, Rhodes — co-founder and executive vice president of All Elite Wrestling — quietly exited the company he helped create. The backstage reasons were many and largely inaccessible. But what happened on screen — or rather, what didn’t — was revealing. There was no storyline heel turn, no final betrayal, no worked-shoot confrontation. His last appearances were suffused with a strangely lit mood: gratitude, distance, a vague sadness. He delivered promos in which he seemed to speak not to his opponents but to the history of the business itself — evoking memory, legacy, and sacrifice. And then he was gone.

Cody Rhodes – The Exit Interview

Like the estate in The Cherry Orchard, the most significant developments in this story happened offstage. And what remained — the televised, choreographed part — took on an elusive yet undeniably elegiac tone – but an elegy delivered with the intensity of a pro wrestling promo. The audience suspected what was happening; they could read the press, follow the rumors, sense the mood. But they stayed, not to witness surprise, but to participate in a farewell that was beautiful precisely because it lacked narrative necessity and clarity. Rhodes’s departure was not an angle, but it had the feel of one — a new form of wrestling storytelling that leverages absence, restraint, ambiguity and audience complicity as its core materials.

This is what Szondi meant when he said that modern drama becomes a performance of the crisis of form. In Chekhov, plot dissolves, but structure remains. Characters are trapped not by external events, but by time, memory, and a loss of coherence between language and consequence. In The Cherry Orchard, the characters talk, remember, stall, and hesitate — but their actions never avert the orchard’s fall. The result is a kind of theater of drifting souls. Wrestling in the Nachkayfabe era has from time to time, become something similar — not absurdist, but Chekhovian.

And yet — Rhodes did not end his story there. His quiet departure from AEW became the opening movement in a broader arc. His closing interview hinted nothing as to what was to come.  How could it?

But, yet, when he returned to WWE, the tone was different, the themes endured. Indeed, they were magnified. He began to speak openly, ritually, about the unfinished legacy of his father. He invoked the past again and again — not to dwell in it, but to shape his own future through it. He said, often and without irony, that he had come back to “finish the story.” By doing so, he crosses over into a more traditional, heroic dramatic arc, but a heroic dramatic arc, poignantly infused with an extraordinarily powerful memory and presence of a colossal figure, his father, Dusty Rhodes.[2]

And he finished his story at Wrestlemania 40 in a magnificent, Wagnerian flurry of drama which we will discuss in detail in future essays.

Here, the Chekhovian register remains — but something else breaks through. Rhodes begins as a man reflecting on memory and fate, caught in contemplation — but then proceeds, over nearly two years, to act. He wins. He loses. He suffers. And eventually, he triumphs. He crosses from a theater of reflection into a theater of resolution. And in doing so, he begins to restore what Szondi believed had become impossible: the dramatic link between fate, speech, and meaningful action.

This is not a contradiction of the earlier mode — it is its evolution. Szondi teaches us that Chekhov’s characters are not failed agents; they are observers to a world in which agency has grown hollow. In wrestling, Cody Rhodes plays both roles: first, the Chekhovian man, aware of history’s weight, speaking into absence; then, the mythic agent, reclaiming action and resolving the past through will.

If Chekhov shows us how the theater survives the death of drama, Cody Rhodes shows us how the ring — that most theatrical of spaces — can momentarily reverse the drift. His journey doesn’t negate Szondi. It affirms it, then turns the page.

I am convinced that Aristotle, the author of Beowulf, Shakespeare and Chekov would all enthusiastically endorse The Saga of Cody Rhodes.

Mark Cole

It is not unlike Hamlet — another figure suspended between memory and consequence. Hamlet ponders, delays, speculates — but eventually acts, tragically and decisively. Like Hamlet, Rhodes shows that reflection, for a time, forestalls action but is ultimately unable to preclude it. And when action comes, it is rendered more charged, more meaningful, more dramatic — for Hamlet, tragic; for Rhodes, heroic.

I am convinced that Aristotle, the author of Beowulf, Shakespeare and Chekov would all enthusiastically endorse The Saga of Cody Rhodes. And Szondi would be pleasantly surprised at the brief and nuanced fusion of classical and modern which he would not have thought possible.

***

Wrestling after kayfabe, like theater after classical form, is not dead. It is self-aware, layered, aching — and still capable, now and then, of moments that feel final and complete and bring catharsis which the greatest classical dramatists could not even aspire to.  This is a humane achievement that should be understood as a meaningful contribution to our western literary canon.

The orchard is gone. The EVP is gone. But the form persists. And in rare, luminous moments, it remembers itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]Nachkayfabe is a term I have coined to describe the world of professional wrestling after kayfabe—that is, after the disciplined concealment of the scripted nature of matches has largely lapsed. But kayfabe, of course, is more—much more—than a simple code of secrecy. It is an entire ontological framework, a mode of being in which fiction is lived as truth, performance is indistinguishable from identity, and belief is enacted communally, even if not fully possessed individually. Thus, Nachkayfabe does not merely name a chronological aftermath. It signals a deeper transformation: a world in which the suspension of disbelief is no longer maintained by illusion, but by shared awareness and aesthetic complicity. The German prefix nach- is deliberate—it implies not only “after,” but also “following from,” “echoing,” or even “haunted by.” Nachkayfabe is not the death of kayfabe, but its spectral continuation.

[2] The lead-up to WrestleMania 40 is where I became deeply, personally invested in the outcome. The intergenerational storytelling — the invocation of Dusty Rhodes, a figure I kayfabe despised as a young wrestling fan, but who must now, through the prism of history, be recognized as one of the greatest performers of all time — carries real emotional weight. It caused many of us to want, with startling sincerity, for Cody Rhodes to “finish the story” of the Rhodes family legacy, even while we knew that Dusty never held the WWE title for legitimate business Chekhov in the Squared Circle: Szondi, Silence, and Nachkayfabe and dramatic reasons. It is, quite simply, narrative alchemy — where performance becomes legacy, and the scripted becomes true.

On Chekhov and the Silent Collapse and Rebirth of Drama

When Peter Szondi, writing in the nervous mid-century quiet of postwar European thought, turned his attention to theory — not of literature broadly, but of drama specifically — he did not treat it as one might an ancient genre or art form. He treated it instead like a living structure with organs and internal laws, whose very shape arose from metaphysical and historical conditions. Drama is not a relic for Szondi. It is very much alive and the form of drama, in Szondi’s account, is not merely what happens onstage; it is what is possible to say, to resolve, to mean when time and agency still operate with some unity. That possibility, as he shows with patient and fatal insight, begins to collapse by the end of the 19th century. And in the soft rubble of that collapse stands Anton Chekhov.

And in the soft rubble of that collapse stands Anton Chekhov.

In The Theory of the Modern Drama, Szondi devotes particular attention to Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a play he treats with the kind of respect usually reserved for works of diagnosis rather than demonstration. In Three Sisters, action is not so much eliminated as evaporated. What remains is a space thick with inwardness, repetition, memory and temporal drift. Characters speak not to alter the world but to circle the contours of their condition. Their conflicts are not resolved, and — perhaps more unsettling — they are not decisively escalated either. Instead, a fire burns offstage, love dies quietly in a corner, and Moscow remains a dream whose very mention becomes a kind of tragic refrain. What Chekhov dramatizes, Szondi says, is not conflict, but the impossibility of conflict – and therefore of resolution - in a world where volition has grown vague and time offers no horizon of redemption.

Amazingly, Chekhov inserts a clue as to what he is doing in Three Sisters and perhaps these lines gave Szondi the flash of insight he needed for his theory:

KULYGIN:  The Romans were healthy because they knew how to work and knew how to rest….Their life went on within definite forms…[sic] What loses its form comes to an end – and the same in our everyday life.[1]

***

Szondi’s diagnosis — haunting and precise — became clearer to me as I recalled my own direct encounter with Chekhov, years ago seeing The Cherry Orchard in London. My experience of the play then was that it was hauntingly beautiful, even though the play is laced with failure, departure, loss.  I didn’t put much thought into why that was the case, but now Szondi has illuminated that.

The Cherry Orchard, written later than Three Sisters, embodies Szondi’s insights with subtlety yet with great force. He does not discuss The Cherry Orchard in the early chapters of Theory of the Modern Drama, but it would be difficult to imagine a more vivid illustration of Szondi’s idea that modern drama becomes impossible not through rebellion, but through silence, delay, and the aestheticization of loss.

Indeed, one of the most telling features of The Cherry Orchard is what does not occur on stage. The central event — the sale of the family estate — happens offstage. So, too, do the negotiations, the legal handovers, and even the orchard’s destruction (symbolized by the sound of axes). The characters do not act upon their world; they await it. They speak to one another but not with the force of tragic speech — which in classical drama always carries weight, consequence, and clarity. Rather, Chekhov’s characters murmur, digress, contradict, and repeat themselves. The dialogue circles, then stalls, then resumes, like the thoughts of someone unable to sleep.

What Szondi detects in Three Sisters — the replacement of plot with mood, of conflict with atmosphere — appears even more distilled in The Cherry Orchard. But where one might expect a descent into bleakness or cynicism, Chekhov offers something stranger, and in some ways more disarming: a play that is poignant and unresolved, but also luminous. There is no catharsis, but there is beauty. There is no justice, but there is time. The final moments — the empty house, the sound of the axe, and the forgotten servant left behind who dies in front of us — do not moralize. They simply linger, like the last light in a room no one inhabits anymore.

Here, I think, is where Chekhov meets Szondi’s project most completely. Szondi is not lamenting the death of the older dramatic form; he is tracing the inner transformation of its conditions. When a form loses the metaphysical order on which it was built — the coherent self, the knowable world, the meaningful act — it cannot be preserved by style alone. And Chekhov does not try to preserve it. He lets the form dissolve — not with violence, but with grace. He accepts that in modernity, events may still occur, but they no longer add up. Time passes, but no longer builds. People speak, but their words no longer create reality.

That The Cherry Orchard is beautiful in spite of — or perhaps because of — this quiet dismantling is part of its enduring power. The beauty is not decorative; it is existential. The play does not instruct, resolve, or even explain. It witnesses.[2] And in doing so, it offers a kind of truthfulness about transience and its very human reality that classical drama, bound to structure and consequence, could not contain.

We are still early in Szondi’s book, and the argument is not yet complete. Strindberg will arrive, along with Brecht and others who meet the crisis with fragmentation or ideological reconstruction. But Chekhov stands apart. He does not reconstruct the ruins — he walks through them. And as Szondi implies, this wandering is not a failure of form but its final act of sincerity. The cherry orchard is lost, but the drama has not lied about it — and that, perhaps, is its highest achievement.

[1] Chekhov, “Three Sisters,” Act I.

[2]  I am grateful for my Southern Baptist heritage, where the word witness was routinely used as an action verb that a subject performs. We witness to others about Christ, about our relationship to Him, and about their need to have a relationship with Him as well. Today, the word witness seems to be used only in the sense of what a passive observer sees another actor doing—as in a court of law. We witness events and are then perhaps called upon to testify about them. I prefer the older, richer, and less exclusively juridical sense in which a speaker witnesses—even as an observer still witnesses events.

From Gutter to Glory: The Misfit Logic of Cultural Renewal

By now the pattern should be visible.

It begins not with greatness, but with loss. Not with clarity, but with fatigue. The forms are still standing—the museum, the school, the stage—but their animating spirit has flickered. The rituals grow longer, but not deeper. Audiences applaud, but without conviction. Art still exists, but the artists are tired.

Barzun called it “exhaustion,” and it is the unmistakable signal that a culture, once fertile, is entering its late phase. But if exhaustion is real, so too is the stubborn vitality that rises to challenge it. It never comes from the center. It never wears the proper clothes. It almost always arrives uninvited.

In this series, we’ve traced that renewal through two improbable emissaries of cultural energy: The Ramones, who could not become a proper pop band and in failing to do so gave us a permanent new language; and Paul Heyman, who ran a wrestling promotion out of a bingo hall and in doing so rewrote the grammar of modern dramatic performance.

What unites them—and what justifies our attention—is not merely their outsider status, but their uncanny ability to remake the world from beneath it. They were not destroyers. They were purifiers. Not vandals of the temple, but renovators from the street.

The Inversion of Prestige

To understand how we arrived at this moment—where two cultural misfits can shape the sensibility of a generation—we must revisit the concept of the mainstream. As noted earlier, it is both myth and machinery. The myth says that talent rises. The machinery ensures that only certain kinds of talent do. It rewards polish, pedigree, and promise of return within the confines of the status quo. Accordingly, it has always struggled to recognize conviction without context, or greatness that arrives in the wrong clothes.

What punk and ECW share is their open rejection of this machinery—and their unintended triumph. They did not scale the castle walls. They broke ground behind it and built something louder.

Their success is not ironic. It is axiomatic. As in earlier eras—when Van Gogh painted outside the salons, when jazz emerged from brothels, when American democracy was conceived in taverns—the real work of renewal was taking place outside the institutions that claimed to preserve.

Legacy as Echo and Distortion

Of course, the edge does not remain the edge forever.

The Ramones are now museum pieces. Paul Heyman works the main event at WrestleMania. Their names appear in textbooks, on merchandise, in the mouths of performers and promoters whose polish would have once disqualified them. The machinery, having ignored them, now needs them—for authenticity, for language, for myth.

This is the price of success. But it is also the proof of influence. When the fringe becomes canon, it confirms the movement of renewal.

That legacy is not pure. It is, like all legacy, a blend of echo, distortion, softening. Pop-punk without anger, “extreme” wrestling without danger, slogans without struggle. But the original force remains traceable, like the root of a mighty tree still visible beneath the bark.

The Edge captured this moment perfectly in his speech inducting The Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He wasn’t speaking of the Ramones, but the story was the same: a first-wave punk band that wasn’t polished enough for the machinery of the time—too political, too raw, too real—but who changed everything that came after. What Edge understood, and what he articulated with clarity and gratitude, was that the sound of the margins becomes the rhythm of the center. The Clash didn't adapt to the system. The system adapted to what the Clash had already made possible.

The Edge Inducts the Clash into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Audience Is In On It Now

Perhaps the most radical transformation, however, is not in the sound or the spectacle. It is in the role of the audience.

In both cases, the misfits did not just offer a new product. They offered a new relationship. Punk fans were not just buyers—they were scene-makers, zine-writers, co-conspirators. ECW fans were not just spectators—they were agents of the narrative, participants in the logic of the show.

This shift matters. It is not a gimmick. It is a redefinition of dramatic form. The fourth wall is not broken—it is perforated, and everyone knows it. Reality and fiction blur. The knowing wink becomes part of the ritual. The crowd now co-authors belief.

This is not postmodern detachment. It is post-postmodern participation. The audience has been disillusioned—but chooses, nonetheless, to believe again. Not naïvely. Not passively. But knowingly, and together.

It may be the most honest mode of storytelling we have left.

Closing the Circle

In the end, what this series has tried to trace is not just the history of two cultural episodes, but the logic of how renewal happens.

It does not happen by committee. It does not happen by institutional decree. It happens at the edge—when a misfit plugs in an amplifier or rolls out a wrestling mat, and dares to act as if what they feel matters.

Sometimes the world listens. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does—when it truly hears—it is changed.

Barzun saw it. You have seen it. And we will see it again.

Because culture, like belief, does not die. It smolders. And when the citadel grows cold, it is always the noise from the margins that tells us: the fire is still burning.

And that somewhere, in a garage or a bingo hall, it is about to roar again.

(Part 4/4 in this essay series)

Paul Heyman: Theater of the Margins

Every art form, when it endures, develops not only technique but ritual. Rules harden, boundaries are set, and the audience learns to expect structure as much as surprise. But eventually, the form forgets why it began. The gestures remain, but the spirit dulls. The cathedral still stands—but no one hears the choir. When this happens, revitalization does not come from renovation within. It comes from the fringe, from the fool, the outlaw, or the heretic who refuses to play by the accepted rules.

In professional wrestling—a form long misunderstood, long dismissed—this moment of rupture came through a wiry, hyper-verbal New Yorker named Paul Heyman, whose small promotion, Extreme Championship Wrestling, became a revival tent of unholy liturgy in the mid-1990s.

Heyman did not invent wrestling, any more than the Ramones invented music. What he did was purify it. He stripped it down to violence, voice, and vengeance. He removed the pretense of legitimacy but left in the raw emotion. He let the audience see the strings—and then used the strings to strangle the illusion. In doing so, he invited the fans to believe again, not in kayfabe, but in wrestling as drama, rebellion, and renewal.

The Old World Order

For most of the 20th century, wrestling operated as a closed system, governed by kayfabe and cartel. The National Wrestling Alliance divided the country into territories, each with its own regional stars, promoters, and loyalties. Champions were chosen not merely for athleticism or charisma but for their ability to “carry the belt” in real life—to protect the illusion, travel constantly, and negotiate backstage politics with care.

The fans were participants in a shared fiction. They knew, perhaps vaguely, that the matches were predetermined, but they accepted the performance as meaningful. Betrayals hurt. Victories mattered. The blood, though often theatrical, felt real. Wrestling was less a sport than a ritualized morality play, with good and evil fighting in tights and boots instead of robes and incense.

But by the mid-1990s, that world had crumbled. National television deals, the decline of the territory system, and the rise of Vince McMahon and corporate wrestling turned once-regional art into overproduced spectacle. The matches became formulaic. The danger evaporated. The audience became restless.

Then came Heyman.

Heyman's Rebellion

Heyman’s genius was not just in what he booked, but who and how. He didn’t seek the chiseled stars and comic book heroes of WWF or the aging icons of WCW. He collected misfits, has-beens, wild men, and cult heroes: men with scars, with records, with chips on their shoulders and something to prove. In ECW, broken men were not rehabilitated—they were unleashed.

He shot promos in locker rooms, alleys, and parking lots. He encouraged profanity, blood, and real-life grudges. He handed out microphones like weapons and told his wrestlers to speak their truth, whether it fit the storyline or not.

And most importantly—he turned the audience into co-conspirators.  This was the heart and soul of his revolution.

ECW fans were not passive. They were initiates. They chanted, cursed, threw chairs, and cheered things that other wrestling audiences weren’t even allowed to see. They knew the business, knew the dirt sheets, knew what was a shoot and what was a work—and Heyman rewarded them by turning that knowledge into the show itself.

It was not polished. It was feral theater. But it was alive.

The Business as the Story

In the closed-world kayfabe era, the business of wrestling—the contracts, the booking, the politics—was never part of the narrative. But in ECW, and later in the broader revolution it helped spark, the business itself became the story.

A wrestler didn’t just turn heel—he walked out on a handshake deal. A title wasn’t just won or lost—it was dropped because someone no-showed, or got fired, or was leaving for a better offer. When Shane Douglas threw down the NWA World Title (literally trashing the famous “ten pounds of gold” belt!) and declared ECW independent, it was not merely a plot point. It was a declaration of rebellion, staged as a moment of theater, but vibrating with real-world consequence.

Fact and fiction were now intermingled in a way never before in the history of the dramatic arts.

And this meta-awareness spread. Scott Hall’s 1996 Nitro debut, the rise of the nWo, the Mr. McMahon character, the Montreal Screwjob, the entire Attitude Era—all of it grows out of the seed Heyman planted: that the audience can be trusted with reality, so long as reality is made mythic.

Heyman showed that the greatest heat didn’t come from fantasy—it came from truth, weaponized.

A Sacred Spectacle

Violence in ECW was not a gimmick. It was a form of confession. Tables, barbed wire, fire—these weren’t just props; they were sacraments. The violence wasn’t staged for shock value alone, but for authenticity. Wrestlers bled because life was hard, because they had nothing else to offer, because the audience deserved it.

This was not the wrestling of Madison Square Garden. This was the bingo hall gospel: loud, ugly, participatory, and raw. There was no illusion of safety, and therefore no barrier to belief. ECW wasn’t fake. It was true.

Heyman, like any good showman-priest, knew how to manage chaos without appearing to. He let the crowd feel like it was running the show, while quietly shaping every beat. He played to the smart fans, the angry fans, the disillusioned believers who didn’t want kayfabe back, but wanted something to believe in. What he offered them was not certainty—but conviction.

Failure, Again, as Victory

ECW didn’t last. It was too violent, too unstable, too indebted. The company folded in 2001. The wrestlers moved on. WWE bought the library and absorbed it.  The brand became a corporate asset within the WWE empire.

But like the Ramones, ECW’s failure was its fulfillment.

Heyman didn’t change wrestling by winning. He changed it by altering the conditions under which victory could be defined. After ECW, the industry could never again pretend the audience didn’t know the game. It could never again hide behind kayfabe alone. Every promotion that came after—whether they copied ECW or tried to erase it—was responding to the new logic Heyman had introduced: that wrestling is not pretending to be real, it is real pretending.

His influence lives in AEW, in the “pipebomb” promo, in every moment where the camera lingers too long on an unscripted reaction, in every storyline that whispers, “What if this one isn’t fake?”

Conclusion: The Heretic and the High Priest

Paul Heyman did not look like a revolutionary. He looked like a manager at a downtown copy shop. But in a strip mall in Philadelphia, he rebuilt wrestling from the floor up, using only noise, belief, and a locker room full of men with nothing to lose.

He did not save the art form by preserving its traditions. He saved it by reminding us what it was for: to let people scream, and bleed, and matter, even if only for ten minutes under the lights.

Barzun teaches us that cultural renewal often begins in places that look like collapse. That the true guardians of civilization are sometimes mistaken for vandals. And that when the stage goes dark, it is the back alley or the bingo hall that lights the next fire.

Heyman lit that fire. And it burned beautifully.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, My Name is Paul Heyman!”

And now, a generation later, he is at the center of the most celebrated storyline in modern wrestling. The wise man. The consigliere. The anchor of The Bloodline saga. What do we make of that?

We accept the irony. We accept that the revolutionary becomes the establishment, that the heretic is invited back into the temple—sometimes even as high priest. The cycle continues. And in this case, we say simply: Congratulations, Wise Man. Well done. You earned it.

And then, we enjoy his performance—because it is, unmistakably, in continuity with what he began long ago in South Philly. Still unpredictable, layered, dangerous, and alive.

The bingo hall never really closed. It just moved to prime time.

(Part 3/4 in this essay series)

The Ramones: Cultural Renewal from the Margins

In any age, the mainstream is both myth and machinery. It claims to be the destination of talent, the proof of value, the reward of refinement—but it is also a filtering device, designed to admit only what conforms to its aesthetics, marketing logics, and institutional tastes. The machinery includes the labels, the critics, the award shows, the charts. The myth is the illusion that these institutions recognize greatness, rather than merely manage visibility.

By the 1970s, rock music had become particularly vulnerable to this machinery. What had begun in the two decades prior as a kinetic outburst of rhythm and soul had, by mid-decade, ossified into pageantry. Stadium shows required budgets. Songs grew longer, lusher, less urgent. The rock star was no longer a threat to the establishment—he was the establishment.

Into this world came The Ramones, four oddballs from Forest Hills who didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a headliner, couldn’t play like the virtuosos on the radio, and had no evident place in the system at all.

And yet—they wanted in. That’s the paradox.

The Ramones didn’t set out to burn down the house. They wanted to play inside it. They loved the girl groups, the British Invasion, and bubblegum pop. They longed to be pop stars, adored by teenagers and welcomed onto American Bandstand. But what emerged from their collaboration was something entirely different: a new ethic of performance, rooted in velocity, minimalism, and refusal. They didn’t become what they dreamed—they became something greater, and ultimately timeless.

Three Chords and the Truth

There was nothing accidental about their sound. It was stripped-down on purpose. A Ramones song did not build or swell—it attacked. The songs were short because they had nothing to prove. No solos. No bridges. Barely any endings. Joey’s vocals were somewhere between a chant and a whine, unpolished and deadpan, yet unmistakably human—a voice that could be mocked but never imitated. (You could say the same of Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, or Bob Dylan—voices dismissed by critics, imitated by comics, and yet impossible to replace.)

Everything was deliberate: the matching leather jackets, the blank stares, the economy of motion. Where other bands courted transcendence, the Ramones delivered precision simplicity—which, in their hands, became electrifying. They brought energy without decoration, which is to say: ethics.

You might say they brought:

A New Kind of Virtue

What punk introduced was not merely a sound but a set of moral priorities. It refused excess, performance for its own sake, and virtuosity as a credential. What mattered was sincerity, velocity, and presence. To be in the moment, not to narrate it.
And—to a certain extent—to take the moment with you. Hence the importance of melody in punk. That’s why people still hum “Blitzkrieg Bop” decades later—it wasn’t just energy. It was catchy.

In this way, punk was not the enemy of artistry—it was its conscience. And the Ramones were not lazy musicians. They rehearsed relentlessly, tracked obsessively, and held themselves to standards no critic could see. They may not have looked like professionals, but they were never casual. They simply redefined what professional meant.

This, too, is part of the larger pattern Barzun names: when an art form becomes over-theorized, exhausted by its own vocabulary, a new one appears—not just to vandalize, but to purify.

Failure as Fulfillment — The Paradox

Of course, they did not succeed on their own terms. The Ramones never had a number-one hit. They were never the pop stars they aspired to be. They did not break into the machinery of the mainstream—except as a curiosity, a warning, or later, a mascot. But in failing to become popular, they became permanent.

What the Ramones did was harder than sell records. They retooled the culture’s ear. They created a vocabulary that more marketable bands would later adopt. Without the Ramones, there is no Nirvana, no Green Day, no American Idiot on Broadway. Even U2, with their stadium reverence and moral uplift, owes a direct debt. Bono has said the Ramones taught him to believe in raw expression—and that Joey Ramone's voice never left his head. The first track on Songs of Innocence is appropriately The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone).

They may have been too strange, too fast, too unpolished to win the favor of their time—but they became the measure of what would last beyond it.

A Canon of the Margins

Today, the Ramones are canonical. Their logo is worn by people who’ve never heard “Beat on the Brat.” They are rightly taught in courses, lionized in documentaries, referenced in museum exhibits. But this canonization risks obscuring the depth of their gift. They were not merely “early” or “raw.” They were correct. Their instincts were not precursors—they were judgments. They heard what was false in the age, and they answered it not with theory, but with rhythm, noise, and uniform haircuts. What they proved—like jazz before them, like the mystery plays, like the founders of empires—is that refinement is not always evolution, and technical mastery is not the same as artistic power.

The Ramones wanted what the mainstream could not give them—and what it didn’t understand they were giving in return. They didn’t make it inside the machine, but they changed what the machine would later run on. And in doing so, they revealed the deeper pattern: that cultural renewal comes not from the center of power, but from the margins of refusal.

In their three-chord thunder, they taught us something Barzun himself might have recognized: that when forms grow hollow and belief dries up, truth returns in strange garments.
And sometimes, it wears a leather jacket and counts off:
“1-2-3-4!”

(Part 2/4 in this essay series)

Wrestling & Punk: Cultural Renewal from the Margins

In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun surveys the last 500 years of Western cultural history and charts the movement from creative vitality to what he calls “exhaustion”—an era in which forms remain but meanings falter. He observes how, by the twentieth century, the West had grown "introspective to the point of paralysis," turning its genius for criticism inward, often to destructive effect. Religion, art, education, and politics—those great institutions that once shaped Western man—were no longer immune to scrutiny. Worse, they no longer inspired. The artist mocked the museum, the professor dismantled the curriculum, the statesman became a politician—or worse, a bureaucrat—and the preacher often doubted his own sermon.

Institutions that once offered a framework for creation and legitimacy, if not transcendence, now seemed preoccupied with undermining their own foundations. It was an age not of disbelief, but of exhaustion—an era in which culture still had the machinery of greatness but no longer the conviction to turn the key.

In such a moment, vitality—the essential, almost biological force that gives rise to art and belief—could no longer be expected to issue from within the cathedral. The established forms, still standing, echoed with past glory but no longer generated it. The truly generative energies, as they had in other periods of stagnation, began to bubble up from the peripheries: from the garage band with two working amplifiers, from the rusted factory turned dance hall, from the bingo hall lit by neon and cigarette smoke. What was dismissed as low or illegitimate—vulgar, in the old sense—now became the crucible of renewal.

This is the paradox, which is also no paradox but a perceptible, perpetual pattern.

Western history, long before its modern self-awareness, has always flirted with this dynamic. The medieval mystery plays were birthed outside the church even as they dramatized its doctrines, reminding us that sacred expression often begins in unsanctioned space. Jazz rose from the red-light district of New Orleans, improvised by the socially marginal and racially excluded, only to be later anointed as America’s classical music. Van Gogh, uncelebrated in his own lifetime, painted in isolation and poverty, outside the salons and institutions of his day—yet today, he is for many serious critics the greatest painter of all time, a genius who can never be matched.

Even America’s Founding Fathers, whose Enlightenment prose would later line the walls of officialdom, were—at their moment of creation—rebels and provincial agitators, condemned as traitors to the empire they would ultimately transcend. Their political and philosophical innovations were forged not in European capitals but in colonial assembly halls, taverns, and battlefields—peripheral places that gave birth to a central ideal.

Each time the citadel falters, a new vernacular is born in the alleyways, first condemned as chaos, then crowned as genius.

So it was in the late 20th century, when culture’s official avenues grew stilted, managed, and bloodless. The life of the spirit moved once again to the margins. And if you were listening closely, you could hear it—not in the concert hall or the network studio, but in the feedback of a battered guitar in Queens, or the chants of a sweat-drenched crowd in South Philadelphia, demanding tables, blood, and truth.

One was The Ramones, a ragged band of New York misfits who played three-chord songs faster and louder than anyone had before, founding not just punk rock but a new ethic of performance. The other was Paul Heyman, an irreverent wrestling promoter who turned a threadbare independent wrestling promotion, ECW, into a laboratory for theatrical chaos, emotional realism, and a new grammar of storytelling.

In the essays to follow, we will explore what these two misfits did, how they relate to each other, and how—despite existing far outside the boundaries of respectability—they shaped the language, logic, and aesthetic possibilities of popular culture today. Their stories are not merely footnotes in the histories of punk and professional wrestling. They are chapters—urgent, improbable, and unforgettable—in the larger chronicle of Western cultural decline, subversion, and renewal.

We are not speaking here of high culture—at least not directly. But we are speaking of cultural renewal within a subculture, of forces that arise from below but eventually ripple upward. This, too, is part of the pattern Barzun saw so clearly. In moments of exhaustion, when the great instruments of civilization grow quiet, it is often the noise from the margins that signals the return of life.

(Part 1 of 4 essays on this topic)

From Sophocles to SmackDown: The Deep Philosophy of Pro Wrestling

So.

I’ve begun what I expect to be a long, serious project: the first philosophical study of professional wrestling. Not a book of commentary or pop culture reflection, but something closer in ambition to Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music. I want to treat wrestling not as a lowbrow curiosity, but as an art form—a subgenre of drama—deserving of philosophical and aesthetic reflection.

To do that, I need to start with drama itself. What is it? What is its structure, its history, its form? Why does it ever matter, and why does it still matter?

To that end, I’ve just started Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, and it is, frankly, not an easy read. Szondi, writing in the 1950s, set out to understand how the structure of drama had changed in the modern period. He was convinced that the classical conception of drama—one which assumed a stable moral universe, coherent characters, and the possibility of resolution—could no

longer, and does in fact not, hold. The modern world had changed, and the forms of drama had to change with it. Szondi does not weep for that loss, but he does treat it with a kind of tragic seriousness. The classical form is not rejected so much as it is outlived.

His predecessors and sources include Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin’s Origins of the German Tragic Drama, and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music. So my reading list has continued to grow, but I believe a serious look at professional wrestling as a subgenre of drama is worth the effort to come.

Roger Scruton, somewhat in contrast to Szondi, wrote out of a deep and often explicitly conservative aesthetic sensibility. He was not stodgy, nor did he fail to appreciate innovation, but ultimately he is an exegete and champion of the Western musical tradition. In his magisterial The Aesthetics of Music, he defends the classical tradition of Western tonality—not just as a technical system, but as a meaningful order, one that allows for beauty, intelligibility, and the disclosure of human feeling. Scruton mourns the collapse of musical form, particularly in the face of kitsch and irony. Where Szondi diagnoses and defines a historical shift, Scruton laments a civilizational rupture.

But the two are not at odds. They both believe that form matters, and that when form collapses, so too does the possibility of meaningful expression. They both understand that content without form is chaos, and that form without content is dead ritual. They are each, in their own way, grappling with how art can still carry meaning in an age that no longer trusts meaning itself.

(Let me note that this is how I am reading Szondi so far. If I progress through his work and need to come back and correct my reading, then I will do so.)

And then there is my T. S. Eliot.

T. S. Eliot stands, as he so often does, at a strange intersection—classical and modern, theological and fractured, ritualistic and ironic, precise but not pedantic. He mourns like Scruton. He diagnoses like Szondi. But unlike either, he tries to rebuild. The Waste Land does not simply describe and inhabit a ruined landscape—it assembles fragments, half-remembered rituals, ghosted voices, and shorelines of memory. In Four Quartets, Eliot embraces liturgical rhythm, theological time, and poetic musicality to build a poetic form adequate to the modern soul.

And it is Eliot, I think, who best helps us understand why professional wrestling is worth thinking about seriously. And for saying that, let me apologize in advance both to Eliot and to Scruton. (I would like to think that Szondi would like this project, but I don’t know that for sure.)

Let me clarify early on that wrestling is not born of drama. Its roots are in combat and sport, as far back as the gladiatorial games. Then in America, its roots are in carnival and in showmanship. It was never a theater of ideals. Once professional wrestling was separated from combat sport by its organizers, it was a work—a con, a trick, a show. The organizers knew it was scripted, but the audience didn’t. What has grown from those roots is a dramatic form unlike any other: a genre built of conflict, moral gesture, bodily risk, myth, and audience participation. Its matches are ritualized struggles. Its characters are masks that sometimes fall away. Its stories are often absurd, sometimes profound, and occasionally tragic. At its best, the stories are surprising and unpredictable, but eventually, at least for a moment, satisfying. And always, somewhere just beneath the surface, is the crowd, shaping the story as it unfolds.

In no meaningful sense is wrestling fake. Rather, it is profoundly real. It’s just not a competitive sport. It’s, well… it’s drama.

But it’s an interesting form of drama. Pro wrestling is American folk opera. It’s not elegant, but it is rich. It remembers its history even when it mocks it. It stages betrayal, redemption, revenge, sacrifice, failure, pride, and laughter in ways that resonate with something ancient. The best storylines can span ten or fifteen years, and even generations. The very best storytellers are very meticulous.

The WWE—whatever one thinks of it as a company—has understood this, at least in flashes. It acknowledges and returns to its roots in the carnivals. It honors its lineage and presents its own history as myth, complete with saints, villains, martyrs, and miracles. And like Eliot, it constructs meaning from fragments.

Wrestling is fragments shored against ruin.

It is one of the last great popular spaces where the physical body still carries symbolic meaning, where the crowd still gathers for a shared experience of moral drama, and where the fourth wall isn’t just broken—it’s moved, toyed with, transgressed, and restored again. At its best, wrestling allows us to participate in the form itself. It gives us a place to see good and evil (and everything in between) played out, not as philosophical abstractions, but as human struggles carried in the body.

I don’t expect everyone to see wrestling this way. But I think it’s worth arguing. And if I’m going to make the case seriously, I need to understand the full history of drama, from Aristotle to Szondi, from Sophocles to Beckett. I need to reckon with Scruton’s sense of form, and Eliot’s instinct to rebuild it. Wrestling didn’t start as drama. But I believe it has become a dramatic form. And I believe it might be, in its own strange and broken way, one of the last places where we still act out the human story. And that is exceptionally important.

In this I will also be drawing on another source that has long shaped my view of the human person and public meaning: the philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. In his view, it is through action—particularly embodied action—that the person is disclosed. The body is not a mask or instrument, but the visible expression of the invisible self. In At the Center of the Human Drama, Kenneth L. Schmitz explores this idea with clarity and depth, showing how Wojtyła’s vision affirms the dignity of performance, sacrifice, and witness. Wrestling, in its best moments, is a secular liturgy of the same truth: persons and personhood revealed through bodily struggle, conflict, and moral decision, witnessed and affirmed by a crowd.

So this is where I begin. With Szondi, Scruton, Eliot and Wojtyla—not because they ever wrote about wrestling, but because they understood that form matters, and that when we lose it, we lose something human.  Our dramatis personae will grow, but let’s begin.

And maybe—just maybe—wrestling, in all its madness and myth, helps us get a little of that back.

When Profit Shapes the Plot

Every delivery method of entertainment implies a path to monetization, and that path shapes the creative act. When revenue comes from ticket sales, you invest in the stage. When it comes from ad dollars, you write to the break. When it comes from algorithms, you write for clicks.

Monetization models are not neutral—they drive budgets, which in turn determine production value, which in turn create audience expectations. Eventually, the product’s very aesthetic logic comes to reflect its revenue logic. Sometimes this leads to aesthetic success. Sometimes it leads to aesthetic stagnation. Hollywood’s current output—largely IP-driven mega-films backed by private equity or corporate media conglomerates—reflects this perfectly. Each film is less a standalone work than it is a financial instrument: a known quantity engineered for maximum global box office, merchandise potential, and theme park synergy. They are expensive commercials for themselves. But they are not really films.

But technology is not inherently the enemy of art. Tomorrow we will look at one of the great artistic achievements of our day which has always been pushed forward by technology and mode of delivery.

When Medium Molds the Message

Every entertainment product is shaped not only by its content but by how it is delivered. This is not incidental—it is constitutive. This has been true forever.

When Anglo-Saxon scops performed their poems, they were also composing in a meter and rhyme scheme which made their product memorizable. That’s how we have Beowulf still today.

Elizabethan drama was inseparable from the open-air amphitheaters, daylight performances, and all-male casts of its time—conditions that demanded vivid language, heightened emotion, and theatrical ingenuity, giving rise to the genius of Shakespeare, whose plays were shaped by and written for that very form. And he did it so well, his plays became works of literature to be read.

A Depression-era radio drama in the American Heartland was not simply a stage play without visuals; it was a form that lived and breathed and thrived within the affordances and constraints of radio. Change the mode of delivery—to television, to podcast, to livestream—and the product changes too. Not just in packaging, but in pacing, structure, budget, and ultimately meaning.

So we see the mode of delivery becomes embedded in the product itself. Silent films had exaggerated facial expressions because that was the communicative mode. Network TV dramas were built around ad breaks, which shaped story arcs. VHS led to the rise of the direct-to-video market; streaming birthed the binge model, which in turn warped storytelling to serve the "next episode" button. The medium doesn’t just carry the message—it molds it.

Ponder that and tomorrow we will discuss monetization.

This article was first posted on MontLux.com

Poetry about Texas

Poetry about Texas

This short book is a Texan’s reflections on home through the lens of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; or reflections on Four Quartets through the lens of Texas. It is available on Amazon for $6.99.

“Jagged, hopeful men 

High on the dream of independence declared

At Washington-on-the-Brazos

Built and built again

A hardscrabble Capitol of whiskey-breath 

Poker games and livestock

By the dusky molten bronze River

Singing low, they dug deep”

Excerpts from Four Texas Quartets:

“It is told by our Storytellers

That before the age of barbed wire 

A steer driven from deep down in Texas as far as Kansas 

Would sometimes turn around 

Walk back along the trail and eventually 

Arrive where he started”