Like wrestling, rock music often snares our attention when we're children. Our tastes change with age and maturity, and while one serves as the soundtrack of our lives, the other helps us date major changes in ourselves and the world around us. As kids, we may marvel at the "fresh" keyboards of the J. Geils Band or the dulcet tones of Bananarama while admiring the Ultimate Warrior's devotion to the tasseled garment. As teens, punk rock harnesses our disaffection while Steve Austin's rebellious attitude gives a vicarious thrill. And perhaps maturity sees Wilco's lamentations affect us as deeply as Mohammed Hassan's complex and subtle in-ring evocation of the horrors of a paranoid and multi-lateral war.
 
Our tastes in wrestling and rock music often inform who we are or what we are no longer. If the 1980s' "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection" did not say it convincingly enough, our own personal growth shows us that the two media are more connected than many might suppose.
 

 
If you'd asked anyone in 1984 whether rock music needed a Christian metal band, they would have either said "Have you heard the Good News?" or "absolutely not." The people who made the latter comment were ultimately right. Still, like surf rock, "acid folk" and disco before it, Christian rock was a sub-genre that was given its day in the sun. From 1984 to 1986, Stryper released a gold and a platinum album, inexplicably inspiring some fans with songs like "In God We Trust," "To Hell with the Devil" and "Paul's Epistle to the Cenobites, 8:14-21:12." Cynics believed it was only their devotion to Jesus that insulated Stryper from much of the ridicule and abuse they most richly deserved. Stryper fans replied that every time you said a hurtful word about the band's goofy uniforms or silly lyrics, it was equivalent to pounding a nail into Baby Jesus' hand.
 
After a few years, however, inspiration waned among the masses. Christian metal as a whole didn't have a lot of potential song fodder; sooner or later, listeners noticed that all the love songs were about God, and the rest of the songs encouraged reading or boring old "not evil." Eventually all but the true believers accepted that, even if you threw an organ track or two in the song, Jesus really wasn't right for metal.
 
The average wrestling fan had — except when stoned — gone most of his life without thinking of putting a one-legged man in a wrestling match, but that thought became reality when Zach Gowen arrived on Smackdown in May, 2003. Gowen's story was an inspirational one: at the age of eight, a severe bout with cancer necessitated the amputation of his left leg. Yet, by age 20, he'd achieved his dream of wrestling on WWE TV. Jaded wrestling fans foresaw his debut as a carnival sideshow — Vince McMahon spiking a ratings point by throwing out a "freak" wrestler. This kind of remark was often condemned by people who'd themselves basically dressed Gowen up in the spokesman role of "Cancer Boy." Talk like this offended saintly co-opting sensibilities — though presumably not Gowen's, as he was already dropping comments about using his wrestling fame to meet chicks. 
 
Nonetheless, many fans warmed to Zach, and for a while his promo appearances and few moves generated significant cheers. However, just a few matches quickly showed the audience that Gowen's offense was restricted to kicks and a moonsault, while the rest of the match featured him getting kicked around worse than a soccer ball accused by a drunk Pele of sleeping with his wife. The matches, though few, quickly came to seem routine. Even the addition of a blue-headed red-beaked Hulk Hogan (as "Mr. America") did little to alter the perception that Zach Gowen didn't really have a natural role in a modern wrestling show.
 

 
Over thirty years ago, Tom Waits appeared on the music scene as a throwback beat poet. His raspy voice and beat-up piano transported listeners to the broken-down backroads of America — places where love began with a truck-stop waitress and evenings ended with bourbon in a flophouse. Over a decade later, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, who — like all women in rock and roll — immediately found ways to ruin a perfectly good formula. Waits' harpy wife reinvented him as some sort of agrarian populist author of spirituals, replacing songs about cross-country buses with lyrics like, "She got to get behind the mule/In the mornin' and plow," despite the fact that Waits was born in LA, lives in New York and would probably mistake a mule for a leopard if you ever asked him to identify one. Meanwhile, his music now often sounds like a jackhammer trying make babies with a harmonium. Through it all, however, Waits has stayed true to the fundamentals of rock and folk, relying on keyboards and guitar to sustain roughly four-minute songs, even if they now don't make a damn lick of sense.
 
Just as "Attitude" was creating characters that were more realistic, Kane debuted as an old-school monster caricature. He picked people up, threw them and was a horrifyingly scarred man-mutant with a seldom-heard gruff voice, embodying a kind of wrestling underworld. In 1999-2000, a betrayal by his girlfriend Tori brought out a new voice for Kane. And really, who could blame Kane for critical self-analysis? If your woman left you to shack up with X-Pac, what act of degradation and self-loathing would you not commit?
 
But that wasn't the end of his reinvention at the hands of women. Later, audiences learned of Katie Vick and necrophilia, leading to Kane's unmasking. In a dramatic departure from his gravel voice and his basic ambitions, Kane became a non-scarred loon looking for salvation in a woman's womb. He attacked, stalked and married Lita, then sired a child. Then the child was lost because of Gene Snitsky or an insectoid astronaut or something. Kane is now half the character he once was: his imposing mask replaced with goofy contact lenses, a scrunchy-faced look and a half-moon head-shave job. Despite forays into burning people, forcible "making babies" and electrocuting men's balls, he still displays a respectable monster move-set and exceptional speed for a big man.
 

 
As a young girl, Mariah Carey dreamt of singing songs she couldn't understand, to music she couldn't write, and at vocal frequencies so high that they were detectable only by rabid ponies. Sometimes dreams come true. Music lore has it that record executive Tommy Mottola discovered one of Carey's demo tapes and thereafter made her a star, his girlfriend and then his wife. Attempts to broaden her fame led her to star in the movie Glitter, a near-suicidal decision that would have killed a lesser career. The movie's toxic awfulness was so pervasive that DVD copies of it are today used in maleficent voodoo rites in the Caribbean islands, while the more plodding U.S. Army simply blares it at Guantanamo detainees. Carey's attempt to dig herself out of her career ditch impelled her to re-brand herself as a vampish banshee version of Beyonce — a hole-escape strategy perhaps best summed up by The Simpsons' Chief Wiggum when he said, "No. Dig up, stupid." Despite a buyout of her Sony contract and a pop-culture association with schlock and film failure, Carey still possesses a vocal range as wide as the wingspan of the majestic condor or an A320 Airbus or Star Jones or something else wide like that. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before Carey sings another G7 note that causes her head to perfectly resonate and then explode.
 
After toiling in the indies and coming to grips with life on the road and without surgically enhanced breasts, Lita debuted in the then-WWF as a valet to Essa Rios. Despite her inability to throw a punch, execute most wrestling moves or cut a promo of any kind, she gained the audience's attention with extreme highspots like the moonsault and the hurricanrana. In the context of a fight, these moves have about the same effect as dunking your head in lava and charging your opponent face-first: visually arresting but terminally self-defeating.
 
Teaming with her boyfriend Matt Hardy and his brother Jeff led to greater audience exposure, even more extreme spots and, at that point, the highest degree of fame for any woman wrestler. Unfortunately, branching out to TV resulted in a nearly fatal neck injury on the set of Dark Angel. Lita's career-long ambition to fiercely pummel the ground with her head and spine left her ready to fight another year; but, in a cruel twist of fate, the TV show suffered a mortal blow and died soon afterward. While Dark Angel is now largely forgotten, Lita has recently returned to the WWE, seeking to recapture her former fame. This pursuit has involved the same displays of highspots, including a tope suicida executed with a literalism that surely terrified even the dimmest paste-eating child. Nonetheless, Lita can still hit a hurricanrana and a moonsault, though faithful viewers wonder whether the next attempt may prove deadly.
 

 
By last count, the members of veteran punk band Bad Religion have something like 612 doctorates and master's degrees between them. This high level of erudition has informed their songwriting for over 20 years, forcing kids who just want to bang their heads, stomp on bugs and light stuff on fire to stop and think about nuclear proliferation, social inequality, religion and environmental decay. While the lyrics may shine, most of the music is formulaic, and rare is the song that runs even four minutes long. Despite the brevity, they pretty much all sound the same and can be replicated by any garage band with one year of practice on their instruments. One-time lead guitarist Brett Gurewitz often played solos that sounded as if he were trying to smash wasps that had decided to make a nest in his strings. Despite the intelligence of their writing, their medium is youth-oriented. Thus the age of the band contributes to unintentional humor when compared to their anti-authority attitude and target audience. The last time anyone saw singer and front-man Greg Graffin in a music video, he looked like a balder and fatter Bob Oedenkirk.

Raven may well be the most intelligent wrestler of the modern era, and his command of language in his promos is rarely anything less than impressive. A Raven promo is just as apt to lead to the psychological manipulation and control of another wrestler as it is to delve into the disaffection and malaise of modern youth. Though his work on the stick approaches the legendary, his ring work frequently ranges from the pedestrian to the terrible. Many fans remember how Raven shocked the wrestling world in his WCW U.S. Title match with Goldberg when he busted out a (gasp!) dropkick. Most Raven matches are wisely kept short, yet he often fills them with kendo sticks, chairs and garbage cans, smashing wildly to compensate for an absence of technical prowess. And while Raven easily taps into the frustrations of adolescence, he is inexorably growing visibly older and wider. It took seven years after the song's debut for him to change the name of his finisher from the "Evenflow," and only a few years ago did he abandon cutoff jeans and flannel shirts. Judging by Raven's acumen of what is current and funky, any day now we should see the unveiling of his dreaded new finisher, the "MMMBop" and the formation of the extreme stable, "The Crash Test Dummies."
 

 
Kurt Cobain was dead, Billy Corgan was making crappy concept albums and Pearl Jam decided that tuneless punk odes to vinyl records were the way to please fans of their basically anthemic rock. The rise of teen pop was looming on the horizon, with the return of garage rock right on its heels. But in 1996, popular music was at a crossroads. The lack of a defining movement or voice left a space into which The Wallflowers were mysteriously deposited. If 1996 were a dorm's utility closet, then The Wallflowers were the plate of Friday night cafeteria spaghetti orally voided by a freshmen overcome by Jell-O shots in the dead of night.
 
Essentially a greedheaded vanity vehicle for Bob Dylan's son, the band saved Jakob Dylan time by providing bad bass, bad keyboards, bad supplemental guitar and bad drums, giving him a break from having to learn to play those instruments badly himself. Instead, he had time to focus on writing insipid and clichéd ballads set to egregiously simple guitar accompaniment. It was the sort of music you'd shoot yourself over, not because it moved you to grief at hearing its ineffable sadness, but out of guilt because you wrote it. No one listening to "6th Avenue Heartache" in its twice-per-hour radio rotation or cinching a noose around a rafter in their house while "One Headlight" was ceaselessly beamed at them by a CIA brainwave satellite thought for a moment that The Wallflowers achieved success due to anything other than the name "Bob Dylan." Unfortunately, Bob Dylan wasn't in the band. The last time anyone not adjudged legally too stupid to aid in their own defense ever heard of the Wallflowers, they were ruining David Bowie's "Heroes" by covering it. The best thing any fan of rock music can say about them is that they are no longer on the radio.
 
The Rock was basically gone for good. Steve Austin would never wrestle again, and Brock Lesnar quit. Had there been any electrifying pantheon superstars on either WWE wrestling brand, 2004 would not have been the year of Randy Orton. He wouldn't have stood a chance. Sure, he had his good points. There was a kind of iconic, dignified look to him — like a Bob's Big Boy carved from marble, or maybe a mighty stack of radioactive waffles forged by Jesus. And, yes, he seemed to have a sense of humor, naming his "RKO" finisher after a long defunct film company. (Look for an alternative submission finisher called either "The Solax" or "Pathe News.") But apart from that, there was little to recommend him.
 
Nonetheless, 2004 became his and Evolution's year. Essentially a vanity project designed to "get Orton over," Evolution showcased power moves he couldn't do, ring psychology and lengthy matches he couldn't understand and promos he couldn't mouth the words to convincingly. Batista, Triple H and Flair handled those tasks and instead left Orton the opportunity to badly execute a chinlock, a goofy European Uppercut, a finishing move that — like The Wallflowers' sudden radio appeal — came out of nowhere, and a repeatedly halting cliché-ridden promo that most people would be ashamed to deliver to a bathroom mirror or a dog trapped in an animal carrier.

Early plans for Evolution also included a fifth member: a crippled and disease-ridden boy named Gus, who would be "cured" of a different ailment every time Orton won a match. Over the course of months, pestilential little Gus was slated to miraculously recover from diptheria, The Staggers, eczema, blindness, night terrors and some sort of wharf-rat herpes. However these plans were soon scotched when the kid cast to portray Gus punched Orton right in the crotch "for being a butthole" — and when WWE realized that Flair was old enough to start getting lots of interesting diseases on his own.
 
Despite the WWE's best-laid plans, no one watching a Randy Orton match or his title victory doubted for a second that his push and his favorable booking were due to anything other than the name "Bob Orton Jr." Unfortunately, Bob Orton still doesn't wrestle Randy's matches, and even his empty arm cast declined the opportunity to tag with Randy, citing prior commitments. The last few months of Orton's ring and promo time have seen him ruining the template of the Stone Cold Steve Austin character by trying to replicate it. So far, the best thing any true fan of wrestling can say is that he hasn't killed anyone in the ring.
 

 
Cher was sired by the Mole People in 1946, and sent to the surface to spread her songs so omnipresently over the earth that humanity would flee to underground caves to escape the sound. Naturally, once there, the Mole People would conquer, devour us, and use our skulls as decorative ornaments on the giant obelisks erected to please their god. Cher wasted little time with her mission, releasing the hit song "I Got You, Babe" with Sonny Bono when she was just 19 years old. ("I Got You Babe" effectively created the Weather Underground, a group of people trying to bury themselves in ditches to avoid hearing the chorus even one more time.) Their success enabled them to jump to television and a broader audience with The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, which is widely remembered as being on television for one or three or five years without once leading directly to the accidental poisoning of an infant. After a divorce from Sonny and short-lived solo TV stint, Cher worked hard to make it in film in the eighties and nineties, appearing in Silkwood, Moonstruck, Mermaids and The Witches of Eastwick — perhaps the finest film ever to feature Jack Nicholson graphically vomiting cherries like a fresh-fruit man-firehose. Also, during the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Cher disappeared underground for prolonged surgeries to re-sculpt her forehead, nose, mole skin and breasts. Her reemergence from beneath the earth's surface was marked with a stunning display of feather boas, used to hide the healing scars.
 
In 1989, she returned to pop music, releasing "If I Could Turn Back Time" and alerting the world to the fact that it was Sonny Bono all along who had kept her from her own personal excesses and hidden her uglier tendencies. One of the uglier ones was a proclivity to sing songs written by Diane Warren, despite the fact that she could write a serviceable tune on her own. Another one was exhibited in the video for the song, where a 43-year-old Cher wore a fishnet body suit with a thin black V-strip hiding her nipples and crotch, then running up her backside in all its thongy glory. None of this would have mattered much to anyone, except for the fact that she spent part of the video nauseatingly dirty dancing with her own son, on a U.S. Naval battleship, in front of a full compliment of horny sailors who could have serviced her without the taint of incest.
 
The mid 1990s witnessed another period during which Cher went underground, this time to obtain new lips and a multitude of tattoos designed to ward off evil shamans and government video surveillance.  In 1998, she returned to the pop charts with "Believe," driving millions of college rock listeners to dig holes, stick their heads in them, then scream until blood poured out of their throats. The vocal tracks on "Believe" so fully fused her voice with studio machine effects that one suspects the song was mixed by Darth Vader. It is a fitting distinction, since Cher is now predominantly a mixture of assembled parts and enhancements. Despite an ability to write songs on her own, she is still less appalling when paired with other songwriters, or in film where she is easier to avoid. Just a year shy of 60, she shows no signs of retirement or a diminished belief that the world is waiting impatiently for her next appearance.
 
A leader of the even more subterranean Goblin People, Hulk Hogan emerged from a Minnesotan lake and set his feet on dry land in 1978. His purpose was to destroy the "under sky" civilization and drive humanity underground, where we would eliminate his civilization's chief rivals, the Mole People, and then be ripe for conquest. But at WrestleMania IV, Hogan got caught up in the moment and divulged his plan, telling the world:

All my Hulkamaniacs, they're gonna feel it tooooo.... But if you look in their eyes, man, have you seen the fear in all those little Hulksters? They realize that when I get Andre the Giant cinched up in the launch position, when I SLAM him through the Trump Plaza, brother!—from New York, down to Tampa, Florida, the FAULT LINE is gonna break off! And as Andre the Giant falls into the ocean!—as my next two opponents fall to the ocean floor and I pin 'em, so will DONALD TRUMP and ALL THE HULKAMANIACS! But as Donald Trump hangs on to the top of the Trump Plaza, with his family under his other arm, as they SINK, to the BOTTOM OF THE SEA—THANK GOD Donald Trump's a Hulkamaniac!!! He'll know enough to let go of his materialistic possessions, hang on to the wife and kids, DOG PADDLE with his life all the way to safety. But Donald, if somethin' happens, if you run outta gas, and all those little Hulkamaniacs, just hang on to the LARGEST BACK in the world, and I'll dog paddle us, backstroke all of us to safety!

"To safety." Laughable! More like, "To my race's miles-deep Salt Palaces, where you will be clapped in leg irons and beaten until you work pneumatic pumps that press copy after copy of Manfred Mann's Earth Band's Solar Fire, between forced participation in humiliating gladiatorial combat — where you will be armed only with a fork and stand in a ring while buckets of crabs and snakes are emptied on you." It's perhaps an understatement to say that it was a stroke of good fortune for humanity that Hogan lost his cool. By the end of the show, the FBI and Teamsters handily confiscated Hogan's excess stores of Hulkamania and pure Bolivian cocaine from the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, thus saving us all.
 
The other parts of Hogan's career — the "non-apocalyptic insanity" parts — tell a more mundane story. Hogan first achieved popularity in Verne Gagne's American Wrestling Association, thrilling audiences with his ability to simultaneously use both gravity and his extended leg. His appearance in the hit film Rocky III led to national TV exposure with the WWF, where his Newtonian Legcrobatics and feather-boaed appearance destroyed the minds of children in small-town America. Some credit "Hulkamania" for viewer's devotion, but it was far more likely that Goblin mind control prevented fans from realizing that their athletic hero moved with as much poetic grace as, say, a mime with his legs broken. Continued TV success led to starring vehicles in more films, such as No Holds Barred, Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny — perhaps the finest film ever to... ah, screw it. 
 
During the 1990s, Hogan periodically dropped off the map as he underwent numerous surgeries to replace his battered hips with dinosaur bones and repair his Goblin skin, which had turned orange under a strange and terrifying "upworld" sun. Continuous surgical procedures and enhancement at the hands of chemicals have left him a hideous and augmented quasi-Frankenstein. At this point, determining where the man's 24-inch pythons stopped and the enhancements from Pfizer, I.G. Farben and Raytheon began is an impossibility.
 
Recently, Hogan has returned to mainstream attention as the strange father of a jailbait Britney Spears knockoff. Although he claims that he's trying to keep his daughter from appearing too slutty, the record shows that, despite his best efforts, she looks like an under-aged Russian prostitute, and he most often looks like her pimp. Any interview with him about his daughter runs at least a 60% chance that he will try to clinically talk about her level of cleavage exposure, say the terms "dope rhymes," and "chiggity style," or point to his bleached mustache and remark, "I walrus, man. I eat you, brother," — all of which would be absolutely mortifying to his daughter, if she had any sort of rudimentary brainwave functions.
 
The last time Hogan "debuted" on a wrestling program was in 2002, in the then-WWF. Wearing a do-rag and strumming an air guitar, he showed no indication of entertaining notions of retirement or looking less ridiculous, thus prompting millions of wrestling fans to throw their fond childhood WWF memories in a grave and pour over them with dirt and lime. Hogan continues to try to book himself and to insist on main-event singles matches, despite ample evidence that he does better work when following another's script and looks more professional in tag matches that hide his shortcomings. Instead of bypassing viewers with more direct-to-video films or direct-to-syndication TV series, Hogan will likely return again to wrestling television, banking on his erroneous belief that everyone wants to see what he will do next.