10 Ways Hardcore Wrestling Changed Everything

10. Like Everything Else In The Late 20th Century, Hardcore Wrestling Went To The Next Level...

The 1990€™s was a time of extremes. Wrestling was not an exception in this regard. The music industry, for example, had come to re-embrace alternative and all things DIY and the intensive grind of hardcore punk acts like Black Flag, The Bad Brains and The Circle Jerks had infused even mainstream musical acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. The dancey, disco-fied rap of the 1980€™s was replaced by the fiery Hip Hop manifestos of Public Enemy and KRS-ONE. In short, everything was bigger, better and badder... Films too, underwent some radical changes. Movies like Natural Born Killers and later, Battle Royale (cheating a bit as that one came out in 2000, but who cares?) garnered rave reviews even as they tore out the moral majority€™s beating heart and ate it f*cking raw. By the end of the decade, even video games had evolved from safe, kid-friendly romps like Sonic The Hedgehog (where the most controversial element appeared to be Knuckles€™ rebellious haircut) to the dangerous, blood flecked orgy of violence that was the Grand Theft Auto series. Games like Resident Evil and its sequels horrified parents with their depictions of cannibalistic corpses feasting on digitized flesh. Come to think of it, Lara Croft€™s perky pixels were hardly innocent, either. In a way, all of entertainment went hardcore to some extent in the €˜90€™s. ...But none more so than professional wrestling. Still, the hardcore style wasn€™t born in a vacuum, it was not without precedent. Wrestlers like The Original Sheik, Abdullah The Butcher, Terry Funk, Harley Race and others can claim, with every justification, to have laid the groundwork for what we now know as hardcore wrestling, except they usually called it €˜doing a hardway€™. Hardways were violent gore-fests that involved chains, leather straps, steel chairs and pretty much anything else you can think of. All hardcore wrestling did was dig down a little deeper and make every match a hardway. So, whilst it is tempting for old school fans to broadly criticize hardcore wrestling as artless, it isn€™t really possible without first criticizing classics like Race vs. Funk €“ and no true fan would ever do that. However, history aside, hardcore was successful because it captured the zeitgeist. Rebel promotions like ECW and XPW took off during this era because they were at the beating heart of that period in pop culture history.