10 Wrestling Chants That Changed Everything
When the audience runs the show... what?
Is wrestling a sport?
Sport or not, wrestling is most certainly a form of live entertainment. Taking it a step further, wrestling is actually the world's most popular variety of interactive theater. Fans, ideally, dictate what happens in the wrestling ring and how storylines end up playing out, with the most skilled wrestlers able to subtly adjust their performances based upon the live crowds in front of whom they're working.
Wrestling fans are the most important part of the equation, and over the past couple of decades, they've come to realize it. Fans have become more and more vocal, not willing to settle for a simple cheer or jeer in order to express their opinions about the shows they attend. In recent years, especially, some crowds have even tried to make themselves the stars of the show - and have succeeded.
One of the easiest ways for wrestling fans to express themselves is to chant a shared sentiment en masse. Again, fans have been doing this for years, and they usually just stick to the names of their favorite wrestlers. Other chants, though, have taken on a life of their own, traveling from city to city, crowd to crowd.
They've altered the face of wrestling - some for better, some for worse...
10. "You Suck!"
In another time, Kurt Angle could have been WWE's biggest face, but in the Attitude Era, the jingoistic, overenthusiastic Olympic Gold Medalist was a hated heel. His music (which originally belonged to The Patriot) was the perfect accompaniment to his pompous, obnoxious character - it was an in-your-face theme that trumpeted Angle's arrival in a fashion which could not be ignored.
Somewhere along the line, some crowd somewhere discovered that the theme song - which contained two repeated brass blares - melded quite nicely with the chant "You suck!" From there, Angle couldn't enter an arena without fans singing "You suck!" in tune with his music. Edge once told Angle that, after their upcoming hair versus hair match, fans would start chanting "You're bald," but of course, that didn't happen.
Even when Angle was a popular babyface, fans still couldn't stop cheering "You suck!" It was just too much fun. Angle tried to explain that fans were actually chanting the words at his opponent, and encouraged them to point at his foe in the ring as they sang. That sort of worked, for a bit, but "You suck" never went away.