Hey there, again, homoerotic wrestling fans. This is Bard, longtime homoerotic wrestling blogger. It’s been a few months since my last episode of Sidelineland Sounds, and, honestly, that’s just how it is. I find it great fun to watch wrestling, to write about wrestling, to review matches, to cobble together these audio episodes… and I just wish I had time to do more of it, and be more consistent. Early on in my nearly 16 years of blogging I used to beat myself up about having to take breaks from it every so often, but I’m older and wiser now, and I’m just enjoying the fun of broadcasting my passion for hot wrestling whenever I get the chance.
In case you haven’t listened to the first three episodes of Sidelineland Sounds, check them out. Listeners have given a lot of great feedback to my audio musings about the written word in the age of instant video gratification. In episode 2 I sampled some of the hot trash talk that spices up my favorite wrestling fare, and in episode 3, I shared some of my thoughts about what I find hot about the sounds of a wrestler suffering. For this fourth episode of Sidelineland Sounds, I’m taking a step back from the action itself, and reflecting instead on one of the unsung heroes of homoerotic wrestling video post-production, the musical soundtrack.
[Bell Ring – sound credit: BG East’s Three-Way Thrash 6]
I’ll forgive you if nothing comes to mind when I mention the musical soundtrack of homoerotic wrestling. It’s easy to miss. In fact, depending on the source of your wrestling videos, music may or may not even be there. But there are some examples of musical soundtracks in homoerotic wrestling that have seriously imprinted themselves deeply on me.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East Wrestlfest 1 trailer]
That was the soundtrack to BG East’s trailer for Wrestlefest 1, and it’s the same soundtrack for several other BG East trailers. And it’s fucking hot! And, depending on how old you are and what digital era you started watching BG East, you might have a similar Pavlovian response to mine, after repeatedly hearing that music paired with seeing super hot wrestling clips.
So, where does music show up in the homoerotic wrestling canon? To explain, I need to go back to my early days of discovering the exciting and salacious world of wrestling for gay eyes. My first foray into purchasing homoerotic wrestling videos happened just before DVDs really became the standard format for video recordings (yes, I’m that old). So, for the younglings out there, before streaming, before blu ray and before DVDs, there were VHS tapes. And frankly, VHS tapes were a pain in the ass because they were literally on a tape. Rewinding or fast forwarding to a particular spot you wanted to savor was time consuming and an inexact science. Some of my earliest wrestling VHS tapes actually broke from me playing, rewinding, and playing the same spot in the recording so often the tape wore out… and I know that you know what I mean about those super sweet spots in a favorite match that you’ve just got to watch over and over again. But the inefficiency of a VHS tape had an extremely fortunate side effect. So if you had a standard 2-hour long VHS tape, producers like BG East and Can-Am would release these collections of 3 or 4 matches to approximately fill a tape with, each match being anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes long. And then there’d be that extra bit of tape still left over at the end. Sometimes just 2 or 3 minutes, sometimes 10 or 15 minutes of space. When I started ordering them, I discovered, to my delight, that BG East ingeniously cut trailers for other products to fill every last inch of available tape, padding the matches you ordered with, essentially, commercials at the end.
I’ve blogged about this before, but let me just say that I LOVED those fucking trailers. Honestly, some of the worn out spots in my VHS tapes were actually during the trailers at the end of the tape. They were these hot, sort of impressionistic short outtakes from full-length matches. Like, they’d have a five second clip of one sweat soaked muscle hunk cranking on a Boston crab, and then a quick cut to later in that same match when the tables had turned and the other hardbodied stud was pumping on headscissors. You couldn’t tell the plot or understand the momentum of match from these trailer, but the point was just to whet your appetite, to make you need to send in more cash and get another tape of matches. These trailers had no audio from the actual matches themselves. Instead, they had these super sexy electronic dance music scores with what can only be described as a distinct homoerotic wrestling sensibility to them.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s Submissions 6 trailer… “I submit, sir!”]
That’s the soundtrack to the trailer for BG East’s Submissions 6, and they used that music for other trailers. I think that one’s got to be one of the most on point musical accompaniments in history. Again, it has that intense, driving electronic bass beat in the background, with that plaintive, pleading high pitched voice-over begging to be allowed to submit.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s Submissions 6 trailer… “I submit, sir!”]
Fuck, that’s hot! Someone at Wrestlefest New York told me last year that he thought Kid Vicious was the actual musician behind these BG East trailer soundtracks, but Kid Vicious told me they were produced by a friend of BGE, but not him. I feel like whoever wrote and produced these has got to be in the club with us, right? I mean, I could be totally wrong, but they *feel* like the musical transcription of an erotic reaction to incredibly hot wrestling.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s X-Fights 20 trailer soundtrack… “Heavenly Bod”]
That was the soundtrack to the X-Fights trailers from BG East, with this upbeat attitude and the indulgent celebration of the heavenly bodies of sex gladiators. In case you didn’t catch the lyrics, the slow, sexy voice is singing, “I face you in a match, be prepared to try your best, you will struggle, you will fight, but you’ll give up like the rest. Meet your master, be my slave, I will whip you with my rod, you will surrender yourself, and you will worship my heavenly bod.” Like, fuck, yes! That’s the vibe of some of the sexiest homoerotic wrestling, right? The X-Fights genre lands squarely in that conquer-and-possess end of the wrestling pool, with an unflinching focus on the erotic attraction between the wrestlers. Some homoerotic wrestling is more explicit, not just in terms of nakedness and sex, but more explicit in terms of exploring how wrestling is turning on not just the audience watching, but the wrestlers themselves. Like the driving, upbeat soundtrack, they celebrate that edge of competition fueled by desire, where the passion to win is just the first wave of erotic passion you’re going to see in a wrestling match.
Not all of the BG East trailers were quite so in your face. Some soundtracks for these trailers were a little less literal than those first three examples. Though, those first three are my favorites. But there were others that were more tone-setting, with more instrumentals, more like the way a cinematic score is designed to signal to a viewer the intended emotional impact of a scene. Like the soundtrack to the Undagear 3 trailer…
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s Undagear 3 trailer]
These more straightforward, solely synthesizer soundtracks were more major chords, less cheeky, literally no lyrics, just a driving electronic dance beat to accompany clips of quick, hard action. I feel like my conditioned response to that Undagear soundtrack is all about eager anticipation of the relief of suspense. It scratches that itch that I often have for the drama and storytelling of hot, competitive wrestling, where two legitimate contenders walk in, both thinking they’re going to walk out of there the winner, and the back and forth of the action slowly wears away the pretense and leaves one of them with a seriously bruised ego.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s Undagear 3 trailer]
So I’m listening to this soundtrack to the Undagear 3 trailer and watching Brigham Bell, that ultra lean gorgeous boy absolutely taking it from muscle hunk Steve Corelli and, in turn dishing it right back. You’ve got no idea from the clips in the trailer who comes out on top, but you know for a fucking fact that the battle was nasty and intense!
I think the BG East trailers have been the most on point in translating a specific homoerotic wrestling vibe to music, but they haven’t been alone in bringing some professional polish to post-production with a soundtrack. Hunk Wrestling has this whole sexy world-building montage before Ivan Guerrero and Steve Mason step onto the mats, for example, that has this almost ethereal dance music with an alto voice musingly singing, “Look into my heart and see what, my love, you are to me.”
[Audio Clip – sound credit: Hunks Wrestling Ivan Guerrero vs Steve Mason]
I don’t know that it strikes the tone of the seriously mean mat scrap about to break out between Steve and Ivan, but the soundtrack accompanies this luxurious, slow look at each of them, separately, working out their hot bodies, perhaps speaking more to the viewer falling in lust with the two of them in the abstract, before our lust to see them work each other over finally breaks out.
A lot of what I’ve seen in pairing music with homoerotic wrestling videos is less about the vibe of a particular match, and more conveying an ethos of a production house in general. In many cases, the music is just part of a visual and audio branded logo, speaking to the particular sensibility of the producer, overall. UCW, may it rest in peace, had that quick 80’s guitar riff to start off matches.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: UCW College Boy Beatdown #4]
It’s very “80’s garage band” which was totally apropos of UCW’s cinder block walls and relatively low budget, high earnestness staging. Just to give credit where due, I sampled that last clip from my copy of UCW’s match between Marcus Ares and Quinn Harper entitled “College Boy Beatdown #4,” now for resale on Underground Wrestler.
And speaking of Underground Wrestler, while I haven’t watched a lot from them, yet, I have caught the high gloss finish to their branded logo of a neon sign blazing to life, along with the Tron-esque audio of a live wire, followed by this ominous horror film minor chord chime fading into silence as the screen fades in on Nordic muscle god Chase Lundqvist stretching out in preparation for his $1,000 Challenge Match against Chasyn.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: Underground Wrestler $1,000 Challenge]
These audio brands don’t drill down quite so deep into the specific ethos of a particular type of match like the BG East trailer soundtracks, but I like the attention to detail, to establish a tone of a production house, if not of any one particular match. Which is probably why polished post-production really stands out, I find, when I come across it on Watchfighters. I mean, the genius of Watchfighters is that everyone from major underground operations to just a sole wrestling enthusiast with a camera phone can share what they produce and let wrestling fans vote with their credit cards for who’s making a move in the market. So, it’s probably no wonder there’s a lot, including a lot of hot wrestling, with little-to-no post production, sometimes no credits, no logos, and certainly no soundtracks. But, a couple I’ve seen deserve an honorable mention for bringing some forethought and creative style to bedazzle a relatively straightforward homemade wrestling video into something with self-conscious character.
A couple of Watchfighters matches I’ve reviewed on the blog stand out for me. The first I want to mention is the growing Uruguayan production house headed by Muscles77 (who wrestled for BG East a while back as Marcelo Muscle). The crew behind matches like Muscles77’s match against Rocky Big Guns opens with a slow motion survey of both hardbodied wrestling hunks in turn, posing, flexing, sneering with cocky confidence at the camera as this unhurried, electronic melody with (mabybe?) a South American sensibility provides the soundtrack to our eye fucking, giving us time to decide whose mouthering muscles we want to see on top.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: Muscles77’s Alpha vs Alpha: Big Muscle Domination]
My last shout out for self-produced wrestling content with a self-conscious, perhaps even cerebral post-production footprint goes to long-time friend of this blog, Mason Brooks. I reviewed his apartment match against Dio Characi after Dio told me it was one of the favorite matches he’s filmed by that point in his early career. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Mason has crafted super-stylized opening credits with a funky, quirky beat and an A-Ha-style life-to-storyboard visual effect.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: Mason Brooks’ Mason vs Dio Characi]
The music is high concept. Like, I’d expect to hear it on the floor of a gay dance club AND playing the elevator of a museum of modern art. Which, honestly, is a pitch perfect capture of exactly the way I think of Mason Brooks in general.
In summary, I confess that a hot musical soundtrack is, by no means, a requirement for me to get turned on by homoerotic wrestling… but it certainly doesn’t hurt. Honestly, I’m all about the blending and blurring of artistic media. I do it every day. Every morning, I wake up before the sunrises and write homoerotic wrestling fiction with my best wrestling buddy and graphic artist, AR. Getting turned on by the overlap of watching hot homoerotic wrestling with a conscientious musical soundtrack is why this infatuation I have with homoerotic wrestling feels like something more than just my taste in porn. It’s a sensibility that translates well beyond pushing play and watching wrestling on video. It’s a worldview that translates into literature and audio podcast and visual arts… and into music.
So, that’s about it for this much anticipated fourth edition of Sidelineland Sounds, my audio accompaniment to my longstanding blog Sidelineland. Email me at Wrestlebard@gmail.com, or message me at Wrestlebard on Instagram and BlueSky, and let me know what music speaks to your homoerotic wrestling sensibilities. It can’t promise when the next episode of Sidelineland Sounds will drop, but my plan for episode 5 is really inspired by the BG East track “I submit,” slowing down and taking a long, slow listen to the panicked pleading of once proud wrestlers begging not to get broken. Until then, keep enjoying homoerotic wrestling, and let me know what’s catching your eye and what’s turning you on hardest in the world of homoerotic wrestling, because you know, I’m going to keep telling you what’s turning me on about it.
[Audio Clip – sound credit: BG East’s Submissions 6 trailer… “I submit, sir!”]
[Bell Ring – sound credit: BG East’s Three-Way Thrash 6]
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