“Fire Editorial” forces you to remember that wrestling is best when it feels almost too real.

Track: “Fire Editorial”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

I am not deep enough in the subculture of wrestling to know who Ed Farhat was. I’m also not in John Darnielle’s generation, but that doesn’t stop most folks. Wrestling is a fascinating corner of the world, where most folks I know who like it a little end up liking it a lot. It would not be unreasonable for someone to know The Sheik, clarified sometimes as The Original Sheik to differentiate him from the guy who is still alive and still yelling at Hulk Hogan on Twitter, who was really Ed Farhat, a guy from Michigan who was a big deal in the world of wrestling in the 1970s.

“Fire Editorial” isn’t exactly his story, directly, but he’s the central figure. Darnielle described the story behind the song at a show in Seattle in 2015 and I really relate to his explanation. When I was a kid, The Undertaker beat Yokozuna in a “casket match” where the loser, supposedly, would be rolled into a specially made casket and buried. I had to look up the details, but I was nine when that happened. That’s exactly the right age where you logically know someone isn’t going to be killed and buried on TV, but you can suspend it just enough. Ed Farhat threw fire at people and the announcers played into it, screaming that he was a literal killer and “something must be done!”

You can picture young John Darnielle seeing this and being in that same headspace as I was at nine years old. Maybe you have a similar experience and maybe you don’t. The tension of Darnielle’s highest range and the piano here sell it, even if it’s a new experience for you.