From Far and Wide and Light-Years Away (2024)

Since her WWE debut in 2015, Asuka—born Kanako Urai in Osaka, Japan—has been a true beacon of light. Her joie de vivre and general awesomeness are as infectious as the love and reverence she receives from fans, her coworkers, and legends of the business. Although she had a few fits and starts earlier in her career (she briefly retired in 2006 to take on a bout with nephritis and work as a graphic designer), the past eight years have been among the finest ever produced by a performer in WWE history.

All while she juggles motherhood and being possessed by a demon who has led her to hang out backstage and embrace her destiny as the end boss from Yakuza 8: Puroresu. (Or, sure, according to my dear old friend and video game nerd Marc Normandin, she is literally cosplaying as Goro Majima.)

There are any number of reasons why Urai has an almost universally positive approval rating—to be clear, that is meant literally: Her Cagematch wrestler rating of 9.42 is composed of 679 votes, with just three rating her as less than a 6 out of 10 (which is the Cagematch average)—but for us here in the Palace of Wisdom, the very specific way in which her entrance theme, “The Future,” doesn’t suck is what’s most intriguing to us. This may seem odd, given her awe-inspiring accomplishments—especially considering she’s one of the most over promos in the business without ever needing to say so much as a paragraph in English.

But, in what is perhaps our Hottest Take, we’ve run the numbers—very complicated, can’t show you right now, just trust us—and it is an indisputable fact that wrestling entrance themes are mostly stepping-in-it-barefoot levels of dogsh*t terrible. Especially to listen to out of the context of a live wrestling show. (Also, Hank asked to write about this because he loves music theory, and by that he means he loves watching old episodes of Earworm.)

Of course there currently are, have been, and always will be a few “bangers.” Even when you include the genre’s less aesthetically pleasing entries, the overwhelming majority are still effective in their basic purpose of getting the audience excited to see someone and what they are about to do. As stand-alone products, though, they are not, by and large, good; and before you get all “But my gym playlist!,” bringing great workout vibes speaks to the entire issue with wrestling themes as musical objects, specifically that they aren’t what you are supposed to be paying attention to when they are playing.

The worst ones are so bad as to be entrancing and are repetitive in a way that makes them feel much longer than they actually are. As a consequence, many of these pieces of business live in the exact middle between completely forgettable and dangerously catchy, which makes them earworm breeding grounds. As form-following-function as these are, at their core, they are elongated jingles geared toward eliciting reactions from a live crowd, existing not to complete a harmonic thought but to convey an idea about a brand.

This affects wrestling songs structurally, at least according to Dylan Roth, who, in addition to growing up at “New Jersey’s Premier Record Store,” is a culture writer, wrestling fan, and member of the pop-punk band No Jersey. So he’s thought about the idea of how entrance themes affect a pro wrestler more than most. “Pro wrestling entrances can be any genre of music, but not every great song makes for a great wrestling entrance theme. A great entrance theme needs to line up with the essential beats.”

The most common song structure for most music the public has heard (and liked), Roth says, is “ABABCAB, or verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus,” which he says can be “mapped to, like, 60 percent of all pop hits, from ‘Please Please Me’ to ‘Kiss Me More,’ with allowances for rap verses, guitar solos, etc. It’s not universal, but it’s as reliable as the ‘hero’s journey’ in pop cinema.”

Both independent and mainstream wrestlers have different priorities from a band or record label trying to produce the modern equivalent of a radio hit, Roth says. “A wrestling entrance theme needs to declare its own entrance. It should be immediately recognizable to fans from the first second. ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin’s begins with the sound of shattering glass … so the music is still getting warmed up and the performer has not actually appeared yet, but the audience knows to be excited.”

While Asuka’s theme is more subtle than shattering glass, the motifs and music cues hint toward approaching danger. After what sounds like a meteor crashing, a drum (along with an accompanying light show) replaces thundering footsteps before a burst of distortion stands in for the primal scream of a kaiju monster as the song starts in earnest.

This may feel like/be a bit of Orientalizing and othering by WWE—and would be in line with its presentation of previous Japanese (and Japanese-“adjacent”) characters—but given how Asuka has organically incorporated so many bits of her culture into how she projects her chosen personas onto the world, not having references to that musically would have felt disingenuous. (Also, given the magnitude of her star when she signed and the protective umbrella of NXT, you’d assume she had a major role in her presentation that she may not have had in the mid-1990s.)

Kana has balanced innovation in execution and reverence for traditional presentation her entire career. She has literally paid—or one presumes, as it was for her own promotion, Kana Pro—to have (at least) one of her matches, against Meiko Satamura, scored live by a shamisen (三味線). (Thank Phil for finding this, everyone!)

The words to “The Future” aren’t, in the grand scheme of things, on the level of “One likes to believe / In the freedom of music / But glittering prizes / And endless compromises / Shatter the illusion / Of integrity,” but grading by the standards of professional wrestling lyrics? “The one force of nature they call by name / I came from tomorrow to take back today” is as perfect as poetry as anything those precious Canadian prog rockers ever gave us.

As the “Empress of Tomorrow,” Asuka—a somewhat common unisex Japanese name that means (essentially) either “the fragrance of tomorrow” or “to fly; bird”—has since day one been presented as the present and future of the business. Again, that is meant literally: In her debut on NXT, then-GM William Regal referred to her as “the hottest free agent in the world and possibly the greatest competitor ever signed here.”

That same debut shows the ways in which Asuka represents an explicit turn away from the kind of cheap wrestling logic that treats essentially everyone who does not have the diction of a Nebraskan call center employee as bad on the mic or, if English is not their first language, explicitly “foreign” (and by extension of wrestling logic, “potentially dangerous and untrustworthy because they are not from around here”).

While she was treated as an alien, it was in the otherworldly sense—yes, she comes “from far and wide,” but it’s a place “light-years away” (although it’s reasonable to assume that people would also be hella hateful toward extraterrestrials). And she wasn’t bullied by Emma and Dana (poor, poor Dana) because she’s from Japan; she was bullied because she was the new girl and the Dimmer Twins were trying to seem tough. After she detached them (minds from spirits, bodies from souls, shoulders from sockets, et al.), at consecutive TakeOvers, she got her inevitable comeuppance, which was fueled by disrespect for her not as a cultural idea, but as a person.

Her use of noh masks, which have their roots deep in Japanese performance art and the (relatively modern) staple of Japanese wrestling, and poison mist puts her heritage on display in ways that actually work for her character without being her character. Metaphorically, the masks help hide her true intentions, and especially now with the daikijin mask, she is just straight-up unsettling to stare at from across the ring or down a long entrance ramp. The mist serves as an homage to the Great Kabuki and Muta while simultaneously serving a functional purpose (of helping her cheat and/or defend herself).

Even the one bit of her entrance that doesn’t have a practical purpose, her kimono—which is reminiscent of the armor worn by the Onna-Bugeisha, a group of female samurai warriors in the 19th century—tells us about her without being the only thing she’s about. This kind of holistic storytelling, when paired with a fitting song, helps to create the aura of someone like Asuka. Although the song may not have as high a probability of getting over by itself as something like “Radio”—which, for the record, features the lyrics “I’m gonna drink some beer tonight, yeah / Gonna get some girls I like / I’m gonna wear my pants real tight / All the girls are gonna treat me just right”—the underlying themes of a song like “The Future” can more precisely define someone’s character and, by extension, career trajectory.

“Radio”—the WWE theme for the greatest wrestler in the history of Long Island (the most magical place on earth), Matt “Zack Ryder” Cardona—is instead perhaps the most notable example of WWE’s version of an “I Want” song, the point in a musical when the main character explains whatever dreams and aspirations they have before reality crushes them (or magic makes them come true, usually the latter). They’re probably best known for their appearances in Disney musicals, but you may have even seen one performed by the (former?) first couple of WWE, Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, on The Tonight Show.

While they are usually limited in a musical to a single song and, maybe, a reprise, in professional wrestling these kinds of songs also make up a disproportionate amount of in-house product largely split into two camps, first, the “What I Am” song:

These aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be, as, unlike some other entrance theme styles, they never survived the transition from a single person creating songs in-house to mainstream acts both writing and covering songs for performers. It was during the era of in-house song production that the “Why I Am (the Way That I Am)” song, which is basically a “What I Am” song that learned about poetry in freshman composition, rose to prominence.

Dumb (or even unintelligible) lyrics in a bad or unintentionally goofy song are often objectively funny, which is probably how we missed how many of these things have some of the very worst lyrics in modern music. It’s not until, say, your 2-year-old announces she “loves” (with a conviction she’s never had for either of her parents) a song—like mine did the first time she heard “Radio”—and you try to sing along that you might even notice just how deep the rot goes.

A bad song (or one that people don’t take seriously) can also be part of an accumulation of marginal things that stunts or prevents someone from getting over the way they should. While we all had a good laugh, “It’s a shameful thing, lobster head, a careless man who can wind up bread, you wear your sins like it’s some kind of rice, too many limes, too many limes” put the brakes on things a bit for Sheamus, at least in the sense that it spoke to a larger inability to take him as seriously for an inordinate amount of time. (As an aside, the meme culture surrounding him over roughly the same period also obscured for “internet fans” that he was exactly the kind of wrestler they claim they want to see.)

Writing any song seems difficult, but for wrestling entrances, or any kind of novelty song, the challenge isn’t to stumble into divine inspiration but to find the motivation to write about some really dumb sh*t. Although constraints can lead to creativity, commerce has a tendency to constrict it to the point of suffocation, and wrestling’s microcosmic relationship to capitalism means that cost control exists far above quality on the list of concerns when it comes to something like the soundtrack.

This is the fundamental reason why lyrically, a lot of these songs fall short of compelling. The goal in the ’80s and ’90s was to get something up and out there for when wrestlers debuted, and when someone didn’t have a strongly defined character (or such a strongly defined character that words detract from the overall presentation), the way this was dealt with in the past was to simply make an instrumental song. Which usually turned out great: Bret Hart, Diesel, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Brock Lesnar, and the Undertaker all have absolutely no words to their songs, and even the Rock’s theme didn’t really have lyrics.

This has become a trend once again, with Sheamus reverting to an instrumental while nearly every newly minted WWE main-eventer of the past 10 years—Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose (as well as the Shield proper), Braun Strowman, Shinsuke Nakamura, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn; pretty much everyone except for Bray Wyatt—has had a largely lyric-free catalog of entrance themes (at least, depending on whether you think ska-based chants of enthusiasm are lyric-free).

But what nearly all of them have had is a nearly perfect start to a wrestling theme, incorporating both the self-introduction of the song and what Dylan describes as the “need to leave some space between its opening notes and its first musical climax so that the audience has time to anticipate that moment when their favorite (or most hated) character steps out onto the entrance ramp.”

Roth feels that John Cena’s theme, “The Time Is Now,” is a “perfect example” of this concept and that it speaks precisely to the structural needs of a successful wrestling theme. “The track starts with those minor descending saxophones and simmering tambourine that absolutely everyone in the building knows means John Cena is about to arrive. But it also provides the audience a reliable countdown as to exactly how long they have before they see him. The saxes build, and you hear a vocalist trill his tongue and someone exclaims ‘AMADOU!’ (sampled from ‘Ante Up’ by M.O.P.), and that’s the exact moment when Big Match John is going to bound through that curtain. The trumpets hit, a fanfare declaring that ‘The Champ Is Here,’ and the crowd pops a second time, positively or negatively.”

Hip-hop, as Roth explains, “experiments with form a ton, especially outside of Top 40 singles.” In hip-hop outside the Top 40, “the main thrust of the song is the lyrics, not the hook. If you’re just trying to create a mood, you might not even include a chorus at all.” This makes hip-hop much more versatile for wrestling themes (though for a number of reasons, relatively rare in wrestling compared to rap’s relative ubiquity in popular music). The looser structure of rap also allows it to be cut and reconstructed in ways that get to the emotional crux of the presentation.

“When Cena makes his exit or wins a match,” Roth explains, “the music plays again, but this time they skip right to the trumpets. You don’t need those first 11 seconds anymore because there’s nothing to anticipate.” Although Asuka’s is not structured quite the same, the interregnum between the first “meteor strike” and the arrival of the first verse elicits Pavlovian levels of response from crowds—as the pop at this year’s Royal Rumble showed.

Part of this is because, structurally, the piece reaches the level of what Roth calls “REALLY cooking with gas.” Reaching this level requires a song to be “designed to account for the length of time it takes for you to descend from the entrance tunnel to the ring, and has a third pop, timed for the moment when you climb the turnbuckle, perform a signature pose, spit a geyser of water out of your mouth, or whatever your gimmick requires.”

This doesn’t happen naturally and is in fact something that performers almost certainly practice, especially for something like Triple H’s magical mist fountain, and the performance is all a function of how the song is put together. “This is when it helps to use an inverted pop structure of intro, chorus, verse, chorus. Emerge during the first chorus and use the verse—whether it’s sung or instrumental—to make your way into the spotlight, and by the time you’re there, the crowd is primed to sing the rousing chorus one more time. That’s big match appeal, baby!”

Asuka’s “spit take” is the removal of her mask, which, for obvious reasons, is the most anticipated part of her arrival. The ability to sustain interest in your entrance can also, as Roth implies, serve as a pilot program for whether or not you will be able to get over in a meaningful way over a long period of time. Keeping eyeballs on you while, essentially, just being yourself—or the personification of yourself that you are projecting into the world—puts folks in rarefied air.

Although she’s one of the most accomplished performers in the history of the women’s division—in addition to having one of the longest reigns as NXT Women’s Champion in modern American wrestling, she was the second Women’s Grand Slam Champion in WWE history after Bayley, won the Mixed Match Challenge despite having the Miz as her partner, was a sole survivor in a traditional Survivor Series match, and won the inaugural women’s Royal Rumble—it has not always been smooth sailing for Asuka. There was certainly a time when fans (and presumably folks backstage) had real concerns about whether WWE had squandered the chance for Asuka to reach the potential everyone (including Vince McMahon) seemed to agree she had.

But, at least for Empress, suffering through the “curse of the good hand”—or as Vince would say during the ThunderDome era, “just put Asuka out there”—proved that, like her entrance, she could maintain the interest of fans through a period of transition and decreased focus on her. In that way, she is like Cena—who, as we’ve mentioned in previous pieces, was the first performer to win the Money in the Bank contract and lose the cash-in, has lost multiple WrestleMania main events, and even got tricked into relinquishing another WrestleMania main event after winning the 2008 Royal Rumble.

Neither has ever quite been “buried,” but because of their palpable greatness (and electric relationship with the crowd), the “curse of the good hand” becomes a blessing when put to good use by the company, in service of building new stars (see: the U.S. Championship Open Challenges) and the legacy of future cornerstones, like Asuka may presumably do with Bianca Belair (if not at WrestleMania, almost certainly somewhere after that). Experimentation with star-building models—as our beloved editor Khal has pointed out to me, it became a trend for Asuka and Kairi Sane to dominate in the women’s tag team division while Asuka went title hunting in the ThunderDome—is a rite of passage for megastars at this level, as they are often the only ones who can withstand whatever ill will fans might have toward change (because change is scary and occasionally gross).

Asuka and Cena present themselves similarly at a core level, even though their themes structurally differ quite a bit. On a basic genre level, they exist in entirely different spheres of influence. Lyrically, however, their songs both exemplify the one significant style of wrestling poetry remaining, which more often than not produces the best of all wrestling themes (or at least those with lyrics): the “What I’m Gonna Do” song.

Bestowed only on all-powerful beings, these songs announce that we are all privy to someone becoming great, or at least a pretty good segment on a wrestling show. And these aren’t just about lyrics, as “The Game” elevates Motörhead’s mammoth sound from a song about someone who can win a world championship to a song that makes Triple H a world-conquering force who would eventually become the “King of Kings.”

As the name “What I’m Gonna Do” implies, there needs to be a clear and definitive “truthiness” (more “truthy,” less “facty”) to whatever it is that the song is saying. When Mark Henry’s music hit, you just knew someone was going to get their “ass kicked,” and there was also a pretty good chance someone would end up with their “wig split’ by the World’s Strongest Man, who spent several years “walk[ing] through this land like [he] run this land” on his way to building his Hall of Pain.

The entire “LOL CENA WINS” era was a perpetual “three-second tan,” but it’s almost certainly Vince’s “No Chance in Hell” that hews closest to what something like Asuka’s song (in particular the original CFO$ version) accomplishes. On the razor edge of metaphor, the “implication” of the “No Chance in Hell” theme is that McMahon—although it’s not so much an “implication” once your wife runs a super PAC for the reelection campaign for the POTUS administration of one of your closest friends—exists in a world where he is so powerful that he can buy politicians that control your life, which is 100 percent true, in particular in the world of WWE, where he is essentially God.

Asuka’s song announces her as both the present and the future, something made very clear in the fanfare announcing her arrival. And, based on her return out of the dark side—or as her song explains it, being “cast from the shadows [that] now light my way”—and a new version of her song (which, while it has not been released at press time, has been referred to as a “priority” by the folks I spoke to at WWE), she will continue to make her way through the women’s division until she gives them a reason not to believe in her as a centerpiece of their company.

We’ll have to wait and see whether that means fallen idols scream yesterday or kings and queens fall like rain this weekend at Elimination Chamber—winning that would put her in a title match against the center of the WWE universe, Bianca Belair, at WrestleMania.

Though we’ll probably never be ready for it. Because, well.

Nick Bond (@TheN1ckster) is the cofounder of the Institute of Kayfabermetrics and provides weekly updates to The Ringer’s WWE Power Board.