Glimpses of Recognition: The Mountain Goats' "The Ballad of Bull Ramos"

The concept that I wish to pursue an examination of across a pair of Mountain Goat songs is a philosophically laden one: recognition. As the word literally says, re-cognition is not just a matter of cognition, of thinking something for the first time, but of some kind of thinking-over of something that we already know but perhaps in a higher-order or fuller fashion like when we come to recognize something as true. This sense is particularly relevant to the social meaning of the term: when we recognize someone we know from a crowd, for instance, it's not like picking one object out from a series of others, but of affirming a prior relationship based upon the knowledge (at least to an extent) of who that person is, i.e., their identity. Connected to this sense of recognition and social identity is the way that we also speak about it in terms of the attribution of some kind of status to one's identity. So when we say that we want recognition for something, what we mean is that we want some particular act or achievement, along with whatever social status they are supposed to bring, to be explicitly connected to our identity. 

The song that began my reflection on this matter is "The Ballad of Bull Ramos," which is about a wrestler who was long classified as a heel, but the song itself is a celebration of his life and spirit, as the uplifting music itself attest. 

As for the details of his life, Bull Ramos did actually buy and run a car wrecking yard, so that part is all accurate, as are his famous generosity and the bits about his later health problems. The picture is paints of him is far removed from that of the bull-whip wielding heel; instead, the energy of the song reflects the vitality that seems to have infused his life inside and out of the ring. In this regard the song is really about giving him the recognition that he deserves, a task that much of the album it comes from, Beat the Champ, is devoted to doing for wrestling in general by revealing the human content of wrestling and of the enjoyment of it.


I think the most touching part of the song--its emotional core--comes around 1:25, after he's laid up by a piece of glass on the floor of the shop:

And the doctor recognizes me
As the operating theatre grows dim,
"Aren't you that old wrestler with a bull whip?"
"Yes sir, that's me, I'm him."

All of the weight of this entire song, with its documentation of not just a career but a life, bears down on the one word, "recognizes"  and the kind of status-giving that it implies. In the case of Bull Ramos, I think there is a certain validation in being recognized by the doctor. The fact that a serious professional could have been so influenced by his performance to recognize him so many years later serves as a particular validation of his career. You can hear this in the way that Ramos addresses the doctor as sir as well as his triple affirmation of his identity ("Yes sir, that's me, I'm him"). It's a touching moment that is a testament to The Mountain Goats' songwriting ability. In the next post I'll follow up with the next Mountain Goats song, "Against Pollution."