WWE ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ Video is Actually the Worst of One World

The WWE kick-started their flip-flopping return to dual-branded PPV with an irritatingly generic hip-pop music video that forced many of their supposedly cool combat sports entertainment superstars to dance like buffoons, lip-synch and pump their fists to a song that none of them would be caught dead listening to in real life.

Like, seriously… what the fuck?

In another typical big money decision to shuffle around content and look like they’re actually doing something other than maintaining the status quo (and thus the bottom line), the WWE decided to change their policy of having rotating exclusive brand rosters on their PPV events. Of course, the WWE did this once before in 2011 and the reason they’re doing it again is pretty much the same: they want their biggest stars (Roman Reigns, Braun Strowman, Daniel Bryan, Ronda Rousey) on every event.

That’s right, they want “the best” at each PPV. Well, damn, if I’m a long-time wheel-spinner like Zack Ryder or Natalya, then I’m probably not feeling the “love” of this ad campaign. “Don’t worry,” WWE says, “we’re gonna maybe think about including some of you losers on these shows too – but for now, dance!”

And so they populated this dumb-ass video with (barring a few exceptions) the best of their mid-card talent:

The Bar, Sasha Banks, Finn Balor, Elias, The Usos, AJ Styles, Carmella, Naomi, Nia Jax, Alexa Bliss, Aiden English, The Miz, Matt Hardy, Mojo Rawley, The New Day, Kalisto, Dolph Ziggler, Becky Lynch, Shinsuke Nakamura, Jeff Hardy, Bayley and Erick Rowan.

This choice of wrestlers sends an interesting yet hollow message. None of the real recent main event players are involved, such as Roman Reigns, Braun Strowman, Samoa Joe, Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins, Jinder Mahal, Randy Orton, Charlotte, Asuka, or Rousey, but there’s also no appearance from the part-timers would will steal a PPV spot from anyone on that list with just a nod, like Cena, Brock, HHH, or Undertaker. From what I can tell, only Sheamus, Banks, Styles, Miz, Ziggler and Jeff Hardy have ever actually main event-ed a PPV, and those were rare instances; hardly the “best” you’d be promoting to a mainstream audience.

But is this commercial for the mainstream audience? I’d imagine the only people who are gonna see this are those already subscribed to the WWE Network. Probably the 50 million people who are gonna watch the “This is America” video, or a Lil Tay rant on Instagram, are not going to find much to like about something so un-cool, un-funny, irrelevant, and phoney. This video is just a move by the dominant power of the WWE over their subjugated workers: rob them, humiliate them, and make them dance as if they like it – a cold metaphor for the position most WWE fans in the audience are in at the moment too.

Of course, the WWE had the roster on two brands to potentially make for amazing 3-hour PPVs… but they didn’t. And their first attempt at this new dual-branded PPV-era picked up right where the exclusive shows ended: mediocrity. Right on the heels of two dual-branded super-shows with insanely quality cards (on paper), Wrestlemania and the Greatest Royal Rumble, the first “official” dual-branded show of the “Best of Both Worlds”-era, Backlash, was actually the third – and clearly the worst.

We all guessed right that the return to dual-branded PPVs was so the WWE can slot more matches with Roman Reigns into the top of these shows, thus pushing out whatever few minutes mid-card acts like The Fashion Police or Goldust might have gotten on the single-brand PPVs. Of course, with 5+ hours a week of main roster TV to fill, not getting a couple of minutes on PPV seems like a moot point, but it’s about perception. We perceive that a short match on PPV is more important than a long match on TV, while also assuming that it means you’re a bigger star.

But the biz-world brain-warping of the WWE also wants you to think the company is bigger than it is, and they do this in a typically cheesy way: being generic. Whereas the WWE used to be aggressively weird or violent and dangerous, qualities that attracted new attention and fans, they now aspire to be this major, global “entertainment” company, but they’re really not. They’re not the NFL or the NBA, they’re not Netflix or HBO, they’re not even the UFC. But by producing a video like “Best of Both Worlds” they’re simultaneously chasing the reputations of those companies and proving why they’re never be like them – because they’re lame!

What that video subliminally calls attention to is the real gap between the WWE and the rest of popular culture in 2018. They created a song that has the melody you’d hear in the background of a trashy mid-2000s reality show, like The Hills or Jersey Shore. Additionally, it has some real weak, pre-2000s “rapping” that makes Machine Gun Kelly sound like Logic. And to make it even more laughable, you’ve got young wrestlers doing dad-rap dance moves straight out of a Vince Vaughan movie.

While black culture and hip-hop is as relevant in the mainstream as ever, with Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, Donald Glover’s Atlanta being arguably the best show on TV, Black Panther is one of the biggest movies of all time, Kanye West is polarizing people on Twitter, Ava DuVernay is making a New Gods movie, and critics like Ta-Nehisis Coates and Cornel West are setting the moral compass for how we view culture. Meanwhile, the WWE has The New Day and Naomi dressed in neon and lip-synching to this wack-ass song, while Bayley is doing rap-arms circa Anthony Kedis in 1992, and there’s at least 3 different variations of white people doing the Running Man that I could count.

You’ve gotta feel especially bad for the Usos, who worked against the grain for the past year to establish a very culturally-specific unique cadence in their joint promos, and yet the pay-off is having to sleepwalk through some grill-mugging and finger-pointing, while rapping along to some of the whitest music and lyrics one will find in 2018.

For 3-4 years now, the WWE been pursuing the the most financial rewards from the least amount of creativity during this “Mediocrity Era”, and thus arguably losing out on the kind of next level business they could be doing with more sophisticated content. Rather than leveraging their position as a true outlier in the media and culture landscape, they’ve doubled-down on their quest to mine money out of the blandest of content, and this “Best of Both Worlds” video spotlights how that approach is frighteningly colour blind.

I imagine the WWE sees themselves as above race or diversity, like the way McDonald’s would think because they have millions of minority customers and employees in America that it makes them somehow post-white (money green?). But in 2018, we have the technology and access to see that the only thing lame about Western culture is the business-minded thinking that everything can be generalized in order to make money from the masses. This has got to be a dying paradigm, despite WWE’s huge profits.

And while the WWE, and pro-wrestling in America, is traditionally a product of “white” culture, white people actually aren’t that lame or generic. However, even Logan Paul would shake his head at a video like “Best of Both Worlds”. The point being, when people create their own content, we can all see the diversity inside the diversity. The winners in the culture wars will be the ones who let different voices express themselves on the mainstream entertainment level. WWE has yet to show they are capable of this, taking the easy route to homogenization over real diversification.

At a moment when the world is hungry for more diversity in their cultural content, is it any surprise that the WWE seems more ideas bankrupt than ever before? “The Best of Both Worlds” video is a metonym for their wider cluelessness, and seeing as how they assumed this video would herald a new creative direction is kind of the point. I mean, c’mon, when you can spend this much time motivating AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura to commit to faux-singing on camera like they’re real “artists” but can’t figure out how to let them wrestle a great match on three straight PPVs, then there’s a ghost in the machine.