So, this is slightly rambly and more than a little unfinished but it’s something that I’ve been trying to put into…

So, this is slightly rambly and more than a little unfinished but it’s something that I’ve been trying to put into words for some time and I wanted to share it despite the fact that it could stand to be edited a few times.

The Story of Janne Walterz

 

Actually, that’s not really true. This is actually the story of my realization that Janne Walterz might be the perfect metaphor for the Swedish attitude towards wrestling, and therefore perhaps the most Swedish wrestling gimmick of all time.

 

Janne Walterz is a wrestling character in a small Swedish promotion (it’s the biggest one in Sweden, but it’s still a small promotion called Wrestlingpalatset) whose gimmick is that he is the king of the Dance-scene. This particular music scene is, hopefully, unique to Sweden (I say hopefully because I want to spare the rest of you). It is composed of music that my grandparents liked to dance to, but for some reason it’s still popular, especially in smaller communities around Sweden and some of the bands make a lot of money touring the hamlets around Sweden playing live music that people dance to. The most famous bands, historically, have been Vikingarna and Lasse Stefanz, so just youtube those bands if you want to expose yourself to an earworm (the ironic “z” at the end is common amongst these bands and is the reason for it at the end of the character name).

 

Another signature oddity of these bands are their stage clothes, often using spangly jackets or 70’s clothes, still. I don’t know for sure, but I have been told that it has to do with the fact that a lot of these bands don’t make a lot of money, and if the stage clothes are clothes that you wouldn’t ever want to wear in your “civilian life” they are considered work clothes and therefore tax deductible. In any case, these types of clothes have become a signature of the music genre and Janne Walterz has fully embraced the style.

 

The reason that I consider this gimmick such a good representation of the Swedish attitude towards wrestling can be summed up as “If you don’t get it, you’ll think it’s stupid”. It is of course a gross over-simplification but bear with me. In the cities this Danceband music is something that most people in my mothers generation (she’s nearing retirement) find silly and old-fashioned, but move out from the cities, and really in Sweden there are only a few “cities”, and you’ll find that there is a huge following. To most people my age it is even more true that it seems like a weird old, thing, but still, in the rural towns a lot of people still go dancing to this music, wether they admit it openly or it is a guilty pleasure. For myself I don’t think I’ll ever “get” this kind of music, it doesn’t move me, I am not really into dancing anyway and it just feels odd that this thing is still around. But, and here’s my point, the same can be said for Wrestling, if you don’t “get” it, if it doesn’t hook you, chances are you’ll never get into it, because you have to care about some part of the storyline, even something as simple as “why are they fighting?” in order to get into wrestling. In Sweden there is sort of a stigma to enjoy Wrestling, often from the same people who really care what some football (soccer) player thinks about some issue, so a lot of people avoid it to avoid that stigma (same as with that old-fashioned music).

 

But the best evidence for an analogy is this: About a decade and a half ago, one of our, then biggest comedic actors portrayed a mild-mannered silly character in a dark comedy (one of the funniest, if extremely dark, movies I’ve ever seen). Some years later he launched a danceband, based on that character, where he played that character, and recorded an album, it sold like hotcakes, they toured and was hugely popular and not as you would expect only from those who wanted to see him make fun of danceband-music, but people went to his shows to dance. So, like wrestling fans, who know that the show is slightly silly, nonsensical and sometimes just plain weird, and we love wrestling despite (perhaps due to) that, the fans of this kind of music knows that everyone else thinks that what they like is stupid, and they don’t really care, they’re laughing about it themselves.

 

So when Janne Walterz pulls his opponent into his finisher “Sista Dansen” (the Last Dance) he is making a more or less perfect pastiche of what wrestling is, or at least how wrestling is viewed here.