Rancid - Ruby Soho

My most recent roommate and best friend of thirty-two years has exposed me to the circus that is AEW professional wrestling. I pretty much stopped paying attention to professional wrestling the moment Jon Cena became world champion, so I am very out of touch with modern wrestling. Chris Jericho has always been on of our favorites. We met him at a Calgary Comicon and during our brief interaction he was very cool. Jericho was AEW’s first world champion, so that was a big selling point. Anyway, one evening we are watching AEW’s Women’s Casino Battle Royale at All Out and the wild card comes out musically accompanied by Rancid’s “Ruby Soho.” Great song, I dig it, and out comes the competitor with the same name. That’s cool, I can dig that too. I recognize Ruby from a WWE women’s Royal Rumble which the same friend and I watched as well, Ruby Riot she was then. She has an interesting look and I liked her immediately, but that might have had something to due with the entrance music.

Ruby Soho, the wrestler, wins the Casino Battle Royale and will later go on to face Brit Baker the champion. Good times. Afterward, we watched a post conference with Ruby and her new boss Tony Khan, and Ruby was so happy to be there. What I also liked was I could tell from Tony’s body language and expression he was so happy that Ruby was happy. I am routing for AEW, the wrestlers legitimately seem happy there. I wonder how long that will last….

Fairly recently Thunder Rosa finally become World Champion after defeating Britt Baker in a steel cage match. Time has passed, I probably should have written this sooner.

Anyway, this is a music blog, so let’s talk about Rancid.

A lot of my friends listened to a lot of Rancid when I was growing up, which means by extension I listened to a lot of Rancid growing up. Even though Rancid never got their hooks in me back then, but at the same time, I always enjoyed listening to them, and accompanying that, I always enjoyed the company of my friends. The end result is I have many positive nostalgic memories of Rancid, even if they were little more than part of the soundtrack of my life for a short period of time. Further to this point, I could not recall many times I heard Rancid from the days of my youth until recently. The advantage to my aloofness, I get to rediscover some good music.

And so, I did.

I have worked through Rancid’s entire discography. I normally pace myself when absorbing an entire bands work, especially when they have five or more albums. The reason for this gradual approach is I find I pay more attention to individual songs if I give my ear a chance to fully to appreciate the details and nuances of individual songs. When taking in multiple albums at once, the information is a touch too much in quantity for me to process so the songs bleed together. Hardly a serious issue, but when I sit down to talk about why I like Rancid, I have left myself with a single song to anchor too. So, I guess “Ruby Soho” will have to continue to be my focus for the moment.

The Rancid classics of the nineties were several, despite my casual listening and the passage of time, I recall reasonably well tracks like “Time Bomb,” honestly, I think the album “…And Out Come the Wolves” was probably the bulk of my early days listening of Rancid. So it is not too surprising if their great two word hook remains the single strongest memory I have of Rancid.

“Destination unknown.”

It probably did not matter how many years separated my high school house party punk rock sessions and current day, those two words, bellowed out, stayed with me. As I suspect every fan, casual or hardcore of Rancid’s will be unable to forget the sound of Rancid’s guitar section aggressively thrashing and roaring the end point of their punk rock epic. Speed is essential for punk rock, and “Ruby Soho” is just over two and a half minutes. No time wasted. Maximum rocking possible in the time provided. Mathematically a perfect punk rock song, at least by my calculations.

In the arena of punk rock rebellion, there are not many radio-ready moments. While “Ruby Soho” is too punk for the radio of yesteryear, this short explosion of a song is easy to remember, in fact impossible to forget, mostly because it rocks the house, but also because of two how immortal words.

“Destination unknown.”

It also works perfectly as a walk out song; especially if you name yourself after the song. I hope the joy Ruby Soho (the professional wrestler) has many more joyous moments in her current job. I hope this joy runs a perfect parallel with continued mirth enjoyed by Rancid fans, because that would be cool.

Keep on rocking in the free world.

- King of Braves