Author Archives: ts36942

A recent ‘wild’ song that I’ve heard is ‘The Rumbling’ from the band SiM. The band is composed of Japanese musicians and singers and mostly performs heavy metal and rock songs. The TV edit of the song was released last month on 10 January 2022 and the full version is now available on spotify since 7 February 2022. The TV edit of the song was also used as the opening theme for the final season of the currently airing hit anime called ‘Attack on Titan’.‘The Rumbling’ is a hard rock/metal song with english lyrics, which is rare for japanese bands. It ranked No. 1 at the US Hot Hard Rock Songs chart and brought this band to the limelight for a lot of people in the west.

The reason I think the song is wild is not because of the lyrics by themselves but from the conjunction of the lyrics and events taking place during the final season. The lyrics provide a new perspective to our protagonist, Eren Jaeger’s tumultuous and eventually flawed way of thinking. Since the last season of the show, we’ve seen Eren progress from the relatable protagonist to an insensitive monster. The lyrics ‘All I ever wanted to do was do right things, I never wanted to be the king’ show us that even when committing atrocious crimes like genocide, Eren thought that he was doing right by his people. This way of thinking is just unthinkable and ‘wild’. The later lyrics ‘If I lose it all, slip and fall. I will never look away’, given context from the show, seem to denote that even if Eren loses himself, his family, and his humanity trying to save his people by committing more atrocities, he won’t budge from the path he has adopted. That kind of determination, even if it is for all the wrong reasons, seems ‘wild’ to me. The metal/rock genre, along with the lyrics and visuals of the video make it a truly ‘wild’ experience for me.

For the topic of wild sports, I wanted to talk about Cricket, which I grew up with. Cricket is like a souped up version of baseball that goes on for longer and is much more physically taxing. It’s a bat and ball game where one team gets to bat and score as many runs as they can without getting ‘out’ while the bowling team throws the ball at the batsman in hopes of hitting the wicket behind him and getting the player ‘out’. The teams consist of 11 players on each side and the roles are decided by a coin toss. In addition, there are commentators and  an umpire in the field who works as a mediator between the teams and gives the green signal on whether the batsman was ‘out’ or not. The amazing thing about cricket is that it isn’t divided based on socio-economic backgrounds at all. That means the game is unanimously enjoyed by everyone. The roots of cricket though, have been defined by male dominance. Called the ‘Gentleman’s Game’, cricket is heavily saturated by male players and even though women’s leagues exist, they are often overshadowed by men’s cricket. Regarding my chosen video that highlights a male player, Yuvraj Singh, scores six sixes in an over, even though everyone playing in the field is a man, the crowd is a mix of all kinds of people – men and women. My view about playing sports and gender in cricket is that even though women’s cricket may not be enjoyed by the masses, atleast men’s cricket isn’t undergoing gatekeeping and is enjoyed by men and women alike. In my opinion, cricket is literally the definition of the phrase ‘crowd going wild’. As you can see from the clip, cricket isn’t a contact sport like football so wild encounters among players are rare. But the crowds watching the big cricket matches are some of the loudest, craziest, and yes ‘wildest’ people I have been around. I think that the wildness in cricket doesn’t come from the players but from the cheers of the crowd itself.