The Super Bowl Of Fight Songs: It’s On

noah | January 19, 2009 11:00 am

Hey, congratulations, fans of teams from the greater Pittsburgh and Phoenix areas: Your Super Bowl viewing experience is going to have something more at stake than whether or not you eat too much guacamole before halftime! But what of the music that helped drive the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals to victory and a place on the field in Tampa come Feb. 1? Back when this NFL season started, WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog unearthed a 1960 fight-song album with tunes honoring both teams. (They’re even back-to-back on the record! Psychic!) Both “Pittsburgh Steelers Fight Song” and “The Cardinals Are Charging” are pretty boilerplate marching-band fare, with the Steelers’ anthem having the slight edge for its kaleidoscopic woodwind runs. But much like popular music, the idea of the fight song has been updated a bit, with new, less brass-reliant tracks spurring their teams on to win.

Replacing “Pittsburgh Steelers Fight Song” is the Steelers tribute “Here We Go,” a bit of ESG-meets-dude-on-the-barstool funk that was written in 1995.

Even if it wasn’t, well, kinda good, it would need to be pretty freaking awful to beat the Cardinals’ track, which is by the Phoenix “hybrid hip-hop” outfit Golden Cousins. It is called “We Do This Together,” and, well, it makes “Our Team, Our Time” sound like a hip-hop masterpiece.

(Wait, is that a MyStudio logo emblazoned on the bottom of that clip? Oy. I swear to you that multiple Arizona media outlets are hoisting this song on their shoulders.)

But even if that song wasn’t as abjectly awful as it is, the Steelers would still have the edge. Why? Because of “The Steelers Polka,” duh.

Sure, it’s set to the tune of “The Pennsylvania Polka,” as made famous by Frankie Yankovic and Groundhog Day, but you have to admit it: This would make for an awesome (if partisan) halftime show.

Are You Ready For Some Football? [WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog]

(I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention that both the Steelers and the Cardinals were paid tribute by DiskothiQ on the outfit’s Football Albums, in which every NFL team in existence back in 1999 got its own song. The Steelers track—a bundle of Costello-inspired nerves with lyrics “inspired by an H.L. Mencken essay portraying Pittsburgh as the most abysmally, hideously, unspeakably ugly place man has ever created”—far outweighs the one devoted to the Cardinals, which was, admittedly, improvised and accompanied by a muffled poem-recital. The Eagles song is pretty good, too, in a thunderbolts-from-above sort of way.)

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