CM Punk first adopted “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour as his entrance music while competing in Ring of Honor and has been connected to the track ever since. He used it through the latter half of his WWE run (reviving it at the 2011 Money in the Bank pay-per-view), kept it in his two UFC fights and arrived in AEW with it blaring throughout Chicago’s United Center last month. Punk was on this week’s AEW Unrestricted podcast this week and explained what he loves about the song.
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“I have been fortunate enough to be friends with a lot of great bands, a lot of talented artists, and to use a lot of those songs for entrance music,” Punk said (h/t WrestleTalk). “Cult of Personality I think transcends everything. And I’m proud of this, that the name CM Punk is forever tied to the band Living Colour and Cult of Personality. It’s just been a common thread throughout my entire life.
“The whole reason I used that song in Ring of Honor is because I just love that song, I thought it was great entrance music, and for the character and everything. That was the song my Little League team would play after we won games in 1989, so it’s been with me for a while,” he added. “I know all those guys, I was with them at Riot Fest. Riot Fest sucks, by the way. There’s gonna be some litigation that I was on the grounds during the festival, but I’ll handle that now. I’ve got Tony Khan lawyers now so we’re fine.”
AEW has purchased the rights to a number of famous songs for its wrestlers to use, including “Where’s My Mind” by The Pixies for Orange Cassidy and “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora for Jungle Boy. But one song they were unable to get was “The Final Countdown” by Europe for Bryan Danielson.
“Tony and I talked about a couple of things,” Danielson recently told Bleacher Report. “We had talked about ‘The Final Countdown,’ but that was way too expensive,” he said. “I hate talking business stuff when I don’t exactly know what it was, but it wasn’t just the amount of money. They would only let [AEW] play it like 20 times a year or something like that. For several $100,000 you can play ‘Final Countdown’ 20 times a year. That doesn’t work for us. I had kind of wanted something a bit different, so I reached out to my friend, Elliott Taylor, and said ‘Hey, here’s an idea. But I don’t know if it’s any good. Could you do something like this?’ He dropped everything. I think he’s done 72 hours in the studio and made the song that I come out to now, which I think he’s also going to do a full-length release because it actually has like two chorus lyrics.
“I really, really liked it,” he continued. “And it also incorporates a chant that people would do when I was on the independents. I kind of wanted to get it in there. I would love for people to start chanting it again.”
