Professional wrestling is arguably one of the most involved forms of entertainment. In tandem with the gymnastic soap opera of never-ending stories, performers have to constantly reinvent themselves by concocting new gimmicks and tricking out their toolkits. One understated yet equally important part of a wrestler’s presentation is their theme song. A good theme song will rouse fans from their seats to cheer for their favorite wrestler as they either make an unexpected run-in, long-awaited return, or meteoric debut in a new company.
When a wrestler receives a new theme, there comes the threat of upending the aura they have worked so hard to garner with fans. Who writes these theme songs? YouTuber James “Little V” Mills made a career out of making metal covers of popular video game songs before becoming the architect behind the theme song of AEW’s “God of Pro Wrestling,” Kenny Omega.
Mills is prominently known on YouTube as a musician from Alberta, Canada, who creates “epic metal covers” of popular music from video games, anime, and internet memes. Since joining the platform in February 2010, Little V has amassed over a million subscribers, all tuning into his covers of songs like Casey Edward’s Devil May Cry 5 “Devil Trigger”, Halogen’s 2017 internet earworm “U Got That,” and Yoasobi’s Oshi no Ko anime theme song, “Idol.” Ahead of Omega’s big match against longtime New Japan Pro Wrestling rival Kazuchika Okada at its upcoming PPV AEW: All In Texas on July 12, I spoke with Little V about how he came up with what would become the most popular theme song in the company for its golden wrestler.
As fate would have it, Little V’s reputation as the artist behind metal video game covers preceded him, leading Omega to DM him on Twitter and ask if he could make him a new theme song to debut at AEW’s inaugural pay-per-view Double or Nothing in 2019.
“I believe the message was, ‘Hey, sorry to just slip into your DMs, but you’re Canadian, I’m Canadian’… and I said ‘I’m down,’” Little V recalled. “He had seen my work through YouTube and that’s why he reached out.”
Like WWE’s Megapowers, their out of the blue Canuck connection spurned Little V’s new responsibility for engineering a theme song for one of wrestling’s modern greats. However, despite that bond, Little V had a bit of an uphill battle in creating the theme. The musician had only a tertiary knowledge of wrestling; he watched it from time to time, and he was well aware of Omega, but he hadn’t tuned into Omega’s star-making time in NJPW. As a result, Little V felt he needed to do his due diligence to learn as much as possible about the wrestler. To do so, he turned to a fellow YouTuber and sicko for professional wrestling, Super Eyepatch Wolf.
“As soon as [Omega] reached out, I reached out to another adjacent to the world we belong to, Super Eyepatch Wolf,” Little V told me. “EyepatchWolf was a huge fan of Kenny Omega's, and I was just like, ‘Hey, so, can you give me some background on him? I'm trying to get him a theme.’ I believe [Eyepatch Wolf’s messages were, ‘What? Huh? Um. Er. What?’ in a row.” Little V said EyepatchWolf sent him a “short novel” that incorporated everything about Kenny Omega to get him up to speed on the lore.
In the international wrestling community, themes often walk a fine line between iconic and generic-sounding. Case in point: WWE superstar CM Punk’s visible confusion at Logan Paul’s theme song, a common criticism that fans levy at the company's theme composer Def Rebel. To ensure his first foray into crafting a wrestling theme song wouldn’t fall into the same trap, Little V and Omega came up with some ideas that they felt celebrated Omega’s wrestling career as well as the video games his moveset are an homage to, like Street Fighter and Final Fantasy VII. Omega specifically requested that the anthem sound “synthwavey” with musical stylings comparable to “Turbo Killer” by Carpenter Brut.
Independent of Eyepatch Wolf’s extensive Omega lore dump and the wrestler’s suggestions, Little V conducted some research by listening to Omega’s previous NJPW theme, “Devil’s Sky”, and drew sonic inspiration from wrestling themes like Shinsuke Nakamura’s “The Rising Sun” and CM Punk’s “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour.
“I need something catchy, fun, and memorable. As soon as you hear it, it's recognizable and gets everybody excited,” Little V said. “I'm a sucker for a good hook—something you can chant along with it.”
Ultimately, it took Little V around a month to piece together the song, “Battle Cry,” from concept to final track.
“We actually nailed it pretty much immediately. I think I sent him the first draft, and he said, 'Yeah, no, this is great.' But, really funny thing with that, ‘Battle Cry’ was an instrumental at first. It did not have any lyrics,” Little V said. “It wasn’t until the first Double or Nothing when he was facing Chris Jericho, and Kenny came out to the instrumental that I was like ‘Hold on.’ I literally got up—I didn't even finish watching the match— and walked over to my office and wrote the lyrics and recorded them that night.”
“The next day, I was like, ‘Kenny, I made lyrics. I re-recorded it here, tell me what you think.’ And he's like, 'This is great, this is fantastic,' and that's how it continued,” Little V said. “It was originally an instrumental, [but] watching it in the context, I'm like, ‘This needs something. This needs lyrics. This needs something to grab onto. I need to make it so it's chantable and fun to sing along with.’”
He continued, “It was interesting how it evolved literally from the first match of like, ‘Oh God, I gotta do something ‘cause right now— it's not that it sounds generic—it's missing something for the whole package.”
When it came to writing lyrics to “Battle Cry” that referenced video game lingo and Omega’s wrestling career, Little V made no qualms about the song being “pretty cheesy.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, but I feel like it’s really appropriate. I literally called it ‘Battle Cry’ because of [Omega’s theme] ‘Devil’s Sky.’ [From] ‘one wing angel’ [to] ‘best bout machine,’ I was just like, ‘Let me throw as many references as I can in here. I’m not even gonna be subtle. I’m just gonna slap everyone in the face with it,’” Little V said. “I think it turned out well because a lot of people still love ['Devil's Sky'] even though it's been almost six years since he initially reached out.”
Little V recalled that Kenny Omega had some initial hesitance around the lyrics, primarily because he’d never worked with a vocal theme before. For Little V, though, crafting a wrestling theme didn’t feel far off from composing a song like a boss battle track for a video game. The real pressure came from knowing the track had to live up to Kenny Omega’s legacy for the IWC—as Omega warned him, wrestling fans are fiercely protective of their favorites, and any sudden change, especially in a theme song, would take them some time to warm up to.
“It's Kenny Omega. Everyone knows his previous theme song and everyone knows Kenny Omega [so] I'm like, ‘Oh crap, I gotta make sure I don't make something bad.’ I figure it's kind of like anime themes where everyone hates the new theme until about a month in, and then everyone loves the new theme opening,” Little V said. “I've been on the internet long enough to have people yell at me. I think I'm OK with this.”
As evidenced by “Battle Cry” currently ranking as the most popular song on All Elite Wrestling’s Spotify with over seven million listens, Little V is delighted with how the song panned out. Moreover, he’s touched by how full circle it's all become, leading to folks posting their covers of his track on YouTube.
“As a guy who does primarily covers, it's been very nice to see that,” Little V said.
Even after Kenny Omega introduced an alternative theme, “Take Flight”—a collaboration between Final Fantasy XIV’s Masayoshi Soken, vocalist Jason Miller, and the legendary Nobuo Uematsu–to mark his return after recovering from diverticulitis surgery, Little V remains deeply humbled by fans who continue to celebrate his original mainstay anthem.
“It wasn't just like a complete like, ‘OK, this is a new theme song now,’” Little V said, regarding “Take Flight.” “It's been really cool to see that I was able to have that big of an impact on people and it makes me feel happy that I did a good job, because I don't want to screw up someone's wrestling theme song. That would suck.”
Little V said that he doesn’t make residuals for the track anytime AEW broadcasts it on TV.
“It was a one-time deal. I won’t go too far into it. There were some discussions of other things in the background, but it panned out that way, and I’m okay with that. I got paid a pretty good amount. No royalties—doesn’t work that way.”
Regardless, having created the theme song for one of the flagship wrestlers and executive vice president of a company that stands as the counter-culture to wrestling’s longtime oligarch, WWE, Little V feels a sense of pride in having left his footprint in the burgeoning company’s legacy and identity.
“It’s incredibly humbling. The fact that it turned into being such a really popular theme, I'm really thankful that I had the opportunity to do it. It's led me to also write themes for other wrestlers as well,” Little V said. “Six years later, and it still gets me excited when I tune in, it pops on, and I hear the whole crowd losing it. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to do that.”
