Wrestling fans know Living Colour’s “Cult Of Personality” as the longtime iconic entrance music for WWE star CM Punk, but the song has had a continuously successful life through classic rock radio, promotional tie-ins and more. It helped earn Living Colour a Grammy for “Best Hard Rock Performance” for their album “Vivid,” and guitarist Vernon Reid recently chatted on the Music Buzzz Podcast about the track’s importance and longevity.
“Well, it tells the truth about who we are,” Reid explained. “We become infatuated by charisma. We become infatuated by the story, by the presentation. It was true — I can look at Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and talk about what they stood for, but they both were as handsome as matinee idols. And that’s a part of it. The surface and the substance are together. What was it about Gandhi that galvanized the nation? What was it about Mussolini that hypnotized the nation?”
Reid continued: “Interestingly enough, many conservative people love this tune. They get a different thing, they get something else from it. Because the song is really about a part of the human condition that we are never going to fix. We’re never gonna fix it.”
Singer Corey Glover said in 2024 of the song: “I think if it weren’t for that song, I’d be working for UPS. How about that? If it weren’t for that song and the evergreen nature of that song, because it seems like every so often it pops up in very interesting places — with CM Punk or the video games or ‘Guitar Hero’ or even within the political discourse, where people use it and quote it on newscasts. It has a weird sort of continuing life that I am very happy and very grateful that it exists.”
