5, 6, 7, 8!
Like a fingerprint, no cheer soundtrack is like any other.
Image Credit: CheerMusicPro
The ching of an emptied cash register. Bombastic EDM drops. Laser sounds heralding from the second-nearest galaxy.
Hear this all at once and you may reach to call an ambulance, portending certain death. But if this conglomeration of sonoral chaos lasts precisely two minutes and forty-five seconds, rest assured that there are paramedics on standby (just to the left of the soft mat). Because you aren’t having an aneurysm, you’re at a cheerleading competition.
A far cry from the slow-paced varsity chants of old, modern cheer music cadences would find their own in Berghain. Many songs oscillate in rhythm, setting the tone for the different parts of a cheer routine. The highly technical main stunt section is littered with electronic booms to accentuate the flyer’s body movements. Laserbeams punctuate the baskets — where flyers are thrown into the air, contorting and twisting into pretzels before landing in the bases’ arms.
How can a cheerleading soundtrack so perfectly match the routine’s shape? The answer lies in a lot of effort. Composers are also sent a basic routine mark-through, tasking them with the meticulous labour of syncing zap-gun sounds with stunts. This accentuates every flyer’s pulled heel stretch, or cascading cradle.
Within the genre of cheer music, there is great variation. Like a fingerprint, no cheer soundtrack is like any other, distinguished by its unique sequence of mash-ups and random timing of tings and booms.
For low-level teams in Australia, cheer soundtracks are typically mash-ups of pop songs, often with a theme tying the selection together, like ‘girl power’ of ‘noughties hits’. Teams can submit specific lyrics to intersperse in the madness; “slay” and “queen” are commonly heard. These mixes are familiar to anyone who has attended a bad rave or DJ set.
For the lucky cheerleaders who pack their bags for Worlds in Florida every April, their music ventures far beyond the ordinary. For each team, a new musical marvel is crafted — a song tailored to the routine. Each song has an innovative theme tying to its name: ‘Top Gun Revelation 2023’ lays the religious imagery on thick, with the opening phrase, “Say a prayer to all things holy!” and interspersed words, “Your soul is snatched — Gloriooouuuss!”. The ‘Top Gun Double O 2023’ music has a strong (folklarised) Spanish flavour — “Are you ready? Let me hear you say Olé!” and “Welcome to the bull fight..that’s some bull! (pun intended)” Closer to home, the East Coast Allstars Nightwings team from Sydney has a soundtrack serving as an ode to the fantastical bird: “When the sun sets, you know what time it is'’ opens the song. These soundtracks with their extended metaphors and cultural allusions are nothing short of spoken poetry, if the slam poet had an robotic super-serious male tone.
The future of cheer music has been thrown into precarity, particularly in the US, with allegations of copyright violation piling on like a human pyramid. But a cheer routine without a dazzling soundtrack and all of its auditory quirks is nothing but a glorified stampede. The music is the most essential ingredient, like birdsong to a choir of feathered alarm-clocks. As every cheerleader fights to keep their stunts in the air, we must all save cheerleading music from falling and hitting the mat.