<p>Victors isn’t bad, but I like my high school’s version better than UMich’s (with obvious bias). I also probably don’t have the best recording of it; I bet it comes across with a lot more energy live.</p>
<p>USC’s Tribute to Troy is a great song, but they really overplay it. If they saved it for critical situations in the game, it would be one of the best. Fight On, however, is horrible. It has four measures of actual musical content, all of which have the same rhythm, and they stretch that out into an incredibly boring minute-long song. I vote for Fight On for the worst fight song.</p>
<p>I’m also a fan of Go U Northwestern, Across the Field (Ohio State), On Wisconsin, and Fight for California (Berkeley).</p>
<p>When you get down to it, though, all fight songs are pretty much the same: lame lyrics with an interchangeable melody. Really–try interchanging the melodies of your two favorite songs sometime, and see how smooth it sounds. My favorite example is the first six bars of Notre Dame Victory March, followed by measures 7-13 of Fight for California, then measures 14-16 of Anchors Aweigh. You have to fudge on the time signature a bit (Notre Dame is in 4/4, Fight for Cal is in 6/8), but aside from that, if you didn’t know the songs beforehand, you’d never notice that they were three different songs.</p>
<p>(Naturally, I’m proud to go to a school that has defied all normal fight-song-writing conventions by choosing All Right Now as ours. Others that I admire for breaking the mold, or at least bending it, are Tiger Rag, Rocky Top, and to an extent Victors.)</p>