John Cena Talks Unreleased Rap Music

In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, John Cena discussed the origins of him famous “You Can’t See Me” taunt. He also talked about how he recorded a whopping 85 hip hop songs for his WWE-produced “You Can’t See Me” album back in 2005.

While the story about the taunt has been told before, the sheer amount of unreleased early John Cena rap music is mind-boggling. Cena’s debut album only featured 17 tracks out of the 85 that were recorded in the studio.

“We were in production for new theme music for the John Cena rap identity, so we recorded about like 85 songs, and keep in mind their are only like 16 on the ‘You Can’t See Me’ album,” Cena opined. “And I remember hearing this one beat, and it was that beat for ‘My Time Is Now’ – the build to the crescendo, and the horns, and the brass, and that heavy hit of the bass, like it had everything, and we would always use my little brother as kind of our Litmus Test because he was a really harsh critic, and if he enjoyed it, I knew we were OK, and I remembered him just going like this [You Can’t See Me gesture], and like, getting lost in it, and I think he was doing what was, I think, the Tony Yayo Dance at the time, where Tony Yayo would do this hand in front of his face and shake his head, and I was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ It was ridiculous. And he’s like, ‘I’m doing the Yayo Dance.

As the story goes, Cena and his brother combined the Tony Yayo dance with the nonsense verbiage to create the iconic catch phrase and gesture. It was a simple homage to his brother, never meant to become the stuff of meme culture.

Cena described the phrase as just another way to talk smack. He said it meant that whoever it was being said to was not on his level. It was all to make his little brother laugh, but it soon took on a life of it’s own.

“Now we come to the internet and the internet was like, ‘We can’t see this guy.’ I don’t know why… I became like invisible and the cool joke was either if I was in a picture I wasn’t, they’d be like OK, this is just a chair talking to you, or people would take their picture with John Cena, which was simply like, pointing at nothing, or if nothing was there, they’d be like, yo I can’t believe John Cena crashed our party. I did an interview before this where the audio technician pinned the mic on me and when he’s pinning the mic on me he’s like, ‘I didn’t know how to see where to put it.’ And I never get offended, I love hearing it, I think it’s extremely creative, it’s something that’s been in the internet cycle for so long, but it still never gets old,” Cena told Buzzfeed.

You can catch the story from The Champ himself. Check out the video below.

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