John Cena opened up on his rapper gimmick in WWE and how he came up with his “You Can’t See Me” taunt in a new video for Buzz Feed.
He recalled how he was nearly fired by WWE after his main roster stint that started in 2002 wasn’t working.
The gesture was inspired by G-Unit rapper Tony Yayo, which is now a meme online, and he first did it while recording his “You Can’t See Me” album he released in May 2005.
“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 revealed. “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.
“I’m like, OK, I’ll do that on TV to pay homage to you liking the beat because I’m gonna go with this for the song. And he dared me, and on a dare I was like, yo, I’m definitely doing it. So instead of doing the Yayo Dance, I kind of did this reverse… because I figured it would be more visible to show my brother on TV, like, ‘Hey I’m doing the thing that you dared me to do!’ And ‘You can’t see me!’ is kind of a way to talk smack in hip-hop culture, like you’re not on my level, so I kind of put the two and two together, just really trying to make one person in West Newbury, Massachusetts laugh.”
He continued, “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.”
H/T to Wrestling Inc
