John Cena: "Don't F With Us"

I'm not ashamed to admit that John Cena is a little after my time as a pro wrestling fan.  You're probably thinking to yourself that I should be ashamed to have "pro wrestling fan" on my One-Time Accurate Epithets resume at all, but I don't regret a second of my near-six year obsession with pro wrestling which lasted from WCW's Fall Brawl in 1997 to somewhere around Wrestlemania 19, except for that one time I left a Monday Night Raw early and missed the chance to see a WWF World Heavyweight Title change hands in person.  Ugh.  Haunted me for years.

Damn you, Stone Cold.

From what I remember having caught the very, very beginning of Cena's career, he's a wrestler who's also a very mediocre rapper.  And that's pretty much his gimmick, as far as I know.  Wrestling doesn't have to be complicated, folks.  It doesn't always have to be "Triple H bringing up the time Kane had sex with a dead woman by filming a video of him pretending to be Kane having sex with a dead woman."  This happened.  And then I continued to watch wrestling for another 3 years.

Leave it to the Internet to bring this revolting memory from my late adolescence to your computer screen.  Maybe we should vote for SOPA.

Regardless of the WWF/WWE's sordid history of visual necrophilia puns (or maybe BECAUSE OF IT?!?!), John Cena has become pretty popular I hear.  Popular enough for me to see his likeness on kid's sized t-shirts at Walmart and for him to pop-up in non-wrestling commercials from time to time.  I imagine part of his popularity has to do with wrestling's mostly white, middle-class fan base because the white middle class loves rap, and, since John Cena isn't a real rapper but rather a caricature of one, he is palatable to even the most hardcore rap hater.  You know, like Curt Hennig.

I promise, that's the last obscure wrestling reference of this entry.  Maybe.

In 2005, John Cena came out with a rap album on the heels of his success as a pretend rapper.  In an act of total justice and respect for the hard work and lifelong dedication that it takes to be a successful MC, America shunned the novelty r...wait, no, it debuted at #15 on the Billboard 200, making it three times as successful as any of Big L's albums.  Sigh.  The following line is from the song "Don't F With Us":

"Shoes on the whip that be bigger than Shaq's feet."

Explanation: The rims (shoes) on John Cena's car (whip) are larger than those which Shaq wears.

Awkwardness of Line: Honestly, Cena's album doesn't contain a lot of awkward lines.  The raps in it are so generic that they could have been manufactured from a Lloyd Banks Mad Lib, but they aren't awkward.  Just boring.  So, so boring.  At least that's better than being terrible, right?  3 out of 5.

Appropriateness of Line: Shaq's feet are about 15 inches long.  The most modest of rapper rims are 20 inches, although these days that's poor-man stuff.  Still, that's a pretty sizable gap, so it's not really that impressive that Cena's rims are bigger than Shaq's feet.  After all, that could still be true if he had 16s! 2 out of 5.

Cleverness of Line: What Cena's album lacks in head-shaking awfulness, it more than makes up for in the total and complete absence of artfulness, talent, or cleverness.  This line (and all of the others on the album, really) display a level of rap skill which one can only describe as Kinkadeian.  Cena can rhyme multi-syllabically, but he can't make me care about it.  1 out of 5.

Shaqness of Line: Though Shaq does indeed have famously large feet, anyone from Yao Ming to George Mikan could have been used here.  Nothing especially Shaq-ish about it.  1 out of 5.

This painting is called "A Peaceful Retreat," which sounds an awful lot like Thomas Kinkade trying to bait people into making fun of him.

FINAL SHAQ SCORE: 7 OUT OF 20