9. "We Didn't Want You To Know" (by Seth Rosenthal)
Notorious B.I.G. uses "Juicy" to tell you all about himself, then reassures you that if you didn't know his backstory already, well, now you know. "We Didn't Want You to Know" tells you all about John Cena and Trademarc and how they're running the game, but their relationship with the listener is decidedly more antagonistic. If you don't know, now you know because of this song, but if you didn't know before this song, it's because they didn't want you to know. An internal memo was circulated about how Cen and Trade run the game, got a mil' on the chain, are paid, etc., but you were not CC'd on the memo. They specifically asked you be left off the recipient list. How does that make you feel?
Shitty, I bet. And it should. We're talking about the same guys who sent their hounds to find your stash (of dog treats, I assume) and make you breakdance for them then "ship you to D.C. covered in Redskins" (I don't know why Cena sends people to D.C. when he's done forcing them to breakdance, but I do know Dan Snyder is nodding his head to the beat and shouting "IT'S A TERM OF RESPECT!"). These are mean men.
And now for a ranking of similes used in "We Didn't Want You to Know":
1. They know I'm nice, they ain't betting on you/That's like playing roulette and betting on blue
There's no blue on a roulette wheel. Betting on you would be as foolhardy as putting money on an event with zero probability. Betting on you in what? I don't know. I guess you're supposed to fight John Cena and Trademarc.
2. Bust shots and get cops bent out of control like a spiral
This gets extra points because it's rhymed with "survival," which is bold.
3. I hold on the club like I was Bagger Vance
This actually works in both senses, because Bagger Vance was both a caddy who held golf clubs and a notorious presence in the Savannah nightclub scene.
4. ...when we drag your body out to sea like fishermen
What do Cena and Trademarc think a fisherman's job is? That is not a fisherman's job.
5. I lay you down like when you sleep at night
That sounds really sweet, actually. These guys aren't so bad.
10. "Bad, Bad Man" (feat. Bumpy Knuckles) (by Matt Ufford)
I have managed to live a full and happy life without knowing much about John Cena.
My knowledge of pro wrestling consists mostly of hearsay. As a child, I picked up chatter from elementary school classmates about the heyday of the WWF (I somehow developed an admiration for Ricky the Steamboat without ever watching him). Now, as a sportswriter, I take notice of the occasional story lines that burble out of the white noise of Twitter and into the larger scope of the sports blogosphere. The death of Macho Man. Something about CM Punk breaking the fourth wall. That sort of thing.
So John Cena is recognizable to me, but I don't know anything about him. In my mind, he occupies some sort of space between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kurt Angle: a blockheaded white guy with Austin's jorts but none of his charisma. (Maybe? Be gentle with me, I'm a blind man describing the David to Michelangelo.)
So when Bill Hanstock asked me to review this be-wristbanded moe rapping, I happily accepted, because I knew it would be terrible. And hoo boy, does the sketch before the song portend a car wreck of schlocky pop culture mash-ups:
Gary Coleman reads a newspaper with a foreboding headline: THE 1980s HELD HOSTAGE. This seems difficult. Has a master criminal created a device that can rob humanity of its memory of a kinda-shitty decade? Has he stolen every VCR tape and cassette ever made? Has he reassembled the Berlin Wall and forced Scorpions to disavow the message of "Winds of Change"? It's probably explained in the article, but we can only see the headline, and are left to wonder.
Coleman, reading the news in a diner, loudly bemoans the loss of the ‘80s and, with it, his relevance. "My only hope is to find the Chain Gang," he says, with all the subtlety that ensured he never held a stable acting gig after "Diff'rent Strokes."
Coleman's waiter, who is wearing leather gloves and an apron over a trench coat, and - more problematically - is smoking a cigar in what HAS to be a violation of food service law. He is also wearing a wig that approximates a hairstyle last popular in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, which may explain his sympathy to Coleman and his desire to find the Chain Gang, whoever they are.
But then!
YO DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE WIGS, SO I WORE A WIG UNDER THIS WIG.
It turns out that the waiter is not a waiter at all, but a member of the Chain Gang, which is apparently a crime-fighting unit that dresses like the A-Team but avoids cease-and-desist orders by only having three members. Cena, by virtue of calling dibs on the cigar and gloves and gray wig, is the team's Hannibal.
The other credited rappers on this track are Tha Trademarc (Cena's cousin, as it turns out) - who plays Murdock with a more luxurious mullet - and Bumpy Knuckles (AKA Freddie Foxxx) in the B.A. Baracus role. This leaves the Chain Gang without a Faceman, which is the correct A-Team member to cut. Dude was an accountant in an ascot; what's he gonna add to a rap video?
All of this, though, is spectacle that washes over the inconvenient truth I don't want to face: "Bad, Bad Man" is not a terrible song. This is largely a result of the production; the beat - a bouncing guitar with flute flourishes - drives the song through three capable verses and a chest-pounding chorus that Cena probably entered the ring to at some point (I'm not going to look it up). I played the track for Ryan Nanni, who said, "If this was the ninth track on a Method Man album that nobody bought, I'd believe you."
Cena, for his part, demonstrates a certain level of competence on the mic. At the very least, it takes gumption to drop "Everything that I be spittin is strong / After I rock, fast forward through the rest of the song" in the first verse, knowing full well that his cousin and Bumpy Knuckles have done him the favor of taking the next two verses. You think Freddie Foxxx couldn't be doing something better, John? He was rapping with Easy E when you were in grade school, man.
Anyway, the song doesn't suck and Gary Coleman (SPOILER) was the bad guy who stole the ‘80s. I remain unconvinced that Cena is truly a bad man.
11. "Running Game" (by Peter Berkes)
As the harmonica starts us off on "Running Game," I'm almost immediately thinking about "Timber," the omnipresent Ke$ha/Pitbull joint. That's not really Cena's fault, considering this album was made nearly a decade before that song, but history exacts a steep price.
Almost immediately, Cena raps about cutting someone's throat, and less than 15 seconds later uses the term "party in my pants." It's a jarring transition, and perfectly illustrates the issue with Cena writ large: he tries to be both brutally serious and the class clown, but isn't particularly great at either.
The highlight of the song for me was "you're like a proctologist/you're feeling my shit." I mean, yes it absolutely made me laugh, but mostly because I don't think John Cena knows what a proctologist actually does. Like, someone paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to medical school and dedicate their life to just feeling people's poops.
Tha Trademarc has the second verse in the song, and it's decidedly the weakest offering between the two performers. It's almost entirely about having sex with girls that approach him in clubs, and between that and his apparent delight in immediately throwing said girls out after coitus has ended, you just get the impression that he's a selfish lover.
Just past the three-minute mark, it appears that Cena raps "She calls my dick Frank Reich," like former Buffalo Bills backup quarterback Frank Reich, but further examination seems to show that it's "Frank White," which is pretty disappointing. I don't know how a part of a person's anatomy can be like the engineer of the greatest comeback in NFL history, but I am FASCINATED to know more.
The beat itself isn't wholly unpleasant to listen to. The harmonica and blues guitar riff that make it up are fine, but it's more or less ruined the second you begin to listen to the words. The chorus (and verses, really) makes heavy use of "pimp/pimping," and it's difficult to imagine a pop culture term that's aged worse. That term was used so heavily that it's basically responsible for Katt Williams' entire career, and hearing it now just makes the whole thing sound corny. You just get the feeling that he and his cousin could not have done this song without wearing fedoras.
12. "Beantown" (feat. Esoteric) (by Marc Normandin)
While Cena's "my time is now" schtick continues to work today in a pro wrestling sense, "Beantown's" time was clearly the moment it released and only then. Sure, some of the themes he falls back on still apply today, as Boston went from the most successful sports team of the moment to the most successful of the last decade. That doesn't mean the way he goes about applying this theme works.
The references are very much in the moment, and had Boston as a city not continued to rack up championships and meaningful games, Cena's likening and/or predicting his own success would come off even sillier than it already does. As is, referencing Deion Branch as the Patriots player of importance behind only Tom Brady barely survived this album's production schedule, never mind the ensuing years, and seeing Terrell Owens' name dropped instead of Donovan McNabb when it was time to chide the Eagles is a missed opportunity even without the benefit of hindsight.
We should be thankful, though, that the Celtics and Bruins waited until after this album's release to start winning, as Beantown would have had three-to-four minutes more of awkward rhyming in order to accommodate their dominance. As is, it clocks in over 3:30 minutes, only so Cena can mix-and-match places and things in Boston like he's reading them from a tourists' guide. A sampling, with emphasis my own in case you're a Boston newbie:
Cross me and pay a toll like the Tobin Bridge
From the home of the curse, you all know what I mean
We like the left field wall, we stacking Monster Green
Knock you out of the park, you land on Yawkey Way
My shit be butter, but around here we say Parkay/parquet
The most aggravating part of this whole verse is that you can't hit a ball out of the park -- at least not one you would brag about -- on to Yawkey Way. That street is located behind home plate at Fenway Park, John. Lansdowne is what you're looking for here, though, I understand "Lansdowne Street" doesn't rhyme with your conflating of the parquet floor used at the Garden/Fleetcenter with the margarine product originating from Nebraska. That's not even an "in 2014" complaint, it's a matter of researching your material.
Time has destroyed the meaning of this particular line:
Like the Big Dig, baby nobody can finish me
The Big Dig, aka the most expensive construction project ever, has been finished since 2006, a year after this song was released, but to be fair to Cena, nobody has truly finished him yet. Maybe he just can't see the Zakim.
We don't forget you all, we're keeping it grimy
Had the Steel Curtain looking like venetian blinds
Yeah baby, that's how it go
That's why next year it's looking like 3 in a row
The Patriots have been competitive almost without interruption since, and are inarguably the NFL's top team of the last decade-plus, but they haven't grabbed that fourth Super Bowl yet. And now I finally know who and what to blame for it.
Not every line in this song is bad, mind you. The ones that are just happen to be particularly egregious, and outnumber anything worth appreciating. This line works well near the intro, since Cena shares the track with another rapper, Esoteric:
Straight up, hitting one two like Manny Ortiz you heard?
The Manny Ramirez/David Ortiz combination is a far stronger pairing than Brady/Branch, given Manny and Ortiz helped end Boston's 86 years without a World Series and were considered one of the best, if not the best, 1-2 punch in the game.
Roll thick like Yaz's sideburns in seventy-three
I don't care what year it is, that's a line you use in a song about Boston if given the opportunity. This other dip into history works equally well, even if it's a little mean:
Yo we're fresh, you're all a little bit stale
And we're 'bout to make it ugly just like Kevin McHale
Okay, fine, maybe the "we're fresh" part doesn't hold up so well for 2014 John Cena.
Tracks 1-4 | Tracks 5-8 | Tracks 13-17