No, Actually I Can See Straight Through You

"You Can't See Me" is the debut album from John Cena. Cena is a wrestler from the WWE, and used a Hip Hop gimmick, and releasing a rap album was a just a part of making this seem realistic. Outside of the wrestling industry, Cena was truely a Hip Hop fan in a town which had no interest in this type of music, so he genuinely wanted to express this throughout his life, so he did enjoy the expierence and it wasn't all just to big up his WWE persona.

I really didn't expect to get much out of this album, because he had done some rapping on-screen, with lines which he had written himself, and even though they wre very specific and related to individual wrestlers, he didn't really show much potential.

As the quality from this is consistantly weak, it's not worth commenting on individual tracks in the album. This album is definitely designed just for fans of the wrestler and not of this genre of music, so I'd only expect his following to bother with this, but there's no reason for anyone else to bother with it at all because the rhymes are weak throughout, all of the beats are very out-of date with sounds of the ninties throughout, and he has been put on as he is an East Coaster, you would expect a lot of the mellow production, but then with tracks such as "Don't F*** With Us", "Make It Loud" which use a G-Funk influenced sound, which doesn't suit a Mass. rapper from the East of the US. He goes for everything that you would expect with laughable attempts at slowing things down for some serious raps in "Right Now, but it's never convincing, there the production team have a go at emulating the Kanye 'chipmunk' technique by increasing the pitch in the hook, but as it's not from an old soul sample, it has no power for the listener.

No attempts to do any typical thing are done correctly as he tries to big up his city in "Beantown", but he's from West Newberry, and decides to represent Boston, if he was a known rapper then he would be dissed for doing his (as the T.I.-Shawty Lo beef at the moment), so f he can't get his area right, you can't take anything seriously. At other times he blatantly lies as well as he talks about stereotypical things which rappers do such as get money by signing deals, but he's not gtting money this way, and he makes very few references to wrestling (where he gets all his money from, and the only deals he will have siged wll be contract renewals with the WWE as this album was released through their record company (who usually relase theme music annually).

Just to give you an idea of the type raps you will hear, these are a couple of WTF lines: "...crew loaded up with extra bread like a Big Mac", "I'm John Cena baby, and we heating up the beanpot." you just can't get away with stuff like this, and it shows tyhat he has't got a chance of beign taken seriously as an MC.

I was very surprised that he could make so many tracks out of so little material, but I don't expect him to do anything like this again so it's good that he tried eveerything which he possibly could in the album by taking techniques from all around (but annoyingly missing out the Dirty South), but he was never going to get away with a club tune, the best sttempt at this (well kind of) was with "Bad Bad Man", a single which went down the Pop rap angle.

As this album is directed towards Cena's younger fans, I was surprised by the amount of cursing which can be found on the album, and it really isn't needed when the majority of the listners will be pre-teen, and I doubt that anyone over this age would bother with this as they would have matured as music fans to go for less mainstream releases, but you can't even call it this, it's an attempt at the mainstream, but a failure as he is so weak. So I wouldn't have expected the WWE to allow him to have such explicit lyrics, because the amount of over-18s who would purchase this (for themselves) would be so small in comparison that it's not worth having him swear, because it's not needed to begin with (it's just a addedextra to make him appear harder, but he's a wrestler anyway, so why do this).

Don't even think about buying this no matter what. I don't care if you love the wrestler, it's not worth it especially now since he has moved on from these, times (well he had done the last time I watched, but then again it was a couple of years ago). If you mare a Hip Hop fan and for some reason are considering it, don't the only sign of Hip Hop is when a small snippet of M.O.P.'s "Ante Up" is put into the beginning of "My Time Is Now", but that's his theme music, so why not just watch him wrestle instead of wasting your money on this.