John Cena Interview: Lyrics, Rap Album, Open Challenge To Rapper, more

The following is an interview conducted by rapper Method Man on MTV.com:

John Cena's a busy man. On Sunday, he'll step into the ring to face the 7-foot-tall, 500-pound Big Show for the WWE U.S. Championship at Wrestlemania XX. But his biggest challenge may lie even further down the road, as Cena prepares to enter the rap game. The rising WWE star has proven that he can move arenas with his mic skills as easily as he does with his in-ring skills, and his debut album is expected to arrive later this year. Through the power of his weekly appearances on the WWE's Smackdown, the self-proclaimed "Doctor of Thuganomics" has already tried out his rhymes on millions of ears, but is he ready to go toe-to-toe with hip-hop's big dogs? Who better than Method Man to find out? The hip-hop icon (and wrestling fan) sat down with Cena recently to talk about their shared loves: wrestling and hip-hop.

Method Man:Are all your rhymes you say when you come out the ring written, or off the head?

Cena: A lot of stuff is off the top of the head, but because they let me go off the top of the head so much, sometimes I say things that make Vince [McMahon] go, "It's a little too raw for TV." Now I burnt my bridges too much, so I gotta run everything by everybody to make sure, but once in a while I'll try to slip my stuff in.

Method Man: You are officially a rapper, 'cause they hit us with that every day, all day. "Can we have a chart of the lyrics so we can know everything you're going to say? No, that's not acceptable!" Last year at Wrestlemania, you issued an open challenge for a rapper to come battle you, and no one answered the call. How surprising is that?

Cena: That was something I could understand. I've been doing this rap thing not for a while, only two or three months. I'm a small-time white kid trying to represent hip-hop. If a hip-hop artist comes up and beats me in a battle, who did they beat? A small-town white kid who ain't never been an MC, who ain't never done nothing. Now if an MC comes to battle and they get beat by a small-town white boy, that's MC suicide. So there wasn't a positive aspect for the rapper, nothing positive that the rapper could gain out of it. There is no exposure they can possibly have, so I can understand why it didn't pan out. We had a little fun with that anyway. We had cardboard cutouts, just poking fun at people. It's all fun. We keep it on wax. There's no worries ... nothing's going wrong.

Method Man: Who are some of the people that you're working with on your album?

Cena: I'm looking forward to working with my boy Freddie Fox. Maybe we can get some members of the Wu, maybe Meth, Red. Anybody over there from Def Jam, I'm feeling Joe Budden. Joey's one of my guys. Eminem, obviously I'm a fan of his. Pretty much my feel toward MCs is, if you really got heart, you got passion, let's get on and do something. I like doing stuff with people that's real.

To read the entire interview, click here.

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