The following was derived from MTV :
Method Man: When did you fall in love with hip-hop?
John Cena: In 1985, my dad bought me a CD player for Christmas. This is when CDs first came out. I wanted the boom box with the TV in it. I got the CD instead. I didn't even know what CDs were. I was rocking tapes like everybody else. One of the first CDs he ever got me was the Fat Boys' Crushin': "The Fat Boys are back/ And you know they can never be wack!" Right after that, everything just kind of fell into place. I wore that CD out, then everything else hit after that. I must have been 10.
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: And plus, a lot of y'all rap dudes can't fight anyway, so all you'd have to do is just sit on it and be easy.
Cena: Nah, we had some fun instead. Hopefully, at the end of the year, or the years to come, you'll see some hip-hop people like Meth up on WWE!
Method Man: If you had a choice of rappers, what MC would you choose as your tag-team partner
