John Cena is reflecting on his rap career—and revealing there’s a massive archive of unreleased material fans will probably never hear.
In a new interview with Billboard, the WWE icon looked back on his surprise music success with 2005’s You Can’t See Me, his debut album recorded with cousin Tha Trademarc. While the project went Platinum and gave the world his theme song “The Time Is Now,” Cena never followed it up—and that’s by design.
According to Cena, rapping wasn’t part of a long-term plan. It started when he rejected the generic entrance theme WWE originally gave him and decided to make his own.
“The rapping thing was an accident. I listened to the music they played for me and I’m like, ‘I can do better than this — wait I could do better than this.’”
That led to Cena putting up $10,000 of his own money to create Basic Thuganomics, which evolved into a full album and WWE’s most enduring theme song of the modern era. Still, Cena never dropped a sequel—and he doesn’t plan to. When asked about unreleased material, Cena casually dropped a bombshell:
“There’s like 70 lost tracks of the album that never made it out.”
He explained that the final album was carefully curated from a large batch of recordings:
“I was able to shave off the ones that shouldn’t make and give you the ones that should, and I’m lucky to get that.”
But those hoping for a second project are out of luck. Cena shut down the idea completely, saying he has no interest in returning to the booth:
“It is a young man’s game and I’m not in it anymore.”
So while there may be dozens of unreleased Cena tracks sitting in a vault somewhere, fans shouldn’t expect them to see the light of day. For Cena, that era was lightning in a bottle—and one he’s content leaving in the past.
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