How Good Was John Cena Actually?
Presence/Look/Presentation
John Cena passes the silhouette test. The cap. The oversized t-shirt that still struggles to contain the massive, sprouting trapezius muscles. The handsome, clean-cut face, rock-strong jawline. The jorts that define a lack of coolness so devout that it comes all the way back around: Cena looks the part more than most, past, present, and future.
A lot of wrestlers are synonymous with and are identified by a certain colour scheme. Red and yellow, black and pink, orange. The names of those wrestlers need not be stated.
John Cena was such a merchandising sensation that, at one point or another, every last colour belonged to him. The Rock, infamously, referred to Cena as “looking like a big fat bowl of Fruity Pebbles’ in 2011. This was designed to portray Cena as a children's TV show lead - an uncool wrestler compared to the Rock and his edgy brand of charisma - but how much of an insult was it?
Cena had become so ubiquitous as a top star that he could wear (and flog) anything, and he was still, unmistakably John Cena. He was preposterously charismatic.
Cena’s presence is something more than immense. He split the audience during his prime. Older fans hated him. They grew up on Hulk Hogan as kids, and then Steve Austin as teenagers. The trajectory reversed, and those fans couldn’t sanction it. The kids adored him. WWE developed a way of spinning it - John Cena was such a massive personality that he inspired extreme reactions! - and it worked. Cena was more over than anybody else in the building before he even did anything.
His entrance themes were both outstanding. ‘Word Life’ was a swirl of hip-hop cliche, with its grandiose strings and record scratches, but effective with it. Cena’s genuinely impressive rapping ability elevated the track. It also allowed him to stand out as an elusive, unique character in an increasingly idealess world.
‘The Time Is Now’ wasn’t designed to capture the split reactions, but it did. The moody horns in the intro sound different depending on how you viewed the character. If you hated him, the intro was ominous, the soundtrack of dread encroaching. If you loved him, it was a reflection of the adversity Cena was about to face before erupting into a triumphant, defiant melody. In either case, something magical happened when the song hit the PA: an irresistible surge of real, big-time emotion.
10/10