7 Times Wrestlers Tried To Be Musicians (And Failed)

With the recent release of WWE’s Uncaged II, I’ve become really interested in WWE’s music. WWE have produced some great entrance music over the years, but while people like Jim Johnston, Rick Derringer and CFO$ have made great music not everything wrestling and music related is good.

Wrestlers have tried to cash in on everything that isn’t wrestling, including (but not limited to) movies, TV, books, politics and even food, but I’m not gonna look at any of that today, I’ll leave that for someone else because I’m lazy and I’ve already written like four articles in the last few weeks so give me a break voices in my head. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what happens when wrestlers try a career at music.

 

1. Macho Man challenges Hulk Hogan with a rap song

Let’s start off with something everyone is most probably familiar with, ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage’s debut rap album Be A Man, and hot diggity damn is it a crappy album. I am both a wrestling fan and a rap fan, and let me tell you this album doesn’t appeal to me one little bit. Fair play to Mach, though, he raps okay for an old white guy, and the music is alright, but the lyrics are terrible and Macho’s gravelly voice soon becomes irritating and the whole novelty wears off fast.

The song everyone knows best is the title track, Be A Man, a diss track where Macho calls out Hulk Hogan. “So come on, Hulk, let’s wreck so I can put you in check” he raps, and no I’m not sure what those words in that order mean. It’s easy to laugh at Be A Man because that’s all you can do, but the rest of the album is just painful to listen to.

Of course the lyrics are the worst thing here. In the aforementioned Be A Man .Macho somehow rhymes scared with heard, which is either absolute genius or whoever wrote this is just clutching at straws, or maybe no one took this thing seriously when they made it. It’s a blatant cash grab designed to target curious wrestling and rap fans.

AllMusic gave it one star, Sputnikmusic gave it one star too but gave it eight stars as a novelty album, while Rap Review gave it four out of ten. However public opinion is different, the user rating on AllMusic is four and a half out of five while on Amazon the only review of the album gives it four out of five, because wrestling fans are fucking marks.

Verdict: Don’t buy this piece of crap, even out of curiosity. Oh, and speaking of Hulk Hogan and rap…

 

2. Hulk Hogan released an album

Hulk Hogan doesn’t seem to like wrestling all that much, seeing as how he has tried everything to make money and failed miserably, from food (Pastamania) to movies (Mr. Nanny) Hulk sucks at everything that isn’t wrestling, and that includes music. Enter Hulk Rules by Hulk Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band, an album which features Hulk Hogan farting on the American flag on the cover.

To be fair to Hogan, he actually can play bass guitar and he does so on this album, and he performs alongside Jimmy ‘The Mouth of the South’ Hart and his ex-wife Linda. But the album still isn’t good. Hogan doesn’t sing on all songs though which is probably why AllMusic rated it half a star higher than Be A Man. He sings a bit on the opener Hulkster’s in the House while track two is American Made, his WCW entrance theme. So far not bad, not good but certainly more listenable than Macho’s album. Then track two happens.

Hulkster’s Back is a rap song (yes, another one) that sounds like it’s from the mid 1980’s despite this album coming out in 1995. Then Jimmy Hart sings on track four which sounds like it was recorded on a Concertmate 360 (brother). The centrepiece of this pile of shite is I Want To Be a Hulkamaniac, which hears Hogan rapping again (oh God) and sounds suspiciously like Owen Hart’s old WWF theme.

The songs just get more and more baffling and more and more dated before we get to Hulkster In Heaven, a ballad where Hogan sings (well, talks mostly) about what will happen when he dies, and it sounds so bad I could have recorded it.

Verdict: This album is really bad, but it’s so bad it’s good.

 

3. Jeff Hardy had a band with the worst name imaginable

2003 was a dark time for Jeff Hardy. He was released from WWE for drug problems, he had become unreliable in the ring and was no showing events, so 2003 Jeff Hardy was essentially just 2011 Jeff Hardy. The worst thing to happen in 2003 regarding Jeff however was the formation of his band Peroxwhy?gen.

I’m sure Jeff came up with the name when he scrawled it on a scrap of paper with a head full of acid, but under those circumstances it doesn’t even make sense. Jeff’s music ranges from boring (Envelope) to bizarre (Modest, his old TNA theme), but one thing all his music has in common is it’s really really shitty.

But his worst song has to be Apology. The music itself is perfectly fine, but holy shit Jeff cannot sing to save his life! He literally sounds like he just woke up and thought “Well those lyrics won’t record themselves.” In the song Jeff apologizes for all the things he’s done, which I hope includes Peroxwhy?gen. Why indeed? The lyrics themselves make little to no sense. Either the guy who made that video got the lyrics wrong or the sentence “You would have had to feed her eyes.” make sense to Jeff.

Verdict: Bad music that only Jeff Hardy marks will like.

 

4. 40-year old Terry Funk hates school

Remember how old that Hulk Hogan album sounded? Well, do you remember how old I told you it sounded? Well this album sounds the same, except this album was released in 1984 so it had every right to sound old. It’s hard to think that the hardcore living legend once belted out love ballads (well, spoke them), but that’s exactly what happened. It seems the craziest thing he did in mid-life was release a pop album.

Funk was a big star in Japan in 1984 and he would find himself in the WWF just a year later, so it’s clear to see why such a big star would want to cash in on his fame with an album, but sometimes you might do something you regret, and for Funk it was probably this album, Great Texan (or Eat Texan as it appears to be on some Japanese versions of the record). Partly written by Jimmy Hart and some guy called Eiji Nakahira who I couldn’t find any information on, the album is made up of rock ‘n’ roll songs that Terry talks over.

The stand out track has to be Beat It rip-off Barbra Streisand’s Nose where Funk hooks up with a girl with an enormous nose and “Dolly Parton’s chest, you know that’s the best.” And of course there’s track seven, We Hate School, where Funk sings about how much he hates school and his teachers, but loves rock and roll. If Terry Funk didn’t hate school so much maybe he wouldn’t still be going there at the age of forty.

Verdict: I can’t say anything bad about Terry Funk but this album is just so bad. It’s more laughable than Hogan’s album and has become something of a cult hit in recent years. But still, Barbra Streisand’s Nose?! Who thought that was a good plot for a song?

 

5. AWA promotes a show in the worst way possible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1CRatikdWg

AWA were building up to WrestleRock ’86 which would be a big deal for them, it brought in a decent bit of money and attracted over 20,000 fans. In fact it’s amazing it did so well considering how they advertised the event.

Again with the rapping, what is it with wrestling and rap? You still get it today with guys like John Cena and R-Truth. The wrestlers who rap in the video start off fine, but they soon lose their place and are racing through the verses – well, I say they lost their place but maybe they just wanted it to be over. Strangely they filmed the video in Las Vegas despite the show taking place in Minneapolis.

Of note, Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty show just how uncool they really are by screwing up the timing (as everyone else did actually), Sheik Adnan pops up to tell us his name and “that’s not funny.” No one said it was. Jerry Blackwell splashes and breaks a plank which I think is supposed to be hard for a fat man to do. 50 year old Nick Bockwinkel is the best rapper of the lot, man why didn’t we get a Nick Bockwinkel rap album instead of Macho Man’s? And even Curt Hennig has a verse, no wonder he went on to hate rap so much.

Verdict: Sure, today it’s pretty embarrassing to watch and is probably one of the most embarrassing moments in professional wrestling history, but this was the mid-80’s, shit like that was over back then. Still, that doesn’t mean it was good, because it wasn’t, it was shite.

 

6. CWA’s roster was anything but young, strong and healthy.

For those who don’t know, CWA or Catch Wrestling Association was a German promotion ran by former AWA World Heavyweight Champion Otto Wanz which lasted between 1973 and 1999. They were one of the biggest wrestling companies in Europe at the time, but these days they tend to be forgotten about.

But one day they decided to record a song, but not only that but they also recorded a video for it.

The video features the wrestlers themselves singing, of note we see CWA owner Otto Wanz, Shinya Hashimoto, P.N. News (who turns out to be a worse singer than he was a rapper) and British legends Dave Taylor and Giant Haystacks dancing and singing along, and this is interspersed with actual matches, of note we can see Vader wrestling as Bull Power.

The song is so ridiculous and downright bad it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear on the Eurovision Song Contest. But despite that no one is embarrassed by their participation in the video and they all look like they’re having a whale of a time.

Verdict: I don’t know who thought this was a good idea at the time but God bless that man, this is hilarious, and surprisingly catchy. And while we’re on the subject of a promotion humiliating its talent by making them record ridiculous songs…

 

7. WWF all the time

Just like how WWE puts out music today, 1985 was no different as the year saw WWF’s first musical release: The Wrestling Album. The only problem was wrestlers didn’t really have music back then, only a select few, so what did WWF do? They got their roster to perform songs, of course.

The album opens with the roster singing Land of 1000 Dances which starts with Mr. Fuji trying to sing, which is a big indicator that this album is going to suck, which it did but not entirely as we get Hulk Hogan’s Real American (which was then used by The US Express at the time), Jimmy Hart’s Eat Your Heart Out Rick Springfield, Hillbilly Jim’s Don’t Go Messin’ with a Country Boy and Gene Okerlund’s Tutti Frutti.

While that wasn’t so bad, the follow-up Piledriver: The Wrestling Album II was total shit. The album is painful to sit through, but not as bad as the VHS release, which featured music videos and interviews with the so-called artists. This failed and the album has not been released on CD, but this wasn’t the last time WWF did this kind of thing.

In 1993, they released WrestleMania: The Album, the most famous track being WrestleMania of course, which was used as Linda McMahon’s theme and asked the question “Are you ready for the Survivor Series?” Wait what? Why would a song about WrestleMania talk about Survivor Series?

But aside from this the album features songs by the last people you’d expect, such as Bret Hart’s love ballad Never Been a Right Time to Say Goodbye, which is the most 80’s sounding 90’s song you’ll ever hear, and it just doesn’t fit The Hitman’s character. What’s worse than that? How about The Undertaker having his own weird 80’s hip-hop song?

The strangest thing about this album however is the fact that the songs were written by Mike Stock and Pete Waterman who have written hits for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan and it was produced by none other than Simon Cowell. Yes, that Simon Cowell.

Verdict: As much as I love the cheesy Pete Waterman penned WrestleMania Album, it doesn’t suit Bret Hart to sing love ballads. As for Piledriver and The Wrestling Album, other than a few entrance themes these albums shouldn’t exist.