Jalen Rose is here to remind everyone when the culture is being appropriated or misconstrued by those not within it. First, it was securing the elusive interview with Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant to get the authentic side of his story minus the takes and spins. Now he is making sure that the ‘you can’t see me’ hand gesture that both Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese remade popularly is credited to its proper creator, and it’s not former WWE wrestler John Cena.
“All I know is this if you think John Cena made that up, you clearly know nothing about our culture and about hip hop,” Rose said on social media about the ‘you can’t see me’ hand gesture that Angel Reese did to Caitlin Clark which amplified it during LSU’s championship win over Iowa.
“Please give Tony Yayo his flowers. Love,” Rose finished.
You Can’t See Tony Yayo
Rose added a clip from a John Cena appearance on “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” from a year ago when Cena revealed the dance move came into his orbit when his younger brother mimicked Tony Yayo.
“I developed a special maneuver in the WWE called the ‘you can’t see me’ in which I put my hand over my face and said, ‘you can’t see me!’ and the reason I did this is ’cause while I was creating the album to which my theme music is on, my younger brother Sean was always our litmus test,” Cena said during the interview. “He kind of liked the same music, and he would never go to the studio with us.
“So we would come home with like tracks, and we would play it for him, and he was ruthless man, he would never be satisfied with any song, and he heard ‘The Time Is Now’ and just did this dance that Tony Yayo did in one of the G-Unit videos. He put his hand over his head, and he just bobbed his head like that. I was like, ‘Man, what are you doing? That looked ridiculous,’ and he was like, ‘No man, its the Tony Yayo dance,’ and I’m like, I’ll do it on TV and he was like, ‘I dare you to do it on TV.”
Boom. History has been corrected with one post. The amazing part is that Caitlin Clark’s usage of a Tony Yayo move during the Final Four that John Cena amplified didn’t create as much controversy until Angel Reese returned the same energy during the championship game.
G-G-G-G-Unit!
Yayo is the most loyal member of 50 Cent’s G-Unit group, as the two have remained close amid the group’s breakup. As one of the rappers who stay close to the street edge of hip hop, even though 50 Cent has transitioned more into Curtis Jackson, the entertainment executive.
Ironically, Angel Reese has felt judged by the media and a huge swarth of die-hard and casual women’s basketball fans for making a hand gesture that started in the culture and received new life in the Iowa cornfields.
“I’m too hood, I’m too ghetto. Y’all told me that all year. But when other people do it, y’all don’t say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me,” Reese said during the post-game press conference after her championship win.
Tony Yayo looks like Angel Reese, too, and the environments they came from, Baltimore and South Jamaica, Queens, respectively, are alike. Jalen Rose is here to reclaim the origin story of a move that should reflect the same judgmental names Reese has felt labeled by; that is, unless someone believes John Cena made it up first.
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