Good Lord, this feels like the Twilight Zone.

If the name Mike Tenay doesn’t resonate with you, don’t fret.  He may not be the biggest name in music.  Moreover, he’s rather well-known in a completely unrelated industry: professional wrestling.  Many knew him as a color commentator for the ill-fated World Championship Wrestling, from 1994 to 2001.  Now he resumes that role in a company, I admit, I have less than flattering things to speak of: Total Nonstop Action Wrestling.  For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s where Sting was for the past few years, and where Kurt Angle still is.  No, neither of them have retired.

Michael William “Mike” Tenay is also known as “The Professor” due to his extensive knowledge of professional wrestling.  In a particularly comical note, he was also in the pro wrestling movie Ready to Rumble, alongside plenty of WCW talents, the Nitro Girls and an unaccredited John Cena.  So you may be asking yourself what any of this has to do with music.  Well thanks to a particularly NSFW event that caused TNA’s attempt at fan interaction to feature more porn, smut and general unpleasant things on their sub-site than whatever pornographic website you frequent, through the dozens upon dozens of questionable posts, there was featured a very unnerving picture of Mike Tenay, smiling, and along with that was a song called “Jacuzzi”.

Before this day, few people (myself included) even considered that there was someone in TNA with this kind of talent.  Finding my way to Bandcamp, I discovered his album and the unnerving cover art of him smiling, and I was instantly thrown back to the 80s.  I love the 80s.  I’ve never personally BEEN in the early 80s, seeing as I wasn’t even conceived until the late 80s, but history, word of mouth and a few infamous video games featuring a surplus of drugs and violence made it very clear what the music was all about at the time.  There were traces of Kurtis Blow and Michael Jackson, Oliver Cheatham and Megadeth, Judas Priest and Blondie, Rick James and REO Speedwagon, so on and so forth.  It was a time where pop music and the subcultures of that era’s pop music were in bloom.  Perhaps the best way to describe it and Mike Tenay’s music is the Miami Beach sound.

When it comes to Tenay, I find myself most drawn to tracks like “Jacuzzi Love” and “Slow and Easy”, and perhaps the description offered under the track listing is more in-depth than I want to admit:

speeding along the coastline in your red ferrari with the roof down, the blast of night air refreshes you after a long day in the sun with your top squeeze

This album, and I hope there are more to come, takes me back to when I spent hours upon hours commuting throughout the swimmer’s deathtrap of Vice City, pretending that I cared about the story when I was just happy to run around and drive fast cars through a tropical paradise.  “Jacuzzi Love” especially cares the feel of a track like the Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic”, an upbeat track that invokes the synthpop feel of carefree days and the disco (or post-disco (music has so many sub-genres)) attitude of the time.  Contrast that with “Soft and Easy”, which could easily have featured an overeager Michael McDonald crooning over it, saying nothing but the title of the song in various inflections.

Tenay’s music is listed under plenty of labels, but perhaps the most interesting of these is “vaporwave”.  Relatively new as a genre, it combines elements of chillwave, smooth jazz and R&B, as well as other brands of pop, and mashes them together in a highly danceable, and very sensual style.  As of writing this I’m no expert on the genre, but if this is any indication of the brand as a whole, then Mike Tenay might legitimately be the most talented man in professional wrestling.

With all that being said, Mike Tenay did not release a perfect album.  Some elements to the music, or at least his music, seem out of place and even a bit disjointed.  “Bubble Butt”, while fun to listen to and a certified “booty shaker of song” as a friend of mine pointed out, features so many elements that it’s easy to confuse some of the background noises to your favorite effects from Streets of Rage.  Meanwhile, some songs like “Swimming with Dolphins” are so dreamy (neutral term) that they make you question exactly what it was that Tenay was smoking at the time of creation.  Granted, he does like in Vegas.

Mike Tenay is a talented musician, this is undeniable.  Perhaps his future after wrestling is making some club music for the Boogie Nights crowd on the Vegas strip, or even just making music for an aspiring filmmaker with an ever-eclectic palette.  Either way, if this is just Tenay’s first foray into music making, then it can only get better.  And he’s off to a good start.

Check out and purchase Mike Tenay’s “Jacuzzi” here at Bandcamp.