Hulk Hogan's Notorious 1995 Album Hulk Rules is an Accidental Masterpiece of Anti-Comedy
The Hulkster is in the house!
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The Wrestling Boot Band’s first, last, and only record, Hulk Rules, might just be the single most 1980s album in existence. Heck, it might just be the most 1980s thing I've ever experienced, and I lived through that wonderful, terrible decade.
Hulk Rules is more 1980s than the guy from Flock of Seagulls with the hair playing a keytar solo while zonked out of his mind on Quaaludes, cocaine, and New Coke. It’s more 1980s than a gratuitous break-dancing sequence. It’s more 1980s than Max Headroom.
Yet through a crazy cosmic time warp, most 80s albums was released in 1995, a half-decade after the decade it so embarrassingly and exquisitely embodies ended. It’s as if Hulk Hogan and his collaborators Jimmy Hart, wife Linda, and singer and multi-instrumentalist J.J. Maguire got so fucking high recording Hulk Rules one lost weekend in 1985 that they ripped a massive hole in the fabric of time and space and somehow found themselves naked and confused in the desert a decade later with a cassette with the words “Hulk Rules” on it and no memory whatsoever of what had happened or why.
Hulk Rules shares with celebrity rap productions from the early 1980s a stubborn, unfortunate conviction that rapping is pretty much the same as talking. If you can speak words coherently into a microphone, then you are, if anything, overqualified to join the ranks of those silly “rappers” exploiting that wacky rap fad before it inevitably goes the way of the pet rock.
Unfortunately for Hulk Rules, Hip Hop is a challenging art form and not, in fact, silly kid stuff any only idiot can do at a professional level. That Hogan raps at all on Hulk Rules is an unforgivable insult to Hip Hop. It's cultural appropriation at its clumsiest, something that should never be forgiven or excused.
But before Hogan disrespects one of America’s true homegrown art forms, he drop-kicks things off with “Hulkster’s in the House,” an arena-sized mash-up of “State of Shock” and “Let’s Go All the Way,” all hair metal chords and Jock Jam chanting.
The Hulkster can’t really sing. He can’t really rap. So he just sort of groans everything in that definitive rasp of his with zero rhythms, zero musicality, but all of the Caucasity (or caucasian audacity/audacity in whiteness) in the world.
Like the entirety of the album, the following track, “American Made,” exists in both a 1980s time warp and a world beyond self-parody, irony, and self-awareness, in a gonzo realm of 1980s Cannon movies, G.I. Joe cartoons, and Jingoistic Ronald Reagan speeches.
It’s a glorious exercise in Uber-patriotic kitsch where a hair-metal crooner observes admiringly of Hulk Hogan, the musician, and songwriter behind the album but also, confusingly, its subject as well, “He's Ammmmericannnnnnnnnnnnnn made/He’s got the red white and blue running through his veins/He was born and raised in the U.S. of A/He's got to be inspected, he's US grade/If you mess with the flag, it's like a slap in his face!”
“American Made” is laser-focused on hype-macho, red, white, and blue camp, but the track that follows, “Hulkster’s Back,” personifies the album’s surreal identity crisis with its incoherent smorgasbord of old school Hip Hop (none of Hogan’s beats made it out of the eighties, I’m afraid. Instead they all died horrible deaths sometime around the middle of George H.W Bush’s time in office), California surfer vibes and attitude, clumsy allusions to Hogan’s wrestling fame and finally a hilariously arbitrary, shoe-horned “positive" message in the form of “(Hulk) got as high as the sky, he remained the same/With the training and the prayers and the vitamins too.”
The bit about training, prayer, and vitamins is repeated at the very end to really drive home that Hogan owes his success to faith, hard work, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and, not as you might imagine, steroids, racism, and dumb luck.
Hulk Rules then heads unexpectedly down to a honky tonk down south for what is easily the best song on the album and also, not coincidentally, the track on the album that has the least to do with feeding Hogan’s insatiable ego.
“Wrestling Boot Traveling Band” is a country-fried, bittersweet look at the lonely life of a touring musician with a bit of a “Margaritaville” vibe whose only reference to Hogan is, “She heard the band play late last night/And she thought the bass player was cute.”
Hogan plays bass on Hulk Rules. He has a long history with the instrument, which he rhapsodizes about at length in his memoir. While he seems like a proficient enough bass player, it’s an awfully unglamorous, working-class instrument for a mega-star/leading man like Hogan to play.
Then again, Hogan leaves the singing to others as well so that he can focus on his ostensible strengths: passable bass playing and rapping that made me ashamed to be part of the same species as Hogan.
Accordingly, Hogan doesn’t sing “Bad to the Bone,” but there’s no doubt that he’s the Harley-riding badass being paid tribute to in its testosterone-poisoned lyrics as the WWF superstar. Now, if you are going to record a song called “Bad to the Bone,” it better be the “Bad to the Bone,” you know, the one George Thorogood and the Destroyers recorded that was in a million movies and TV shows, or it has to be good enough to justify sharing a name with one of the most famous modern blues songs of all time. Needless to say, the “Bad to the Bone” on Hulk Rules doesn’t meet either qualification. It’s not “Bad to the Bone.” It’s just bad and not in a fun, “Can you believe this exists?” way either.
The same cannot be said of “I Wanna Be a Hulkamaniac”, which is bad, all right, albeit in a manner that is utterly distinctive and unforgettable. “I wanna be a Hulkamaniac, have fun with my family and friends,” a chorus of seemingly drugged or brainwashed lost souls sings sluggishly over a Technotronic goes bubblegum rap beat and Hogan delivering more wholesome life lessons with a mouth full of marbles and peanut-butter like, "If you want to be a Hulkamaniac/I can sure tell you how to stay on track/You gotta train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins too/These are all the things that Maniacs do.”
These days, Hogan is known less for wholesome, All-American heroics than for making sluggish love to Bubba the Love Sponge's wife on camera and with Bubba the Love Sponge's enthusiastic consent despite feeling gassy, dropping an N-bomb on tape, teaming up with real-life supervillain Peter Thiel, and putting a chokehold on free speech with his successful lawsuit against Gawker.
But Hogan hadn't made his heel turn in wrestling or in life when Hulk Rules was released to universal mockery in 1995. He could still portray himself not just as a good guy piously advocating for prayer, physical fitness, and health but as a fucking saint sick children all around the world worship as a God, and for good reason.
“Hulkster in Heaven” was inspired by a Make-A-Wish kid Hogan invited to one of his matches in the UK who died before he could see Hulk in action, leaving behind a poignantly empty seat and a gaping hole in Hogan’s heart, which some say is three times the size of mere mortals.
So the Hulkster decided to talk-mumble his way through nearly five minutes of the synthesizer-fueled sap about how “I used to tear my shirt, but now you tore my heart!” because “I knew you were a Hulkamaniac right from the very start.”
“The world just lost another Hulkamaniac” Hogan croons off-key of the loss of one of his millions of worldwide fans, his wobbly voice breaking with earnest emotion. It’s an unintentional masterpiece of kitsch, a maudlin melodrama that legitimately belongs on lists of the worst and most embarrassing songs of all time.
Hulk seems convinced that he will be reunited with the dead little Hulkamaniac when he, too enters the gates of heaven but if everything I know about Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s personal life is any indication, I wouldn’t be so cocky in assuming that Hogan is heading to the Good Place rather than the fiery bowels of hell.
In a similarly melodramatic development, Linda decided to make her presence felt via “Hulk’s the One”, a solo vehicle about, what else, her feverish love and adoration of her husband “Hulk” Hogan.
Then again, the song begins with the lyrics, “They say your heart is made out of stone/You got me hanging by a string/My friends all tell me you're bad to the bone/Please be bad to me,” so perhaps it should not come as a terrible surprise that after recording this song about how she could never be with anyone but “Hulk” Hogan, how he is her one and only soulmate, Linda and “Hulk” Hogan had a nasty divorce that may or may not have had something to do with Hogan making love to Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife on video.
Yes, Hulk Rules certainly takes you on one hell of a journey in ten songs, clocking in at less than half an hour. It really lives up to its reputation as one of the worst and weirdest celebrity albums ever released.
Hulk Rules took Hogan’s happy-ass good guy shtick as far as it would go and then a little further. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that a year after its release, he shocked the world with an epic heel turn that paved the way for him to revitalize his career by playing the bad guy.
Hulk Rules suggests that by 1995, Hogan had tired of playing the bland good guy, the patriotic All-American. Hogan’s cornball shtick had become a joke; Hulk Rules was its anti-comedy punchline.
Hogan would successfully reinvent himself after the album’s embarrassing failure as a bad guy professionally, but being a bad guy in life would also end up leading to his personal and professional ruin.
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