Back in the early 2010s, TNA Impact Wrestling thought it’d be great multimedia cross-promotion to put as many of its stars as possible into country music videos. Play the regional odds, right? Cowboy James Storm had ‘Longnecks & Rednecks’, Mickie James had a full-on country music career featuring videos starring Magnus, and so on. If you look hard enough, there was probably a Lady Antebellum video starring Garett Bischoff.
The best and most timely-to-reference of these happened in 2011, when imperfect Lee Ann Womack clone Sarah Darling needed a country stud for her new video and cast future WWE Champion AJ Styles. In ‘Something To Do With Your Hands,’ Styles stars as “Mr. Handy” — a butler robot from Vault-Tec, apparently — who is repeatedly called to the house of a 35-year-old teenager (?) who wants him to fix everything in her house and, failing that, feel her up.
Because hey, if you need something to do with your hands, why not beat up John Cena?
If you can’t follow those ‘Panda’-style lyrics, here’s the breakdown:
And if you need something to do with your hands
Uh uh oh
Uh uh oh
If you need something to do with your hands
Uh uh oh
There is a 100 percent chance that the last like two years of Styles’ run in TNA were built around Dixie Carter watching this video and imagining she was Sarah Darling. Or maybe it’s the other way around and Sarah Darling is Dixie’s Tyler Durden. Dixie would identify someone named Sarah as, “Sarah, darlin’,” after all.
The weirdest shot in the video for me is the one of Darling on the ground, one of her legs bent like she just got killed by It Follows, missing one of her shoes.
Don’t tuck your chin on the Styles Clash, Sarah.
It’s a shame that this is Styles’ only G-rated country music softcore appearance, but going to Japan, winning two IWGP Heavyweight Championships, getting signed by WWE and winning the biggest wrestling company in the world’s top prize is pretty good too, right?
