When I say the name Will Smith, probably the first thing people think about is “oh, the actor”. Or maybe they think about the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or maybe, just maybe, they think about his songs he did for his hit movies like Men in Black. But honestly, I don’t think Will Smith gets enough credit as a rapper and honestly, what he did for the hip-hop industry as a whole.
Part 1: The 80's
Let’s travel back to 1980’s America. There was this up-and-coming music genre called Hip-Hop, that was trying to break it’s way into the American music scene. Now this isn’t the place for a detailed history of Hip-Hop, but here is the basics that you need to know: Hip-Hop was grown from influences of Caribbean music and culture, mixed with the urban inner-city life of African-Americans primarily growing from the burrows of New York City. Hip-Hop has been, and has it’s roots established from the idea of story-telling and passing down knowledge.
The idea of Jamaican Toasting and block parties where Disc Jockey’s would mix and cut popular disco songs at the time and rhyme over them became the basis of Hip-Hop as we know it today. But Hip-Hop also stood for something much more important culturally, and that was the plight of the modern African American citizen. You see at this time, the idea of Subsidized housing in the United States and more importantly in New York City became a failure. This hurt African-Americans the most, with poor living conditions and little to no support from the government or city officials. One of the byproducts of this living situation was the birth of Hip-Hop music and it’s culturally importance.
With the rise of Hip-Hop artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and The Sugarhill Gang, Hip-Hop music was a stellar medium for Black Americans to express the frustrations that they felt on a daily basis as well as an outlet for these problems. No only that, Hip-Hop was a way to let American know nation-wide the problems they were facing. However, due to the nature and subject matter of what Hip-Hop was about, in most cases Hip-Hop music was just not a marketable media. Most Hip-Hop was destined to live and die on local airwaves and it was extremely hard to get mainstream attention for this new form of music. Run DMC’s hit album, King of Rock in 1985 was a huge step into bringing Hip-Hop into the mainstream, but there was one duo coming up that would forever change the Hip-Hop game.
Part 2: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
While Still in High School, Will Smith met with Jeff Townes at a party he was hosting and filled in as his hype man. The two grew to have great chemistry together and started their professional relationship together. The two collaborated together to create the smash hit “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble”. A very humorous song, based on the troubles that Will Smith faces with girls as a teenager. The song blew up and overnight the duo became a success story. This new group was called: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince.
What’s so significant about this song was a few things. One, it is very much a core hip-hop song. At it’s essence, “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble” is just a storytelling song in which Will Smith tells a story about the problems he’s facing, which we already established, it the core idea of Hip-Hop. The other thing that makes it different however, the song is a comedy, which is a stark contrast to other Hip-Hop songs at the time. You see many of the storytelling elements of Hip-Hop songs in it’s early years was about the rough environment living in the Bronx or the violence and inequality that African Americans faced. A lot of this wasn’t radio friendly or wasn’t fit for mass production. Hell, it took Run-DMC to make a Rock inspired song just to get played on MTV, one of the biggest platforms for music at the time.
What Will Smith and Jeff Tones did for hip-hop, was to make it extremely marketable. Yes, for the most part, Will Smith’s raps were pretty clean, and didn’t delve into controversial topics, or featured much cursing. To put it bluntly, Will Smith’s music was appropriate for most of America to listen without much fuss. But another huge aspect about Will Smith’s early music, is that is was extremely relatable. Being that Will Smith and Jeff Tones was still minors when their first song blew up, meant that they could relate to a huge audience of teenagers and like-minded kids. It was the culmination of a perfect storm, the right time at the right place, and the right sound and the right image.
Part 3: Making Hip Hop History
After releasing their first album in 1987, “Rock The House”, DJ Jazz Jeff and the Fresh Prince kept the momentum pushing forward. Following up only a year after that album, the duo released their second album “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper” which not only became their most successful album out of their catalog but was also the first double album for hip-hop music. This album featured hits like “Brand New Funk”, “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand”, and “A Nightmare on My Street”. Continuing with the style established in “Rock The House”, the album was a mixture of comical story-based songs as well as general hip-hop tracks.
One single in particular “Parent’s Just Don’t Understand” is also a hugely important song to Hip-Hop History, as it was the first ever Rap song to be win an award at the Grammy Awards. This is huge because it signifies a culturally change in the perception of rap music. Hip-Hop and Rap wasn’t just a “fad” like many wrote it off to be many years ago, it was finally getting recognition at a major awards show. However, this didn’t come without his own controversy.
You see, while it was awarded for “Best Rap Performance” in 1989, the actual award was never given during the actual televised show. Instead, it was set to be given during the pre-show, meaning it wouldn’t get exposure like the other categories and felt like a complete afterthought. Rightfully so, Will Smith and other nominated rap artists like LL Cool J, Kool Moe Dee and Salt-n-Pepa were offended by this, and this led to Will Smith as well as the other artist to actually boycott the Grammy’s because of their coverage of the Rap awards. This was a huge message to the music industry that Hip-Hop and Rap were real genres of music, and that artists will accept nothing less than equal representation with other genres of music. The Duo would continue afterwards to create 3 more albums before their split up and their pursuit of solo careers.
Part 4: Will Smith's overlooked catalog
So we talked a lot about Will Smith’s history in Hip-Hop and Rap music, but I also want to talk about some of his overlooked and underrate music. So it’s no secret that Will Smith was massively popular in the 90’s. Both with Jeff Townes and Solo wise, Will Smith had hugely popular songs like “Summertime”, “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”, “Wild Wild West”, “Miami”, “Switch” and so much more. But I think a lot people get too hung up on his super popular songs and don’t give him enough credit for his songs that didn’t hit the airwaves.
Let’s travel back to his last album with Jeff Townes, “Code Red”. There are some really great tracks on here that a lot of people don’t talk about. Tracks like “Twinkle Twinkle (I’m Not A Star)” which is talking about his experiences being a super-star celebrity and him just trying to live a normal life. See he’s storytelling in this song, but it’s a completely different vibe. He’s not rapping about absurdities or over-reacted events, but instead rapping about his true feelings. In a much more chill beat and more relaxed presentation, he also does this in another song on the album, “Ain’t No Place Like Home”, where he’s just reminiscing over old times growing up and rapping about the love for his family. On that same album we have “Shadow Dreams” where he’s just talking about dreams and living up to expectations. All of these songs show a much more mature sound for Will Smith. Yeah, there’s some tracks that still go for that super popular sound he’s known for like “Code Red”, “Boom! Shake the Room” and “I’m Looking for the One (To Be with Me)”, but overall, this album feels like a evolution to the style established in “Rock the House”.
Now after “Code Red” Will Smith went Solo, which is a shame in some cases, because I kind of wish the style he had in “Code Red” could evolve some more, but instead his solo albums went almost fully commercial in it’s sound. He made some Mega hits during this Era which defined commercial Hip-Hop at the time, but he still had some really great hidden gems.
The first that comes to mind is “Afro Angel” off of Willennium. This song is a song completely outside of Will Smith’s norm, and that’s a neo-soul styled track. Starting off with a very earthy poem recited by Jada Pinkett Smith, with a very smooth chill beat underneath. In this song Smith tells separate stories in black centric ideals and consequences in which these individuals are considered “Afro Angels”. In this song, “Afro Angels” is term used to describe black people has “angels on earth” but replacing the standard image of an angel with one that has black features. I really like this song because not only is it afro-centric, but it’s also a very conscious rap song, which is most definitely a unique style for Will Smith. And the story telling here is really good. The first verse revolves around a woman not seeing her self-worth and how easily advantage she can be taken advantage of. The second verse revolves around a troubled youth who puts up a false persona to hide his own insecurities which results in his inevitable death. The final verse revolves around a woman who leaves her drug-dealing boyfriend to pursue a better life for her and their child which ends with the boyfriend changing his life so he could be a husband and father for her and their child.
All of the stories have just enough length, great pacing and gets point across effectively. Will Smith has such a masterful way of telling stories that people don’t give him enough credit for. Another stellar overlooked song from this album is “The Rain” featuring Jill Scott. “The Rain” is a retrospective track in which the problems that you face in life is represented by Rain. The first verse is about Will Smith going through his successes and how he burnt through his money, which legitimately happened in his life back in the late 80’s. He used this as a reflection to do better in his life by stating “The Road to the riches is slippery when wet/amongst the fall is where you truly find yourself/ever since then, the rain I never felt/” keeping with theme of rain being the problems you face.
The second verse is about a failed relationship, and he describes this situation as a hurricane and how we weathered the storm with the whole verse using rain and weather-based puns and word play, which all is done very well here. The final verse wraps everything in which he realizes that the rain was important to his development as a person and how for him to change for the better, he has to let the rain flow and accept it’s outcomes. This song is another truly brilliant song from Will and is such a personable song that we don’t see the play-boy party attitude or the comedic character, but we see will for what he is as man with problems and flaws and how he overcomes them.
Will has some other dope, overlooked songs like “No More”, also from Willennium, “Tell Me Why” from Lost & Found, a political and societal song from Will or “Could U Love Me” also from Lost & Found. He has some absolute banger of love songs like “Chasing Forever”, “The Things That U Do” & “I’m Looking For The One (To Be With Me)”. A few other random tracks from Will Smith I like are “Just Kickin’ It”, “Trapped On The Dance Floor”, “Yes, Yes Y’all” and “I’m All That”.
Conclusion:
Will Smith doesn’t get enough respect in the music industry point blank. As a long time Will Smith fan it amazes me how much people either overlook, don’t know his impact to the industry or straight up disrespects the impact Will had. Before he became a break-out actor, he was an INSANELY popular rap star that had a key role into pushing Hip-Hop into the main space. So before you fix your mouth to say anything about Will Smith, make sure you put some respect on his name.
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