WILL SMITH, "Lost and Found" (Interscope) - You can eventually push even Mr. Nice Guy too far, and the famously mild Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has apparently had enough. "I Wish I Made That/Swagga," off Will Smith's fourth solo album, finally takes aim at the critics who have sneered that he's "too white." "Oh, wait, maybe I'll jack a truck/fulla cigarettes and guns and stuff ... then will I be black enough?" he demands. Hip-hop has been long overdue for such a Cosby moment, and good for Smith - who could have abandoned music for movies by now — for providing it.
The problem with the rest of "Lost and Found," Smith's first album for Interscope and an attempt to present a harder-edged Big Willie, is that it deliberately neglects his two strengths: familiar, recycled pop hooks and feel-good rhymes. He needed a Kanye West or Just Blaze to produce this comeback but got Timbaland instead; the harsh, sample-free boom-bap is ill-suited to Smith's breezy style, and his stabs at topicality (an attack on born-again Christians; the belated 9/11 song "Tell Me Why") sound forced. "Sometimes y'all mistake nice for soft," Smith warns Eminem and other haters on "Mr. Nice Guy." Ironically, on "Lost and Found," Smith often makes the same mistake. (Dan LeRoy, Hartford Courant)