Fresh Prince Back to Take Rap to New Heights

[Hero1]

Staying fresh

Will Smith has made it to No 1 in the leading man stakes, but now, he tells Angus Batey, the Fresh Prince is back to take his rap to new heights

“I’m definitely starting from almost below zero,” chuckles the biggest movie star in the world. “My career is not even at the ground — it’s sort of subterranean!” And Will Smith laughs one of his mighty guffaws, part of the devastating charm offensive with which he has won over the globe’s cinemagoers. His new movie, the romantic comedy Hitch — on which he doubles as producer and lead actor — has become the first film of 2005 to take more than $100 million in the US, and may become the biggest rom-com in history. To help to ensure that it succeeds in Britain, Smith has flown in to attend not one, not two, but three premieres in a single day. So if he’s sounding downbeat about his career, it’s because Smith is referring to the job he did before Hollywood called, the job at which he was, by most reckonings, spectacularly good, too — being a rapper. And lately, that has not been going quite so well.

“There was a point when I had to choose between rapping and acting,” the 36-year-old admits, sitting forward attentively in a suite at an upmarket Kensington hotel. “My new album addresses the idea that there’s a much greater rapper inside of me that doesn’t get to see the light of day too often.”

His album — the first for three years — is called Lost and Found. The cover art shows Smith, head bowed, standing at a crossroads; one street sign reads “West Philly”, the predominantly black neighbourhood in which he grew up and became the Fresh Prince, the four-times Grammy-winning, platinum-selling rap star; the other points to “Hollywood”. So what, exactly, does he think he has lost on his journey?

“The level of rapper that I could have been,” he says, for once seeming to struggle to find the right words. “And what I’ve found is . . . the new entertainer that raps. There’s a yin and a yang of all things — losing something is finding something. But you can get so pulled down by mourning the loss that you’re not discovering the find. I’ve found a new style of making records that’s conducive to my life. I have something to say. We’ll see if people want to hear it.”

And just in case the thoughts, feelings and emotions of a movie icon aren’t interesting enough, Smith has an ace up his sleeve: a feud with the world’s biggest rap star.

“I’ve got a song called Mr Nice Guy,” he reveals a little coyly of the new LP, “and in it I respond to a few people who have had negative things to say about me. Eminem said: ‘Will Smith don’t have to curse to sell records, but I do/ So if you’re a fan of his, then f*** you, and f*** him too.’ I never responded publicly, so I took this opportunity just to tell the truth of how that kind of stuff makes me feel.”

He is reluctant to explain beyond this slight misquote from Eminem’s single The Real Slim Shady (2000), but Mr Nice Guy (like all but three songs from the new album) is not available to THE EYE as yet — “We’re still finishing it,” Smith chuckles a little apologetically — so, when pressed, he adds: “You know, I think it’s a real tragedy with me and him. I know that he admires me, and I admire him. But life has put us in a situation where we’re pitted against each other.”

Either Smith is hyper-sensitive, or this astute student of entertainment trends is deliberately overreacting in the knowledge that, in hip-hop, beef sells. While Hitch has confirmed him as the highest-grossing leading man in Hollywood today, he is having to refute rumours that he was dropped from his previous record deal, and it has been a long time since a Smith album had fans running to the record shops.

But just in case feuding doesn’t work, there is a plan B; and as with everything else in Smith’s life, it involves simple, honest graft. In a 1998 interview with Vibe magazine, he was quoted as saying that, if he set his mind to it and worked hard at it for maybe 15 years, he saw no reason why he should not become US president. He also revealed how, as a child, he had watched his father, a refrigeration installation engineer, reach down into inches of gunk on a supermarket storeroom floor, pick up a dead rat with his bare hands, fling it away and then get down on that same piece of floor to do his job. The work ethic he has inherited explains why now, at the peak of his movie popularity, he is determined to take a break to concentrate on re-establishing himself as a rapper.

“I never feel like I am where I’m going,” he continues, trying to explain his unquenchable ambition. “To me it’s . . .” He pauses, searching for a metaphor before hitting upon a sport he is also known to work hard at.

“It’s like golf. You never actually win. Whatever you shoot, now you need to shoot one better in your next round. So that is my mind-set, in the attack on music and film and entertainment in general.”

And some attack it has been. Hitch’s success, and that of last year’s intelligent sci-fi thriller I, Robot, merely cemented Smith’s position as Hollywood’s most bankable star. He broke in to cinema’s mainstream in 1995 alongside Martin Lawrence in the cop buddy movie Bad Boys, and he credits Lawrence, who came to acting via stand-up comedy, with helping him find a collaborative style of working.

“In the world of comedy, most people don’t want the other person to score,” he explains, a smile dancing about his face. “You’ve got to take the jokes, and you’ve got to win. And I learnt early, with Martin, the nature of giving. With me and Martin we were arguing about the other person taking a line! ‘No Martin, it’ll be so much funnier if you say it!’ ‘Nah Will, how you deliver it . . .’ That type of freedom, and giving, is what creates the winning environment. It was the same with Kevin James and Eva Mendes (on Hitch). We just wanna be in a great scene, whoever makes it.”

Smith, who turned down a place at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology to concentrate on his rapping, followed up Bad Boys with two sci-fi hits: Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997). On both a personal and professional roll, he married the actress Jada Pinkett on New Year’s Eve, 1997, and while Wild Wild West (1998) received a critical panning, it still grossed more than $110 million in American cinemas alone.

Many other rap stars have decided that their on-record role-playing can also work in front of a camera but, with few exceptions (Mos Def, Ice Cube), they tend to get stuck in movies that Hollywood believes will play well to a hip-hop audience. Rather than settle for being an action hero, Smith worked on expanding his range. He played a yuppie lawyer enmeshed in a high-tech conspiracy in Enemy of the State and an enigmatic golf caddy in The Legend of Bagger Vance. He portrayed Muhammad Ali in Michael Mann’s 2001 biopic at the request of Ali himself, and spent 18 months learning to box, risking injury by sparring with real heavyweights. For his pains he received an Oscar nomination.

And Smith already had years of practice on the small screen behind him. He had first appeared on TV as the Fresh Prince in a series of brightly coloured music videos alongside DJ Jazzy Jeff. The duo came together as teenagers in the mid-1980s and enjoyed a string of huge hits, purveying a populist style of rap that provided a non-threatening, PG-rated alternative to the gangsta machismo of NWA or the political activism of Public Enemy. Often unjustly derided for his raps’ lighter subject matter, Smith proved that he had writing skills easily the equal of his more lauded peers. In songs such as Parents Just Don’t Understand — which won the pair the first rap Grammy — Smith spun irresistible yarns of middle-class teenage rebellion in a style full of cocky but instantly likeable cheek. Those fans and critics who found his style and material “soft” missed the point: in a genre obsessed with its artists authentically representing the realities of their lives, Smith was, very often, the only major rap star “keepin’ it real”; it was just that his middle-class reality did not involve drugs, gunplay and gangs.

Smith transferred this on-record persona to the small screen in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The show’s six series about a working-class kid growing up with rich Beverly Hills relatives are still being endlessly repeated, and with good reason: everything that audiences love about Smith today can be seen in them. So when people tell him that they are intrigued to see him playing the lead in a rom-com, as he does for the first time on the big screen in Hitch, he is surprised.

“I always thought of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a romantic comedy,” he shrugs. “Most of the episodes are about finding a girl, and falling in love. Playing in those scenes felt like going home more than going somewhere new.”

Crucially, Smith has managed the trick pulled off only by a select few black entertainers: crossing over to a mainstream, predominantly white, audience without compromising himself creatively or culturally.

It is tempting to hypothesise that he learnt how to switch easily between black and white America as a teen. He spent time in a Catholic school in a white neighbourhood before transferring to Overbrook High in West Philadelphia, where he grew up the second of four children born to Willard Sr and Caroline, a high school administrator.

Smith has transferred the essence of himself into his art; in person he is every inch the wisecracking, easygoing, affable individual he plays on screen or in song. He studied the careers of TV actors who had made it big in Hollywood — Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy — with a view to becoming the biggest movie star in the world. And with that goal now achieved, he is refocusing his attention on music.

“The difference is that the music has got to be generated by what I think and what I feel. Whereas you can choose a script, you can’t choose the type of records you make. I’ve always made the records as they come to me, and it’s always got to be about me. It’s more difficult not having Steven Spielberg to produce it, or not having Michael Mann to direct; not sitting across in the scene from Tommy Lee Jones; being out there by myself. But I write all the lyrics, I make up all the songs, so it’s about me, it’s what I feel, which means that it’s much easier to be on a record.”

Which is another good reason why you wouldn’t bet against the world’s biggest movie star regaining his place among pop’s elite.

Hitch is released nationwide on Friday. Smith’s new single, Switch, is released on Mar 21, and the album, Lost and Found, a week later. Both are on his own Overbrook Entertainment label, distributed by Interscope

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/pri...3-14411,00.html

[cataboy3]

very, very nice article tim! :bowdown:

[bigted]

That's a great article there, thanks Tim! :bowdown:

[Hero1]

yep fantastic article :peace:

[WesSyde]

thanx man that was good stuff!

[Hero1]

also confirms the album cover :thumb:

[DevilsJim89]

awesome article! good stuff.

[JumpinJack AJ]

Dope article!! :thumb: Alot of common knowledge in there...but those new quotes are great!!

[Lhunagar]

yeeeah .. great article .. thx man :peace: :thumb:

[KevTastic]

Nice find mate :wiggle:

[Lerkot]

Really good article. Guess the writer must be a fan.

[DefCEM]

Yeah, a really nice article and very interesting :thumb:

Thanx Tim!!

JJFP Rocks The House

[Jonny 5]

thanks a bunch for posting that article Tim!

[jj+fp2004]

great article!! tnx tim... :thumb: but will was a bit wrong about eminems quote ("Will Smith don’t have to curse to sell records, but I do/ So if you’re a fan of his, then f*** you, and f*** him too).

[FreshPrincess]

that was in the Times yesterday!!