In the episode of the series Family Guy titled McInfarctionwhich first aired on January 13, 2008, features a scene that has gone down in history as one of the most accurate portraits of what popular culture believed Will Smith’s music was all about. The littlest member of the family, Stewie, sets out to “be more popular with the kids than Will Smith’s clean raps,” and then the star is shown rapping in the studio, saying things like, “I respect women when I go on a date / I take them to the park or maybe the museum / And I only kiss them if they’re ready.” Or, “Help your mommy and daddy out and get a job / So you can pay for your school supplies.” Rap was supposed to be rebellious, tough, and uncomfortable, but Will Smith, according to this parody, rapped his way to love across all ages, all races, all walks of life.
Smith, the great movie star, started out as a rapper. He called himself The Fresh Prince. In 1997, already signing as Will Smith, at the height of his musical fame he released an album called Big Willie Style about whom critics said, in their most friendly way, things like that he has “a humorous and friendly rap” and, in their most merciless way, that Smith is “the Cliff Richard of rap.” Andy Crysell, of NMEthe architect of this sarcasm, says the following about songs like Chasing Forever“Smith babbles lazily about buying his girlfriend a present in Tokyo, how he’d love for his son to grow up to be a doctor, and how he’s been working really hard lately, so he’s looking forward to going to the beach.”
Smith was the rapper for everyone, the cool actor who often went to have fun The Anthillthe public relations genius, the patriarch of a family that, although some may be suspicious of for its business structure (such as the writer Terry McMillan), has been popular with the masses for years. Smith was all that until at the 2022 Oscars she slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. The fourth installment of Two rebel policemen, Released at the end of May, it has been a success and has shown that audiences seem to have forgiven him, or that the nostalgia factor of the great franchises born in the nineties is greater than the sound of a slap. A final scene was added to the script of the film, very well received by the public, in which Martin Lawrence slaps Will Smith, a more than obvious reference to that episode. It was Smith’s way of asking for forgiveness through the cinema, but apparently he also needed to do so through music.
You can make it It is the lead single from an album that will be Smith’s first in almost 20 years and bears the not at all cryptic title of Dance in your Darkest Moments (Dance in your worst moments). Smith performed the song at the BET Awards about 10 days ago, in a messianic performance that puts him in the middle of a circle of fire and begins with the actor and rapper saying: “I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but whatever you’re going through in your life, I’m here to tell you that you can get through it.” The corrosive web Vulture has called this performance “the beginning of Will Smith’s image-cleaning tour” in an article titled “Nobody Needs to Hear This.” You Can Make It It fluctuates between the masculine self-improvement gibberish that could easily be uttered by one of those tattooed, muscled men who drive expensive cars on Instagram and call themselves coaches and also touches on victimhood in the third person: “Believe me, they tried to make Will Smith bleed / In the rearview mirror I see that adversity was the gift.” Vulture sees in it a certain “urgency to mix spiritual growth and commerce.”You Can Make It addresses the ripple effects in Smith’s public perception, where longtime fans are happy to continue supporting him, but some still feel he needs to be put down. “It’s exhausting. It’s bitter. Nobody wants to hear this from Will Smith.”
The Guardian spoke a month ago of “a carefully choreographed return” that looks to the past to remind the world how clean, familiar and cool Smith was: an undeniably successful franchise that began in the nineties and, now, resorting to a gospel theme about faith and inner strength to return to what was the scene of the crime. A stage that is not the Oscars, but another awards ceremony with a million-strong audience in the United States (it is the first awards ceremony to which he returns after that night). The BET Awards are, in addition, organized by Black Entertainment Television and reward the best of African-American entertainment culture. This makes sense and has a message because many opinion columns (in The Guardianin USA Today or in The Washington Postfor example) pointed out that there was something racist in the way the slap was received by the world: they maintained that if Smith had been a white man the scandal would have been less and that white men have done worse things on television and have not received as much criticism. That if a black person makes a mistake in public, he will need to apologize many more times than a white person. There is a certain symbolism in this song being sung at that gala: perhaps Smith was asking for forgiveness not from the world, but from black people, from his community, for giving wings that night to certain racist opinions and perpetuating the image of the violent black man in a country where the black population faces enough problems and the murders of Trayvon Martin or George Floyd at the hands of, respectively, a racist vigilante and a racist policeman have not yet been forgotten.
For now, the song has timidly entered the gospel and Christian music charts, but with less than half a million plays on Spotify since its release 12 days ago, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to regenerate interest in Will Smith’s musical side. He probably doesn’t need to: with his movie star profile in top form and a personal fortune estimated at around 350 million dollars, this was simply the song he wanted to make to send a message to his people. For the rest of the world, for the general public, the more than 360 million raised by his latest film is enough of a message.
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