Two images have arguably come to define Will Smith’s career. The first, from 1995’s Bad Boys, is a lingering shot of the previously scrawny star of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air with shirt undone and pecs prominent – a close-up insisted upon by director Michael Bay over the actor’s objections and which Smith later credited with marking his baptism as an A-list movie star.
The second is of Smith striking Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, 40 minutes before the Academy named him Best Actor for his sports biopic King Richard. It was an outburst prompted by a joke host Rock made about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith and her alopecia, and which resulted in Smith receiving a 10-year ban from the Academy Awards. This August, there may well come a third life-encapsulating moment when Smith, once the biggest movie star not named Tom Cruise, takes to the stage at Scarborough Open Air Theatre in an attempt to revitalise a hip-hop alter-ego that’s been in the deepest of deep freezes since 2005.
Can Smith, who releases his comeback album Based on a True Story on Friday, cut it as a rapper in an era of Kendrick Lamar and Central Cee? One thing is for sure. “Boom! Shake, shake, shake Scarborough” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, which is why the announcement that the North Yorkshire seaside town will host the opening night of Smith’s first-ever UK tour on 24 August has prompted considerable mirth.
Regardless of the Open Air Theatre’s well-established status as a British touring stop-off, “Will Smith” and “Scarborough” in the same sentence has the ring of a celebrity in freefall. Going into the 2022 Academy Awards, Smith was the toast of Tinseltown. Now things are very different.
Based on a True Story is Smith’s fifth solo LP and the opening chapter in a promised trilogy of records he has likened to “three seasons of a TV musical show”. The 14-track collection features guest turns by R&B vocalist Jac Ross and musician-and-actor Teyana Taylor, while the cover image sees Smith recreating the preppy look of his Fresh Prince era. Of course, the obvious question it all raises is why, at the age of 56, is a $9.5bn grossing Oscar winner going back to music? A cynical view might be that the record industry is far more forgiving of bad behaviour than Hollywood.
However, Smith also seems to genuinely regard songwriting as the best medium by which to unpack his post-slap trauma. He told Billboard that the Oscars and its aftermath had encouraged him to continue down the path of “spiritual investigation” he’d already started while filming the gruelling Apple TV+ slavery film Emancipation months before the slap – a journey he charts on the new record, which features self-empowering song titles such as “Hard Times” and “You Can Make It”.
“A well opened up inside of me, a well of understanding of art and pain … all kinds of things that I didn’t even know were in there,” he revealed to Billboard. “Then, after the Oscars, that spiritual investigation continued, and a whole world woke up inside that I didn’t even know was there. Dreams, visions, parts of my inner landscape that I had no awareness of prior to three years ago.”
“Dreams, visions … inner landscape” sounds more like the menu at an aromatherapy clinic than the lyrics to a rap album. The same sensibility infuses the album’s lead single, “Beautiful Scars” – an otherwise old-school, by-the-numbers hip-hop collaboration with Big Sean and OBanga (albeit harder-edged than Smith hits such as “Miami”). In it he declares, “I’ve got bruises where I came from … But I wouldn’t change if I could restart”.
His message is essentially that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. “Sometimes it can seem like the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, that’s completely unsurvivable, can turn out to be one of the most magnificent experiences of our lives,” Smith told Billboard. In another interview, with music website Genius, he described his post-slap life as a mixture of “brutal” and “beautiful”. He said: “I hate admitting that I’m only human – my ego wants to be Superman … The word I was thinking about when I thought about the last couple of years of my life was ‘brutaful’ – brutal and beautiful.”
That “Beautiful Scars” is about making peace with your mistakes is explicitly spelt out in the video, which begins with Smith seated opposite Big Sean. “You’ve made some awesome career choices your whole life,” says Sean. “There’s only one you truly regret – well, maybe two. But we’re not going to focus on that one.”
The two mistakes are the Oscars slap and Smith passing on the part of Neo in 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix – a role that would instead become synonymous with directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s second pick, Keanu Reeves. Just so nobody misses the point, Smith and his collaborators recreate famous scenes from the film in the video, starting with Big Sean playing Morpheus in the “red pill/blue pill” sit-down with Neo. “That was the fun of doing the Matrix-inspired video,” Smith explained to Billboard. “That’s one of the beautiful scars of my career that I turned down.”
Smith has also been banging on about the concept of “kintsugi” – the Japanese art of putting smashed pottery back together and cherishing it, flaws and all. Speaking to Genius, he said: “I can look at [the Oscars incident] as an absolute mess, horrible, terrible – or I can look at it as a really great kintsugi opportunity, to rebuild something beautiful and powerful.”
The idea of suffering having a bigger purpose is a persistent theme in his new music. On “First Love”, his drippy duet with Spanish singer India Martínez released on Valentine’s Day, he talks about making peace with his foes – “Healing all enemies, this is the remedy.”
Yet even here, he could not avoid controversy. In February, Smith raised eyebrows during a live performance with Martínez in Miami, which finished with the two locking lips. While Smith and Pinkett Smith have spoken openly about having extramarital relationships during their union – and said in 2023 that they are separated but have no plan to ever divorce – the image of Smith kissing his collaborator nonetheless pinged around the internet.
Is there a market for syrupy hip-hop performed by a hamstrung Oscar winner? It surely can’t help that the new songs sound nothing at all like the feel-good rap with which he made his reputation in the Nineties. Smith’s early movie star persona was of a natural-born charmer. That was likewise the aura he brought to hits such as “Gettin’ Jiggy With It”, “Miami” and “Boom! Shake the Room” – the 1993 UK No 1 made with early collaborator Jeff Townes. Nobody would mistake these tracks for the second coming of Public Enemy. Raised Baptist, Smith avoided swearing in his rapping and preferred to radiate a blinding positivity. His music wasn’t deep or meaningful, but it was great fun. These latest tunes, by contrast, feel weighted by the need to circle back around to Smith’s spiritual torment.
Only Smith can know if he is truly on a journey of self-discovery or merely attempting to rehabilitate his image by portraying himself as a victim of life’s slings and arrows. The other tricky question concerns his standing in Hollywood – and whether there is any way back for him. “It is kind of crazy to think that this one incident could wipe away so many decades of goodwill,” The Wrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman told the BBC in the wake of the slap. “But it was so public, it was so outside of the box. One agent we talked to called it a ‘stunning’ act of narcissism. The movie star brand for Will Smith is badly tarnished.”
Tarnished but not destroyed. In 2024, Smith roared back to the top of the box office when he reunited with Martin Lawrence for a fourth Bad Boys movie – the $400m-grossing Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Fans hailed it a stunning comeback. Yet for all its success, Ride or Die has not absolved the actor. Future cinematic projects remain thin on the ground – though he is reportedly moving forward with sequels to his 2007 dystopian thriller, I Am Legend, and his satirical 2008 superhero comedy Hancock.
Behold Schrödinger’s A-lister, then – simultaneously cancelled and not. Still, whichever column he belongs in, he is no longer the sure thing who clocked up hits such as Men in Black, I, Robot or Aladdin – or walked away from disasters such as Suicide Squad and Collateral Beauty with mega-star halo intact. The imponderable posed by his comeback album is to what degree film’s loss will be hip-hop’s gain. For now, the prospect of a new dawn for Smith’s rapping career has not, it is fair to say, set music alight.
“It will be a lot harder because he is trying to appeal to young people,” says Tim Price, host of the Will Smith Podcast and curator of a website dedicated to Smith’s music. “You can see him trying to connect by going on Twitch streams and leaning into his social media. Will started as a rapper and I know it’s his first love. His music has always been popular because it’s been fun and very relatable. This new album is very different though, so it will be interesting to see if he is going to connect with more honest and raw songs.”
Others are more sceptical and perceive the move into spiritual hip-hop as a shameless attempt at image rehabilitation. “Who’s ready for 12-15 generic tracks of vague bars about struggling, making mistakes, and persevering,” was the withering assessment of one rap fan on Reddit.
Who’s right? The Smith fans who want Big Willie back in style? Or hip-hop purists dismissive of his comeback as a marketing wheeze? By the time he takes to the stage at Scarborough in August, the answer will surely have become clearer.
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