Rappers were once ‘mad’ at Will Smith for his role in ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
Before becoming a megastar, many know that Will Smith began his career as a rapper under the name The Fresh Prince. This eventually led to Smith launching an acting career by leading the hit ’90s sitcom. The prince of Bel Air. To this day, the show is applauded not only for its quality but for the barriers it broke on television.
However, some of Smith’s hip-hop peers were angry at what Smith was doing on the show. Artists began to feel that Smith’s message in Bel-Air he disrespected rap culture.
How Will Smith Landed His Role in ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
Will Smith made a huge impact as The Fresh Prince. He and his partner, DJ Jazzy Jeff, created the hit album he is the dj and i am the rapper. The record went triple platinum, earned Smith his first Grammy and cemented his place in hip-hop history. But Smith spent much of his earnings on his youth. This was compounded by the fact that he owed money to the IRS, and his subsequent record with Jazzy Jeff was bombed.
But her second breakthrough came when she met prolific producer Quincy Jones. Jones was in the middle of production Bel-Air, and felt that Smith would be suitable for the role. The producer gave Smith the opportunity to audition. Although Smith had no acting experience, Jones knew that Smith would be a star.
“Will had never acted before. fresh prince, but after a full 15-minute read, we knew he was our guy. It was clear that there was no mountain too high for him, and I am very proud of all that he has achieved. But he was surrounded by an absolutely stellar cast and a great writing team and crew, and that should never be overlooked,” Jones once said in a 2015 interview with Time.
Why some rappers were ‘mad’ at Will Smith
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The show not only changed Smith’s life, it also changed pop culture. Jones credited the show with helping hip-hop become more mainstream, as his influence began to reach all kinds of different audiences. It was a genre of music that Jones was very attuned to.
“Hip-hop was exploding, selling millions of albums a week. Children, both black and white, had become wrapped up in the culture,” Jones recalled. “You had white kids in Iowa walking around with their baseball caps on backwards, but the establishment, as usual, was spooked by the reality of the message in the music. You had C. Dolores Tucker, Tipper Gore and other groups trying their best to kill the music, but they couldn’t. The kids had found a voice in hip-hop that spoke to them.”
Susan Borowitz, the show’s writer and producer, personally noted the show’s influence on young people. But some rappers didn’t like seeing the reach of hip-hop culture expand and blamed the bad boys star as part of the reason for this change.
“When we get back [to the East Coast], we’d hear white kids on the playground using these words that we wrote in the scripts, and we’d crack up: these wealthy white kids from Westchester using ‘Me, dude,’” Borowitz said. “Much of the language passed into white suburban culture. Some rappers were very angry that Will had done this. They felt that he had diluted his culture for this white, middle-class audience.”
Will Smith’s upbringing influenced how he was perceived in hip-hop.
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Smith recognized that his music was much lighter than that of some of his contemporaries in hip-hop. This resulted in other rappers criticizing him for his style of music. The suicide squad The student believed that the way he was raised was part of the problem in the eyes of his peers.
“My middle-class upbringing contributed to the constant criticism I received early in my career as a rapper,” Smith wrote in his memoir. Will be (via insider information). “I wasn’t a gangster, and I wasn’t selling drugs.”
Smith was also the product of a strong nuclear family, which other hip-hop artists lacked.
“I grew up on a nice street in a two-parent home. I went to a catholic school with mostly white kids up to the age of 14. My mother was college educated. And despite all his faults, my father always put food on the table and died before abandoning his children, ”he added.
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