April 27, 2025

by Rodney Carmichael

For the next couple of weeks, while your regular newsletter author, Ann Powers, is out of the office, members of NPR Music’s team will be taking a close look at songs that have captured our fascination. This week, Rodney Carmichael wonders why a certain rapper turned tv star turned movie star turned Oscar-winner-slash-perpetrator-of-public-assault would bother making a new album. And then finds a song that maybe provides an answer.

Will Smith performs in Los Angeles in March 2025

Michael Owens/Getty Images

Will Smith’s new album doesn’t slap. That’s the runaway consensus.

Rolling Stone called it an “overwrought comeback.” Pitchfork gave it a 2.4. It even failed to bust a grape on the Billboard 200 chart. But it shouldn’t come as a shock that Based On A True Story is sonically underwhelming. As Cipha Sounds, comedian and co-host of the first hip-hop podcast Juan Ep, stated on a recent episode: “When has anyone ever said, ‘Yo, this Will Smith album is whelming!?' "

Being a childhood fan of the Fresh Prince — the moniker Will went by back when rap still had similac on its breath — I used to love how different his brand of masculinity hit. Dude was self-deprecating, always the butt of his own joke in an era when rappers didn’t play about their credentials. People called him soft, but he owned his corniness in a way that almost made it cool. For a kid with a dad I only saw on weekends and a live-in stepdad who felt even more distant, Will mirrored a version of manhood even I could envision.

Of course, that was well before the slap, or his decision to return to rap after a 20-year hiatus. In a genre brimming with antiheroes, Mr. Smith has always been abnormal. A six billion-dollar box-office man whose formula for success centered on choosing leading roles based on how closely they hewed to Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero’s journey, he was way too obsessed with selling a different image of Black masculinity — that of a respectable, overly positive role model — to be a great or authentic rapper. Coming from the streets of West Philly, a hero ain’t nothin but a hoagie. Any man attempting to live up to that false ideal is bound to get eaten alive.

Admittedly, my only reason for listening to True Story was to filter Will’s new music through the lens of his most shocking performance — a scene so dramatic it would’ve been Oscar-worthy if it hadn’t happened at the Oscars IRL. Whether or not the album slaps was always beside the point; the question to me was whether Will would be ready to set aside his own myth making tendencies to face himself as an uncelebrated man. The best answer comes halfway through the album, after the mock-barbershop “Will Smith is canceled” humor; the gospel-rock altar call; and the not-so-subtle boasts about him having “long arms” and knowing “when to check a joker/when to stay in your seat.”

Not until “Tantrum,” his Joyner Lucas collaboration, does Will stop painting himself as the victim or the sinner seeking redemption and begin to unpack some deep-seated character flaws. “Going through troubles, I hate what trouble done,” he raps. “I hate to be the thing that people suffer from.” The couplet is the closest he comes to acknowledging the torment he may have caused Chris Rock, who’s only sin was being a more diminutive figure to stand up to than the faceless, shameless yet collective ridicule of the masses formerly known as Black Twitter.

After hearing “Tantrum” on repeat for the umpteenth time, my five-year-old son asked me what the song was about. “It’s a song about a man hurting so bad that he wants the whole world to feel his pain,” I told him.

Maybe Will’s been miscast his whole career. ’Cause that sounds like the character motivation for the ultimate villain in every MCU superhero flick of the last 20 years.

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