Will Smith’s latest musical comeback feels like watching your cool uncle try to recreate his glory days at a family barbecue — there’s something equally endearing and cringe-worthy about the whole affair.
The 56-year-old entertainment icon dropped “Pretty Girls” last Friday, his second musical offering since deciding to dust off his rap career. Coming hot on the heels of his March album “Based on a True Story” (which, let’s be honest, barely made a ripple in today’s streaming-dominated landscape), this latest track sees Smith trying to thread an impossibly thin needle between his Fresh Prince legacy and contemporary hip-hop’s aesthetic.
Look — nobody expected Smith to come through with bars that could compete with Drake’s “For All The Dogs” deluxe edition or Travis Scott’s latest chart-topper. But there’s something fascinating about watching a Hollywood heavyweight wade back into the rap game during these strange post-slap, post-pandemic, AI-dominated times.
The music video opens with a therapy session scene (subtle as a brick through a window, but points for self-awareness) before launching into what feels like a 2025 remix of his ’90s swagger. “I like BBLs / That stand for ‘Bad b**ches link up,’” Smith declares, surrounded by a diverse ensemble of dancers. It’s the kind of line that probably sounded cooler in the writing session than it does blasting through your AirPods Max.
Social media’s reaction? About as mixed as a post-Grammy afterparty. Some viewers couldn’t smash the dislike button fast enough — “My ears bleeding again good god,” wrote one particularly enthusiastic critic. Others found themselves caught up in a wave of nostalgia, defending Smith’s right to express himself through music, regardless of his AARP eligibility.
The timing of Smith’s musical renaissance raises eyebrows. With the dust barely settled from that infamous 2022 Oscar moment (you know the one), and his decade-long Academy ban still fresh in Hollywood’s collective memory, this pivot to music feels… strategic? Perhaps therapeutic? Maybe a bit of both.
Here’s the thing about “Pretty Girls” — it’s not terrible. Really. The production’s clean, the message is refreshingly respectful toward women (a welcome change in today’s hip-hop landscape), and Smith’s flow, while not exactly revolutionary, remains serviceable. But there’s an elephant in the recording studio that nobody wants to address: Should a man pushing 60 be making music clearly aimed at the TikTok generation?
Then again, who makes these rules? Hip-hop’s pioneers are aging too, and nobody’s telling Run-DMC to hang up their shelltoes. The genre’s relationship with age feels increasingly complicated as its founding generation moves into their golden years.
Between the therapy references, the carefully curated inclusivity, and lyrics that sound workshopped by a committee, “Pretty Girls” comes across as an expensive attempt to rebrand Smith for the streaming era. Yet there’s something oddly compelling about watching one of entertainment’s most successful figures risk public ridicule just to reconnect with his first love.
Maybe that’s the real story here — not the quality of the music or the commercial prospects, but the simple fact that Will Smith, despite everything, still wants to rap. In an industry obsessed with calculating every move through focus groups and AI predictions, there’s something almost rebellious about that choice.
Whether that rebellion translates into actual streaming numbers? Well, that’s another story entirely.