In 2005, when Willow Smith was only 5 years old, she had her first touring experience, joining her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band, Wicked Wisdom, on the road. “It’s not very popular knowledge, but she was out there — she was on Ozzfest,” says Willow, who turns 22 this month. “She did [hard rock] for many, many years, and she loved it and she did it with her entire heart… but she did struggle with a lot of pushback.”
Willow, sitting onstage with Yahoo Entertainment at a sold-out Grammy Museum event previewing her own rock record, <Copingmechanism>, recalls the “racist and sexist” treatment her mom received from self-appointed rock gatekeepers — “white men coming at her and telling her that she couldn’t be in this space. But she kind of stood up and did it anyway, and that was so inspiring to me,” Willow says. “Me seeing her as a little child, with people screaming racial slurs at her while she’s onstage, booing her, throwing stuff at her — it felt like she was doing activism. I felt, ‘I’m seeing activism right in front of my eyes.’ And it taught me that music isn’t just music; music is meant to push the culture. … Even at a very young age, that was clear to me, because I just saw it right there. Yeah, it was scary, but it made me value the craft in a way that if I hadn’t seen that, I don’t feel like it would’ve gone as deep.”
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It also made an impression on Willow that Wicked Wisdom was able to win over hundreds of skeptics at every Ozzfest second-stage gig. “There were so many people that didn’t want to like it, but just had to love it!” she marvels. “That was so beautiful to see: the change of people’s minds, the change of people’s hearts. And I feel like that is true activism. … Being on tour with her in such insane places, the memories are kind of fuzzy, but the main feeling I remember is feeling so close to her, like it was us against the world. … And that feeling was priceless.”
Willow relived that feeling last year in a viral video, when she sang Wicked Wisdom’s “Bleed All Over Me” with the reunited band while her beaming mother proudly looked on. It was a torch-passing moment of sorts, and now Willow is taking on the rock world on her own with her fourth solo album, <Copingmechanism> — her hardest effort yet, and “some of the most honest work I’ve done.” While Willow burst onto the pop scene more than half her life ago “(“How crazy is that?”) with her breakout bop “Whip My Hair,” she has since built a credible discography of genre-crossing work, also very much against the odds.
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Willow points out that she’s been dabbling in rock since her 2015 debut album Ardipithecus, and really started going for it with the seven-string track “Human Leach” off of 2017’s The 1st, but “I think that people just sort of chose not to focus on that side of my music and chose to focus more on the melodic, more R&B/neo-soul side.” She reveals that she has received plenty of pushback herself, from her record label, for wanting to move in an increasingly hard-rock direction. “I feel like I’ve never really fit in any categories. I think that that is the issue, and so sometimes people categorize me in not the right way. Which is all good. I stand 10 toes down on who I am, and I’ve been here for a while, and I feel like I’m pretty authentic when you see me and listen to my music.”
While Willow’s mother “came against a lot of physical violence,” even death threats, nearly two decades ago with Wicked Wisdom, “Nowadays, it’s over the internet,” Willow gripes. “People just want to be mad and talk crap over the internet. I feel like, yeah, that’s a little bit less dangerous than someone in your face trying to throw a broken bottle at you, but yeah, you still experience that racism.” For instance, she recalls an incident when System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian reposted a clip of her playing the riff from SOAD’s “Toxicity” on Instagram. “I was so, so happy. Like, I showed my mom. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’ And then I’m looking at the comments, and all of these old white men are just bashing it. It was so crazy.” Thankfully, Odadjian — who’d posted Willow’s clip with the caption, “I love how music transcends all ages! Bravo @willowsmith you’re a real one!” — defended Willow, who was 20 years old at the time. “He was in the comments fighting back, like: ‘Unfollow me, bro. I don’t care what you think.’ … I literally was like, ‘I’m sorry you got so much flak for it!’ I don’t know, for some reason I felt like I had to apologize. But he was like, ‘No, it’s all good,’ and that was so beautiful. I felt so supported.”
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More recently, another one of Willow’s ‘90s rock idols, Les Claypool, complimented her “fine guitar pickin’” on an Instagram post of her jamming on a Primus song, and she felt so supported that she “literally cried. I shed a tear when I saw that he commented. I don’t like to take external validation because that can turn into a black hole really, really quickly, but I had to take that slight bit. I had to allow myself to feel really validated by this, because he’s literally my favorite. Honestly, I will hold that in my heart forever. And he gave me a nickname: I’m the ‘Certified Young Fiery Lass.’ So, I’m going to hold that with me forever.” (“Certified Young Fiery Lass” is now the bio on Willow’s Instagram page.)
Willow doesn’t think it’s so unusual for a Black woman like herself to do rock music, even if it takes some rock snobs by surprise. “It’s definitely been a heavily dominated white male kind of arena for a while, but if you do your research, there’s many, many beautiful people of color who kind of steamrolled the genre in a beautiful way,” she points out. “Sister Rosetta Tharpe was playing the electric guitar in the 1940s, and people don’t really talk about that. I feel like if we do our research and we really love music and we really want to look at the, beginnings of these things, we find some beautiful things.”
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In fact, Willow believes that disenfranchised people have the potential to make the best rock music. “Women have a lot to be angry about — let’s start there,” she grumbles, acknowledging that anger from women, “especially Black women,” often isn’t accepted in the mainstream. “We really haven’t been treated the best by society since basically the beginning. But I think that we hold such a beautiful gift, which is to see life from a perspective that isn’t an entitled perspective. And I think that that allows us to create art that truly changes the way people feel.”
Of course, some doubters might expect Willow to act entitled, given her upbringing in a famous Hollywood family, as the daughter of Jada and Will Smith. But other than fondly remembering her mother’s former rock band, she’d rather not talk about her parents, and just let her music speak for itself. “I think my biggest way of blasting all of those [accusations of nepotism] is really spending time on the craft and really working on my musicianship,” she says matter-of-factly. “You know, if someone can play, they can play, and there’s really no in between. And so, I feel like when you really, really work on that, it’s undeniable. They can’t say you’re not talented.”
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<Copingmechanism> is definitely a showcase for Willow’s immense talent, and the early reviews from Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Consequence of Sound have been stellar. It’s her most lyrically confessional record ever (“In the past, I would just be super-super-esoteric, like every single lyric that I wrote was just about spirituality and geometry,” she chuckles), whether it’s on “slow, sad, drunk songs” like “Split” and “No Control” or the self-critical singles “Maybe It’s My Fault” and “Curious/Furious.” And while she says she’s “angry and sad about a lot of different things” and a sense of “deep, deep existential dread connects all the songs,” <Copingmechanism>is “not a depressing record. I don’t think sadness needs to be depressing. I think sadness is an expression of ourselves in such a beautiful way. We push it away so much, and I don’t feel like we should. We should honor our sadness and we should honor our anger and we should honor our discomfort, because it’s a part of us too.”
One <Copingmechanism> track, “Hover Like a Goddess,” is decidedly less angry or sad than the others, but it especially took Willow out of her comfort zone. “I kind of wanted to challenge myself to try to write like a sexy song, which is not really something I do,” she says with a nervous giggle. “But I just love women and I just think they’re the best creations, and I just needed to make a song to fully express that.”
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A collaboration with Chris Greatti, who’s known for his work with Yungblud, Blink-182, Pussy Riot, and Poppy (“The album that Chris did with Poppy is literally some of the best music I’ve ever heard,” raves Willow), <Copingmechanism> seems to be tapping into the Zeitgeist, at a time — 17 long years after Wicked Wisdom — when guitar-driven rock is finally back in the mainstream. And through rock, Willow is finding a new way to speak out , just as she does alongside her mother when co-hosting Red Table Talk.
“I think there’s so much happening in the world right now in rock. The soul of rock is this cry for change, and I feel like rap and rock kind of have that same foundation of like, ‘Some bad things are happening and we are mad about it, and we want to express this and we need you to know how we feel,’” muses Willow. “There’s so much trauma just in everyday life for us now. Like, we turn on our phones and we see what’s happening in Iran, we see what’s happening with climate change, we see what’s happening with so many Black men and women being killed against their wills. All of this crazy stuff is going on, and we’re just angry and we want change. And I feel like art is the way to show people that we want change.
“And so, I feel like it’s less about the genre, and more about that intent and that underlying feeling that the youth is having right now. The world is not doing too good right now … but we’re seeing it so clearly, and that angers us and makes us feel like we need to speak up. And I’m trying to scream and I’m trying to shred on the guitar, to let everyone know we’re serious about this.”
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