I like pretty girls,” raps 56-year-old Romeo Will Smith in his pungent new single, “Pretty Girls”. The song, released last week, represents the latest step in the Men in Black star’s ill-fated return to music after an absence of nearly two decades. In it, Smith raps bluntly about his omnivorous lust for the opposite sex. In the equally dismal music video, he can be seen blissfully dancing with – or simply ogling – an assortment of women, some decades younger than him.
It’s a video that calls to mind Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s infamous smash hit “Blurred Lines” – now more than 12 years old – not only in its seedy vibe, but the look of it: dancing women before a plain, white, void-like background. Some moments in the video see Smith reduced to a tiny size, while beautiful women tower over him a little fetishistically. (Call it “Honey, I Shrunk the Lothario”.) Lyrically, it’s just as off-putting, and witless to boot: “Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, lemon/ Alright, f*** it, I like women,” he raps.
The music video has already drawn the scorn of plenty online, with some people branding Smith’s single “creepy” and indicative of a “midlife crisis”. Really, though, it’s hard to feel anything other than sorry for Smith, who looks to have, in an inadvertent way, laid his struggles with his own masculinity bare for the world to see. “Pretty Girls” feels not so much a single as a cry for help.
To give credit where credit is due, Smith’s entry into the unabashedly leery canon of straight pride anthems is at least somewhat tongue in cheek (that is, when his tongue isn’t dangling out of his mouth like the lascivious wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon). “I ain't talkin’ ‘bout just the pretty you see/ Uh, but the pretty you be,” he raps, in a kind of vague concession towards the rudiments of romantic depth.
The video is framed with a scene in which Smith (playing, presumably, himself) visits a therapist to open up about the “problem” he’s had “ever since he was a little boy”. (The problem is, we find out, that he likes “pretty girls”.) But there’s an element of self-puncturing mockery to it. There’s something deliberately emasculating, too, about the image of a pint-sized Smith clambering around the giant women, and his woefully un-chic dance moves.
It’s jarring, perhaps, because Smith built his career on a sort of turbocharged charm: in something like Hitch, he seems like he’d be able to chat up a post box. In the video for “Pretty Girls”, he seems not just ambiently lecherous but actively uncool – and the extent to which this is a deliberate choice is never entirely clear.
The song is informed, too, by Smith’s recent history, including the exhaustively discussed incident at the 2022 Academy Awards, in which he walked on stage and slapped host Chris Rock in retaliation for a joke about his wife, the actor Jada Pinkett Smith. The slap can easily be read as an outward manifestation of Smith’s troubled relationship with his own masculinity, and it’s probably not for nothing that the scandal followed years of potentially embarrassing headlines regarding his marriage, and his wife’s romantic entanglement with another man (rapper August Alsina) during a period of “amicable separation”.
In the years since the slap, Smith has spoken often about a newfound introspection. He described his recent album, Based on a True Story, as the result of his “self-examination”. It is “the most full musical offering that I’ve ever created,” he told AP. “I’ve come to some really beautiful answers for myself.” Critics didn’t see it that way: Pitchfork described the album as “excruciatingly corny, a cringe ringer of therapy platitudes, youth-pastor smarm, and showtune production that reeks of Hamilton”, while The Independent’s Tara Joshi decried the “vague, hackneyed platitudes” and “half-baked, corny lines”. But it’s still confounding that Smith’s ambitions should fail him so drastically, that he would pivot so quickly to something as seemingly facile and sexually regressive as “Pretty Girls”.
Ultimately, I suppose, none of this would matter if Smith’s track was any good: the whole thing feels a lot seamier for the fact that the music itself is as crude and outdated as the message. For the erstwhile Prince of Bel-Air, the shtick couldn’t be less fresh.
‘Pretty Girls’ is available to stream now
