Day 315: Will Smith – Big Willie Style
There’s another heatwave in Scotland, so I wanted a warm-weather album for a drive in 22 C. Don’t laugh, people from warm countries, that’s tropical for us. The men of Glasgow genuinely go about their daily lives shirtless on the rare occasions when it’s +20 here – not the ladies, though, for us it’s still frowned upon. Anyway, today I thought I’d go for a summery classic, Will Smith’s Big Willie Style.
Album cover courtesy of Columbia Records
Will Smith probably needs no introduction, even the whippersnappers probably researched him after that infamous slap, but nevertheless: Will Smith is a rapper/actor from Philadelphia, who got his start in the hip hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince in the late ‘80s. They became wildly successful, but Will Smith massively underpaid his income taxes and was hit with a $2.8 million tax debt, so when NBC approached him to suggest that they write a sitcom around the semi-fictional character of the Fresh Prince, he agreed. That was the start of his acting career.
After the success of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, he started acting in films and launched a solo music career with releasing a theme song to Men in Black, which he also starred in. The song ended up on his 1997 debut solo album, Big Willie Style. It features radio-friendly rap songs with soul and disco samples that became a huge commercial success, being certified nine times platinum by July 2000.
There’s something about the relentlessly upbeat and positive style of the album that makes it a great one to drive around to. A rap album by an actor who’s known for being fun for the whole family could so easily be cheesy or sound like a novelty album, but it’s actually just good. It would be hard to even try not to have a nice day being out in the sun and listening to something like “Miami” or “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It”, and while the other songs aren’t as good as the singles, they’re still perfectly fine.
Big Willie Style is intentionally positive and family friendly to suit Will Smith’s sitcom image, and he famously had no sex or profanities in his songs. Except, does willy mean willy over stateside as well? Is this a double-entendre or did he just call himself Big Willie, because willy means something very different around here and hearing him say “This one goes out to all the big willies” is something you don’t hear too often. He says he didn’t know what it meant in the UK, but I’m not too sure I believe him.
It’s enjoyable enough that I feel like I can continue to choose to ignore his 2025 single “Pretty Girls”, which was awful, as well as the kerfuffle around him promoting his comeback tour with AI-generated crowd videos, which was awfully dumb. Would I listen to the album again? Probably not, but obviously I’ll be listening to the hits here and there, I’d be depriving myself of a good time if I didn’t. Big Willie Style isn’t a bad album though, it’s a perfectly enjoyable 7.5/10.