RAMBLE ON: "I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince

I read Will Smith’s memoir “Will” for my Trainwreckords episode on him to get a feel for his creative process, but he doesn’t talk about it as much as I’d have liked. Mostly he talks about the arc of his life – his accidental entry into showbiz, his drive for superstardom, his turbulent marriage, his strained relationship with his abusive father. He does talk about his process a couple times; he talks about going so deep into character for his first movie “Six Degrees of Separation” that he couldn’t turn it off afterward. He says that he deliberately wrote “Summertime” as an impression of his then-favorite rapper Rakim. He details his training methods to get into shape as Ali. But most of these things are about him as a person, not him as an artist; him going goofy on the set of “Six Degrees,” for example, is the reason he thinks his first marriage failed. (I think Will’s admission that he was copying Rakim is to stave off the rumors that Rakim ghostwrote it himself.)

One interesting thing he says is that acting sidelined his music career because he simply prefers it. He thinks he’s better at it and he enjoys it more; it comes naturally to him, whereas he always felt like he was playing catch-up as a rapper. This is probably why he barely discusses his solo rap career at all; there’s not a whole of him in it. It’s an open secret that he uses ghostwriters for his solo career, the main one has done interviews identifying himself so it’s not super-hidden, and it’s not like anyone cares if the “Men in Black” theme was a deep expression of Will’s soul. But Will also doesn’t discuss his original rap career very much, before jiggy and movies and all that, except as a stepping stone along his career. He discusses liking hip-hop, he discusses the things he saw as a budding star in the golden age of hip-hop and the shit he got up to, but his actual lyrics, his thought process, not so much (which was disappointing for me, writing an episode about his most personal record). “Summertime” was one exception. His first career failure is another.

In 1989, 21-year-old Will (then still known as The Fresh Prince) demanded that the record label let him and DJ Jazzy Jeff record in the Bahamas for their third album. Sometimes artists go to exotic locales as a legitimate decision for their artistic process, or sometimes, like the infamous Happy Mondays album “Yes Please,” they go to waste time and party; this was one of the latter. In his words, the two of them immediately started getting smashed on “rum punch and chicken fingers.” Months later, they still had no record, Will had flown out all his boys to the studio to party with him, and also Will had graduated up from chicken fingers to jerk chicken, black beans and rice. (It took me weeks after reading the book to realize he wasn’t actually talking about chicken. I’ve related this insight several times and I’m always happy to do so again.) It was during one of these studio parties when his dad, having been alerted of the situation by the record label, burst in and dragged Will’s ass back home.

Will says he and Jeff would usually mark out time to brainstorm, work on ideas and consume chicken fingers – I imagine the room getting thick with clouds of chicken fingers – but they didn’t have time, so instead they hastily turn their half-assed recordings from the Bahamas into the record (titled …And In This Corner). That album fucking sucks. The worst part is the opener “Then She Bit Me,” which starts out as a joke about going home with a woman who turns out to be a vampire, but Will seems to not have a clue what the actual joke is; it’s just him fucking around without bothering to look for a punchline. This was clearly recorded in the Bahamas in a cocaine chicken bender; it’s not something that should have ever seen the light of day.

The only good song, and the only semi-hit on it, is the single “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson,” and of all songs, this is the one that Will sees as a metaphor for his life. It’s nothing deep or anything; it’s another ‘80s comedy rap song, and the idea behind this one is that Will stupidly talks shit about being able to take out the unbeatable champion Mike Tyson, he gets into the ring with him, Tyson murders him in two punches. Will admits that he shit his pants at one point. Good bit, one of his funniest.

Will talks about comedy as a weapon; if you can get people to laugh at a bully, he’ll leave you alone. (This didn’t work for Chris Rock, apparently.) But the Fresh Prince mostly clowned on himself. All the time, he was getting into wacky situations that left him making goofy perplexed faces at the camera. His mom makes him wear goofy clothes and everyone laughs at him; parents just don’t understand! This one girl didn’t tell him she had a boyfriend and they got caught; girls ain’t nothin’ but trouble! Freddy Kreuger attacks him! What a nightmare! But I guess those don’t make him the butt of the joke exactly; “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson” does. Even though the song is silly, the entire concept of fighting Mike Tyson is something Will takes very seriously, it’s his go-to metaphor. For Will, there’s no shame in getting beaten by Mike Tyson, as long as you tried your hardest. The Fresh Prince doesn’t do that, though. He challenges Iron Mike on a whim, undertrains, comes in unprepared and gets his teeth knocked in. Tyson didn’t beat Will; Will beat himself, just like he did in the Bahamas. “My career’s over as far as fighting,” Will says at the end of the song. His career in anything could have been over. The single did sub-mediocre numbers, the album tanked, and if not for a fortuitous meeting with Quincy Jones about a possible sitcom, there’s a good chance that DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince are footnotes in showbiz history. Will describes fading fame as the worst feeling in the world. When his career got a second wind, he decided that he wasn’t just going to act; he was going to be “the biggest movie star in the world” (direct quote). The way he tells it, it sounds like he vowed never to lose to Tyson again.

And spiritually, you could argue that he did defeat Tyson. Tyson himself is as funny as Will in the video, dancing with a goofy smile in the face because he knows he’s about to murder this poor child, but in 1989 he was actually starting to fall apart; he only had two, very unmemorable fights, he wasn’t training very hard, he was distracted by his divorce. Arguably, beating the shit out of the Fresh Prince was his last hurrah. Just forty-two days into the 1990s, Mike Tyson was on the receiving end of his first KO, ending his aura of invincibility once and for all and starting a miserable decade for him. Seven months after that, Will Smith started his sitcom, and his ‘90s would be nothing but success after success (at least until “Wild Wild West”).  

But I think he lost something in doing it. It's easy to forget this but Will Smith was once very funny (on purpose!), and I don’t mean funny like he is in Independence Day or Men in Black or Aladdin. The comedy in “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson” is different. The stumble he does in the video after Tyson one-shots him is hilarious. The panicked mugging he does at the camera when he lies about his training (“I did four million sit-ups! I-in a minute! I ain’t lyin’, I did it!”) The Fresh Prince’s face is comically swollen and bruised post-beatdown. Will’s face also comically swells up in Hitch, but that’s different. That’s funny because it’s a too-cool smooth-talker getting taken down a peg. The Fresh Prince wasn’t cool, he was a doofy skinny kid with big ears. He says that after he broke himself on Six Degrees on Separation Carlton had to handle the bulk of the comedy on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for a while because he completely forgot how to tell a damn joke. For as funny as he was in his later movies, maybe he never really re-learned it.

One thing I realized listening to the young goofy Fresh Prince is that Will Smith has become a very selfish, exhausting actor. He’ll chase whatever project lets him turn on the Acting, lets himself self-glorify in the most showy way possible. He says he always felt like he was playing catch-up with hip-hop, and it’s pretty clearly true; he came up at a time when all you had to do was tell funny stories and you could be the biggest name in rap, and when that era ran out, he was always chasing after the next trend. On his most recent album (the one that no one asked for and has already been forgotten) he tries to sell some kind of redemption arc after The Slap, like he’s learned hard lessons but now he has some peace and wisdom. I don’t buy it; it’s too sweaty. Tyson, meanwhile, seems very relaxed whenever he pops up in things these days, the pain of his faded glory and disastrous personal life all eventually faded, and everyone seems happy to have him around (whether they should is beyond the scope of this discussion). An athlete must eventually retire, but a movie star doesn’t have that blessing; he can always add more trophies to his wall. Will claims at the end of his book that he’s learned to let go of his drive to be #1; I think The Slap proved he was lying to himself. I think he'll spend the rest of his life trying to beat Tyson.