DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper is no one’s idea of a revolutionary document. It’s proudly, cheerfully, purposefully corny: The first song is a Nightmare on Elm Street parody featuring the line, “He’s burned up like a weenie/And his name is Fred.” Listening to it often feels babysitting a room full of fourth graders for a few hours. And yet, it racked up a lot of “firsts”: It was the first hip-hop double album and the first rap album to win a Grammy; in fact, it was the first year the Grammys even acknowledged rap.
It was not fashioned with global conquest in mind; it was recorded in a month or so by two kids from West Philly who met a few years earlier at a house party. Nonetheless, when Will Smith and Jeffrey Townes learned of their Grammy nomination, they grasped the significance of the moment. And when they learned that the Grammys refused to televise it, they pleaded and made their case, even appearing on “the Arsenio Hall Show” to demand that the academy allow their moment some airtime. But the Grammys held their ground and the pair boycotted the ceremony—it was only later, when someone called them, that they learned they had won.
The Grammy boycott may have been the only time that Will Smith—one of the most supernaturally ingratiating humans of the 20th century—refused to show up. He seemed to have decided early on that he was going to make it virtually impossible for the music industry and culture’s gatekeepers to miss him. Extroverted without mania, likable but thoughtful, swaggering but goofy, confident but mildly self-deprecating, he grinned and mugged and belly-laughed and said “yes” to everything with such vigor that he cratered into the heart of Middle America. In the history of charm offensives, Will Smith is Alexander the Great, and He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper was his first invasion of the world.
It was not, however, his introduction to the world; Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince’s 1987 album Rock the House had scored some minor success with the campy, cautionary tale “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble,” which hit the radio just as Smith was graduating high school. From then on, their ascent was quiet and frictionless: their record label Jive sent them to London to hole up in a hotel to record their follow-up. They worked tirelessly, with Jeff mostly confined to his hotel because of a cast covering his leg from a car accident back in Philly. Before Jive approached, the two of them had been hashing out material for a DJ album, and Jeff suggested they combine those cuts with the new music and voila: rap’s first double album. It was an inauspicious creation myth, and when they finished, they packed up, came home, and immediately went on the Run’s House tour alongside Whodini, Run-D.M.C., EPMD, and Public Enemy.
Amid these heavyweights, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were decidedly the underdogs, the cheerful kids along for the ride. While Chuck D. raided white supremacy, the colorful, kooky video for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was busy entertaining suburban homes. Then, three weeks in, their manager Russell Simmons appeared at a venue to present them with a gold record. On a gamble, Smith asked the crowd to complete a line from “Parents Just Don’t Understand”—20,000 voices roared every word of the song right back at them. Steadily, the wholesome underdog kids ended up becoming the focus of the all-star tour, and soon the duo with the songs about Burger King and Freddy Krueger were going on after Public Enemy. He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper would eventually go on to sell three million copies.
There were some subterranean industry shifts rumbling just beneath them that no doubt boosted the album’s velocity. The business of hip-hop was shifting solidly from fast-and-cheap singles to album formats, which meant that major labels could—and did—carpet-bomb the box stores of America with their products. Hip-hop was also entering its first widely acknowledged Golden Age, with Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy, and KRS-One filling out rap’s first real popular-culture Mount Rushmore. “Rap is in a phase in which it is simultaneously acceptable to the companies running the show, the artists making the music and the audience out there buying it,” Peter Watrous shrewdly observed for the New York Times in June of 1988, just as the album was released. The ground was softened for something as transparent, likable, and immediate as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.
With Smith mugging to the very last cheap seat in the rafters and Townes quietly cutting up records with blinding virtuosity, it was guaranteed that at least half of the duo would nullify some of your reservations. If you were leery of hip-hop because you were A) old, B) white, or C) both, Smith was a one-man disarmament machine. If on the other hand, you were a hardcore hip-hop fan, busy memorizing the meter of Rakim’s lines the year he laid them on wax, then Jeff’s pyrotechnics allowed you to swallow Smith’s antics. He was the DJ, Smith was the rapper.
Smith, understandably, hasn’t been cited much for lyricism or for influence as an MC. He’s also been the subject of multiple ghostwriting allegations, although Nas, frequently cited as a writer for Smith, has vigorously denied it. But he remains a genial and effective rapper, a guy you recognize from the second he opens his mouth. He flowed like a Saturday-morning-cartoon version of Big Daddy Kane or KRS, with compound rhymes and sentences that flowed over line breaks to slyly draw your attention to the tricks he was playing: “It was kind of an accident, the way that it happened/One day I was rapping, and on the beat Jeff was backing/Me up, and all of a sudden, he brought in a cut/And I dropped my microphone and said, ‘What the—?’” He rapped on “Brand New Funk.”
It was nothing that wasn’t being done already by Rakim and Kane and other bolder innovators, but Smith injected the sunbeam of his personality into it. Has anyone ever chuckled mid-flow more convincingly than Smith? His voice is clear and chipper, with every single word as audible and legible on first listen as ten-foot high neon-green graffiti letters. He grinned into fisheye lenses in his videos, full of puppet-show props and sped up, Looney Tunes-style antics. A young Marshall Mathers might have been absorbing every word of LL Cool J’s records at the time, but there’s no question, looking at Eminem’s breakthrough videos for “My Name Is” and “The Real Slim Shady,” that the Fresh Prince’s “friendly scamp” presentation resonated somewhere in his subconscious.
There are a couple of troublesome reminders in Smith’s lyrics of just how hard it is to remain in the perceived “middle,” or rather reminders that “the middle” is simply a peephole for what those pushing on either side allow you to see. Did you remember, for instance, that one of the punchlines in “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is Will Smith almost having sex with a twelve-year-old? Or that he shouts out “all the homeboys that got AIDS be quiet” as a way of getting the crowd to cheer on “Live At Union Square, November 1986?” This was right around the height of the AIDS epidemic, but popular awareness of AIDS was years away from critical mass, so the joke dinged off American consciousness like a Nerf bat. In 2017, it feels like a bludgeon.
When the duo blew up, they were in fact widely derided as the hip-hop equivalent of Nerf bats. “That’s when we started hearing, ’Aw, man, that shit’s for the suburbs,’ Townes remembered. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Southwest Philly is so far from the suburbs. You have no idea the shit I’ve seen or have gone through…’ I paid very close to attention to that. We were cool as long as we stayed on black radio and stayed amongst our hip-hop peers.”
It’s understandable that Townes would bristle. With his sterling hip-hop credentials, he was quietly doing brilliant things on those supposed harmless and flyweight songs. On “Brand New,” he cuts up a drum and horn break from Pleasure’s “Bouncy Lady,” speeding it and warping it until it sounds like a crumpled-up ball of paper. On “Let’s Get Busy Baby” he isolates a little hiccup in the rising sunbeam of Stevie Wonder “Sir Duke” horn lick, and builds a little burbling 8-bit Atari groove from it. On “Time To Chill,” he broke down a flip of George Benson at a time when almost no one in hip-hop was reaching for satiny-smooth, plush samples. This was the age of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad air-raid squeals, the stark, hard drum breaks of Eric B, but on “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” he cut up a chuckling little burble from a Peter Frampton song and turned it into a five-minute long Whoopie Cushion. He’s a genius, alternately working in plain sight and hidden comfortably there, where he’s remained for decades, allowing Will Smith to soak up the spotlight. There is perhaps no old-school hip-hop legend in history with a savvier or more comfortable relationship to fame than Jeffrey Townes.
Meanwhile, by 1990, Smith had blown through a million dollars, an unfortunate occupational hazard for a rich teenager. While hip-hop was scaling up and outward around him, he found himself in debt and on the precipice of fading into the history books along with all his firsts. So, looking for a way forward, he signed on with producer Quincy Jones and a TV writer named Andy Borowitz for a pilot about a young West Philly youth who moved in with his rich relatives in Bel Air. He and Jazzy Jeff knocked out the theme song more or less overnight, and a pilot was made. The pilot did well: as Borowitz remembered, years later: “The audience loved Will right from the start.”
