Hollywood Stardom by Paul McDonald

Author:Paul McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Cross-media Stardom

Smith’s film stardom was founded on the pre-sold fame he enjoyed from his careers in music and television. In 1985, Smith teamed with fellow Philadelphian, DJ and musician Jeff Townes, to form the hip hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. With their first single “Girls Ain’t Nothin’ but Trouble” (1987) Smith and Townes broke into Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 and subsequently achieved hits with “Nightmare on My Street,” “Parents Just Don’t Understand” (both 1988) and “Summertime” (1991). After winning two Grammys, in 1992 Smith and Townes were honored at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Image Awards as Outstanding Rap Artists.

Smith’s musical stardom was achieved within the larger context of the mainstreaming and cultural assimilation of hip hop and rap. Emanating from the South Bronx during the 1970s, and tied to urban African-American youth culture, hip hop emerged as a locationally and racially defined sound. Although ostensibly an underground or “ghetto” culture, as tracks from the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Run DMC found listeners in national and international markets, the audience for hip hop widened (Greenberg, 1999). By 1990 there could be no doubts that hip hop had been absorbed into the spectrum of pop music as MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” both made it into the top five of the Hot 100 to become paradigms of “pop rap.” Smith and Townes carved out careers through this musical transition. With their light-hearted and comedic tracks, the duo took their music in a more marketable direction than the militant stance of Public Enemy or “gangsta rap” of NWA (Niggaz with Attitude). Smith and Townes’s second album He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper (1988) went triple platinum and made it to fourth position on the US charts. As Matt Diehl notes, “even the [album’s] title seemed intentionally instructional, designed for an audience unused to hip hop vocab” (1999: 123). George’s verdict on Smith was that he “has won by applying that essential hip hop rule – keeping it real. His version of real just has more to do with the mall than the ‘hood’” (1998: 111). Conscious of criticism from hip hop purists, Smith frequently defended his music: “Rap … is a music based on being the best through arguing, insulting and battling verbally with each other. It’s about competition. But I don’t think it has to be angry. In fact, when it first started, rap was about having fun” (quoted in Buchalter, 1992: 16). For Adam Krims, the humor and sense of aimless fun which permeated the recordings and videos of Townes and Smith placed the duo in the tradition of “party rap,” “designed for moving a crowd, making them dance, or perhaps creating or continuing a ‘groove’ and a mood” (2000: 55). Townes and Smith followed in a well established tradition, and Krims argues the focus on fun and entertainment in the party genre derived from the very origins of rap.

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