Walk in shadow, move in silence - guard against extra-terrestrial violence

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

24/01/99 : Big Willie Style - Will Smith

Will Smith has, in his time, produced some pretty decent tracks but I have a sneaking suspicion that this album isn't going to consist of only decent tracks - and if I'm unlucky with my "choice" of album it may well feature zero decent tracks.  I'm also expecting it will go for far too long - and I would NEVER have bought this (21/49).

Well the good news is that it definitely features some "decent" tracks (and we'll come back to those quotes later) - "Gettin' Jiggy With It", "Miami" and "Men In Black" can all be included in that category.  The rest of it is OK I guess, but it very much doesn't stick in the mind on first listen.  They are, however, works of genius when compared with the spoken interludes with Keith B. Real "keeping it real" - whoever thought these were a good idea needs to have a good think about what they've done.  Someone should also have pointed out to Will that the phrase "big willie style" isn't quite as hilarious/clever as he seemed to think it was.  On the positive side, 54 minutes is too long, but it's not far too long.

Going back to the "decent" tracks, I was surprised at how very average they were - they all had decent (and memorable) refrains (they're often only a line long, so don't really count as choruses) but a lot of the rest of it was either forgettable or very clunky - some of the words are squashed together very awkwardly.  "Miami" will always have a place in my heart though because I taught 3 year old Emily to sing "Welcome to Miami" when we holidayed there a loooonnng time ago.

This week we're at #9 in the charts on his 30th week of a 44 week run, which was actually his second run after an earlier 29 week run and he followed it up with a 14 week run, which feels like a lot - we really loved that big willie style back then.   But not that much, because this was as high as it ever got - its only week in the top ten, although it did spend four weeks at #11.  The top five this week were Fatboy Slim, Robbie Williams, The Corrs, a George Michael best-of and Steps, which is quite the mix and the highest new entry is Rory Flynn (who Google tells me is Errol Flynn's daughter, but I suspect this might be a different one) all the way down at #91.

Wikipedia tells me that "Big Willie Style showcases a radio-friendly pop-rap sound with non-explicit lyrics" - as Eminem put it "“Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records - well, I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!”.  There's very little of interest in the rest of the entry other than telling us that Jamie Foxx is the aforementioned Keith B. Real - he should be ashamed of himself.  The critics were very mixed on it, with comments ranging from "delicious party jams" to "explicitly awful with nary a redeeming feature" - but the public really didn't care with it shifting somewhere north of 11 million copies globally.

"Customers also listened to" Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Outkast and Kris Kross - one of those acts is slightly cooler than the rest.  I didn't hate this album (except for its attempts at comedy) but I was surprised at how bang average a lot of the tracks that I remembered with some fondness were.  It feels like the presence of DJ Jazzy Jeff really helped him out - "Summertime" is peak Will Smith and nothing here comes close to it. 

17/01/99 - Goes some way to explaining their popularity
31/01/99 - A completely pointless album