"Shakespeare" by Jaden Smith

Truthfully this story has little to nothing to do with Shakespeare, but it was all over the headlines recently so I feel obliged to at least open up the discussion.

Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith (both of whom starred in The Pursuit of Happyness) has released a new music video for his song, Shakespeare.  Your first thoughts are probably the same as mine - what's this got to do with Shakespeare? Is there Shakespeare material in this?   Go check it out, I'll wait.

Ok, did you watch?  I'll be honest, I got about 19 seconds into it before I tried to give up.  "The truth is Jaden Smith is probably the coolest making these jokers lose it"? Is that what he said?  Are those supposed to be rhymes?  The complete lack of facial expression or attempt at annunciation made me just completely bail out.

But then I decided to give it another chance.  I don't have to like it to experience it.  Maybe I'm just not the audience.  I still want to figure out what it's got to do with Shakespeare.  So I kept going.

He appears to call himself the "reincarnation of Shakespeare" at about 2:20 or so.  The best I can figure that's the only Shakespeare connection.  Other than that the song appears to be about the wonderful life of being Will Smith's kid (*), travelling the world while surrounded by beautiful women.

(*) Or maybe it's supposed to be that everybody loves him and wants to hang on him because of his mad rap skillz.  But it's probably the Smith thing.

I did give it a chance.  I still don't like it.  It's not that I don't like this style of music - my regular playlist is loaded up with Eminem.  I just don't like Jaden Smith's offering here.  Other than his ability to speak very fast while slurring all of his words together, I don't see what it brings to the table.  The beat is redundant, the rhymes are weak, and the lyrics are just a variation on "I got hoes in different area codes."

Oh my god .... maybe he's the reincarnation of Edward de Vere?