It's a different world for Jada Pinkett Smith: Actress turns
metalhead

Kerry Gold, CanWest News Service
Published: February 17, 2006
VANCOUVER--Jada Pinkett Smith has left the comforts of Hollywood to
become the front woman for a metal band called Wicked Wisdom.

Her hair is an explosion, her sinewy arm muscles are displayed in
sleeveless T-shirts. And her usually smiling face is a rictus of
pain, her voice a wail of frustration -- belting out, even spitting
out, lyrics of songs with names like Bleed and You Can't Handle
This.

This isn't the pretty Jada, in gowns that show off her diminutive
coke-bottle figure and jewels that complement the fine planes of her
face.

Introducing angry Jada, spawn of Satan.

"In this day and age when people are so afraid to feel, I like to
create a space where if you want to cry, come cry. You want to bash
somebody's head open in the pit? Go right ahead,'' says Pinkett
Smith. "You know what I mean?''

She doesn't mean that literally, because she also admires the way
metalheads look out for each other in the pit. But she's a woman
who's discovered her aggressive side, and it feels good, very good.
"I do get a charge out of being aggressive. I like being in a forum
where it's acceptable, and this is that forum.

"It's hard because in Hollywood I've had to shut down that aspect of
myself, because people didn't like it. They couldn't connect to it.
They're like, `Uh uh. She's a ball-breaker, she's trying to castrate
us.'

"It's not that. I like to get my little growl on too once in a
while. So it's nice to have this space, where I can be that, and
then I can go back to Hollywood and I can play my little softer
roles for them so that everybody's not all scared and intimidated,
then the guys out here on the road are like, `Give it to us. We want
it! We want it as hard as you can bring it chick!'

"It's nice to have the two worlds to go back and forth.''

The male-dominated world of metal doesn't intimidate her either,
because she's used to that.
"Just the industry I come from, it's very male dominated,'' says
Pinkett Smith, who is 34.
Groupies? She's got them, male and female. But that's nothing new,
either.

"You get groupie guys and groupie girls -- this is rock 'n' roll
baby, you know how it goes,'' she says, laughing.

(It should be noted that Pinkett Smith has a raunchy laugh to rival
that of Billy Idol. It is a laugh filled with subtext.)

"The girls, yeah, they let you know. Even in Hollywood you get that.
Definitely. Big time, it's the thing.

"The one great thing about doing this now is I'm straight edge. I
don't drink, don't do drugs. When I was younger, I did all that
stuff.

"I'm anchored, I have a family. I know what all that is `cause I've
done it all. All that party shit, been there, done that. Not
impressed with it at all. I'll go out and hang out for a little
while, but I've been doing that since I was 12, so whatever.''

She may be accustomed to A-list treatment on the arm of her
extremely famous husband, Will Smith, but as a newcomer to the metal
scene, she's had to endure such indignities as the side-stage
treatment at Ozzfest. In the humbling early morning time-slot, for a
crowd of mildly curious metal fans who are already naturally
intolerant to red-carpet celebrities, she's had to work hard to win
them over. On good nights, she's had them moshing. On bad nights,
she's been booed.

The question, of course, is why bother? It's a question she's had to
answer repeatedly as she does interviews to promote the band's North
American tour.

"Because of the persona that I've created -- and, also you know, us
being women, people think that we don't get mad. It's ugly. And
that's one of the reasons I love this genre, because I'm allowed to
be as ugly as I want.

"People ask me, `Why are you doing this?' It's like, `Are you
kidding me?' And I'm like, `I'm doing this because it's an aspect of
myself that I tried to kill. That I tried to put away and put to
sleep. And I realized it was killing the whole of Jada, stealing who
Jada is. And because I had to be all of those things to be complete
and to be whole.

"So for me, it's been a very spiritual experience that I don't talk
about that often.''
Pinkett Smith admits that singing did not come naturally to her. As
a child, she wanted to sing like Freddie Mercury of Queen, and she's
still a fan of the late singer. She attended art schools in
Baltimore and North Carolina, where she was told that she couldn't
sing.

She doesn't recall a turning point when she decided to become a
metal queen, but she does remember feeling restrained and alienated
from her Hollywood colleagues. There is a song on her album called
Something Inside of Me, about the murder of five-year-old Samantha
Runyan. She'd heard about the girl's death minutes before a red-
carpet event.

"I remembered crying my eyes out, and I remember having to pull it
together because... and I remember being full of so much rage and
pain while I was on this red carpet. But I couldn't talk about it.
And I was amongst people who couldn't care less. And I don't know if
they couldn't care less meaning them personally but their mission
that night on the red carpet is to do the whole Hollywood thing,
whatever that is. And I was so angry, even at myself ... `Just don't
go.'''

Pinkett Smith may be tapping into her spiritual side, but for other
members of the band who've experienced the grind, the newfound
materialism doesn't hurt, either.

As guitarist Cameron Graves points out, Pinkett Smith may be new,
but her fame and wealth take the band to a level unknown for most
fledgling bands. Graves, who started playing classical music at age
four, has been kicking around the music scene all his young life.
But playing with Wicked Wisdom has changed the rules of the game for
Graves.

"It's a chess game that we're playing right now, with what is going
on right here. And Jada is our queen piece on the board, man.

"`See, that's how we're trying to maneuver the situation, the
project. Because of Jada's fame, I'm sorry, but it allows us to get
what we need to quicker than all the rest of the bands. Yeah okay so
we're not broke, and we're not riding in a van. You know what I'm
saying? We're over that, we're free of that. A lot of these cats,
right here, I'm working with, dude, they're not like 19- or 20-year-
olds rolling around in a dirty van no more. It's serious.

"Jada has the money and the connections to get that going down, so
that we're not playing around anymore with this stuff. We get right
to the radio stations, right to the TV show people, right to the
management.

So we can get out there faster, so we can get this project going.
For real, it's a whole new level.''
"We are gonna do it our way,'' he says, busting into a raucous
laugh.

"You know what I'm sayin'?''

Graves is also a member of a death metal band called Worm and plays
with a jazz quartet every Tuesday night. He practises martial arts
in his spare time, and is a hyper 24-year-old L.A. dude who was
hired to play keyboards but learned guitar when Pinkett Smith wanted
a bigger sound.

An earlier incarnation of the band, which included Wicked Wisdom's
Louisiana guitarist Pocket Honore and then-Fishbone drummer Phillip
Fisher, leaned toward R & B. When Graves joined, the band scrapped
an album and started over again.

"Jada wanted something harder, she's a metalhead herself,'' says
Graves. "She wants something powerful. She's a small woman, so she's
got that whole power thing, you know? `I can't lose, I'm going to
win. I need something powerful, that blows everybody out of the
water, that kind of mentality.' It was kind of easy to create music
to that, really.

"She's crazy man. She goes buck wild,'' he adds, giggling.

Graves knew Pinkett Smith's film career, but doesn't sound too
impressed by her Hollywood connections.
"I knew a bunch of her movies. My first movie I saw of Jada's was
Inkwell ... she had a cool role in there.
"But if I was to tell you the truth, me personally, I'm totally
against Hollywood man. I don't like Hollywood at all. I created band-
writing lyrics like, `F--- Hollywood.' I wrote a whole project off
of that.

"So when I met Jada, I was still in that mentality. I would tell
her, `Man, I love you Jada, but I don't like celebrities.' I played
a song for her, that went, `I hate celebrities.' I told her that
whole mentality is wrong, it's about commercialism and materialism.
It's killing music artistically.

"And she was down with it. She was cool with it. She was cool to try
to kind of represent that, a little bit.''

She's not so tomboyish that she shares a tour bus with the guys,
mind you.
"She has her own bus, `cause Will already knows that on the guy bus
the guys will get into guy shit, you know,'' says Graves, laughing.

"So Will is like, `We got to get Jada her own bus, so she can chill
out with the candles, the vapourizer, do her own thing over
there.' "But she comes over to our bus a lot and kicks it. Will's
not out right now, but usually Will just kicks it on the other
bus.''

Pinkett Smith is aware that her genre of choice is about
authenticity, not fashion, and she's got to prove herself. Old-
school metalheads don't traditionally tolerate imposters.

Says Pinkett Smith: "People need to know I'm real about it. They're
like, `Uh uh, you ain't gonna come up here and do no J-Lo shit, or
whatever. Not to dog Jennifer,'' she adds, quickly. "She's great at
what she does. But they are, `Uh uh. We ain't doing that Hollywood
shit here, chick.
" `So you better come with something or you got to go.' ''

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