It's A Different World For Jada Pinkett Smith: Actress Turns Metalhead

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.

Jada Koren, AKA Jada Pinkett Smith

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.' ''

For more info on Jada Koren Pinkett Smith, visit www.thejadapages.com