Wicked Wisdom’s primal rage is no act

Wicked Wisdom’s primal rage is no act

By mike usinger

Jada Koren, AKA Jada Pinkett Smith & Pocket Honore

If Wicked Wisdom is a vanity project, you’d never know that from the demands the band makes of interviewers. The L.A.–based quintet has a concrete rule: all journalists must talk to at least two members of the group if they are interested in doing a story. And what a story Wicked Wisdom is. It’s not often that the spouse of one of Hollywood’s most successful players sets out to reinvent herself as a post-thrash metal queen.

The frontwoman in question is Will Smith’s better half, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has racked up more than a few big-screen credits with roles in The Matrix Reloaded and Scream 2. Her partners in sonic bombast are guitarists Pocket Honore and Cameron Graves, bassist Rio Lawrence, and ex–Fishbone drummer Philip “Fish” Fisher. What the band’s self-titled debut lacks in radio-friendly unit shifters, it makes up for in full-bore ferocity. Wicked Wisdom sounds like the work of suburban skids who’ve been force-fed a steady diet of Slipknot. That’s not an accident.

“When we first started this band, it was like a pop/R&B thing,” Honore says, on the line from a Fort Wayne, Indiana tour stop. “We weren’t really feeling it, so we made it into more of an alternative situation. Then Cameron and I started messing around. I’m a big Slipknot and Pantera fan; he’s a big Meshuggah and Slipknot fan. We tuned things down really low and realized we were coming up with stuff that was really heavy but still groovy.”

At that point, after a couple of years of playing low-profile shows on the L.A. club scene with revolving band members, Wicked Wisdom locked into a style it was happy with.

“I love Pantera, Sepultura, and Meshuggah,” reveals the gravel-voice Pinkett Smith, calling from her Fort Wayne hotel room. “I also grew up with Guns ’N Roses and Ozzy Osbourne, so I wanted to have hooks and melodies in what we do.”

For Pinkett Smith and Honore—Wicked Wisdom’s only surviving members from the pop days—agreeing on the direction the band would take was easy. Getting the headbangers of America to accept the group as legit was another matter. Thanks to such musical horror shows as Keanu Reeves’s Dogstar and Russell Crowe’s 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, the paying public has little time for slumming silver-screen millionaires. Wicked Wisdom discovered this last year when it signed on for a second-stage Ozzfest stint. For the first half-dozen shows, the metal faithful gave Wicked Wisdom a good idea of what Frankenstein’s monster felt like when he finally lurched out of the castle. And then something clicked.

“I’ve had this performer inside of me for a long time, but I had to work on letting it out,” Pinkett Smith says. “At the beginning of Ozzfest, I was holding back, and that was the problem. What I had to realize was ‘Jada, this is not the place to hold back.’ Once I started to let go, it all got better. As the shows went along, we’d have three mosh pits going at the same time.”

Wicked Wisdom gives you a good idea how the band won over all but the most close-minded of haters. Wasting no time earning its Parental Advisory sticker, the album starts off with “Yesterday Don’t Mean”, an expletive-packed locomotive loaded with far-beyond-driven guitars and rolling-thunder drums. Wicked Wisdom eases up occasionally, with? “Forgiven” detouring to the hard-rock area of Gothville and “Set Me Free” injecting a little experimental funk into the mix. Mostly, though, this is metal for those who still haven’t got over the death of Dimebag Darrell Abbott. Pinkett Smith—who doesn’t sing so much as bellow—doesn’t win a lot of points for vocal range, but she at least seems authentically pissed. If you thought Otep had issues, check out “Something Inside of Me”, a bludgeoning attack on child abuse that finds her barking “Something inside of me could break that mother?fucker’s neck”.

Cynics are going to charge that Pinkett Smith is playing a role, a skill for which her day job has more than prepared her. She, however, suggests that something more primal kicks in when she finds herself in front of a mike.

“I feel like I’m at home up there,” she argues. “The stage is like my freedom space where I let my soul pour out.”

If that comes across as Hollywood psychobabble, then consider this: if the advance buzz is to be believed, Juliette Lewis isn’t the only Tinseltown actor currently winning over audiences one sweaty show at a time. And although Wicked Wisdom might not quite live up to the band’s live reputation, Honore promises the band is just getting going. Wicked Wisdom, he says, has only begun to unleash its inner monster. By the time the group drops its next album, the guitarist pledges that no one will be doubting Pinkett Smith’s devotion to metal. Vancouverites, meanwhile, can judge for themselves when the band opens for Sevendust at the Commodore on Sunday (February 19).

“This record is actually kind of watered down,” Honore admits. “The next one we’re working on is way heavier, like somewhere between Crowbar and Meshuggah. If we’d gone that heavy with this record, no one would have even given it a chance. Now that it’s out there, next time we’re coming with a ball breaker.”

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