Willow Smith Shares Experience About Being Black Girl Into Heavy Metal
Famous American actor Will Smith’s daughter is in the music industry. While her father Will Smith and her brother Jaden Smith are in rap music, Willow Smith is more into heavy music. Recently she has shared her music work. That song called “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l feat. Travis Barker” was a very good Pop-Punk work, especially if we think she is still at the very beginning of her career.
But just like every musician, she also gets critics and negative comments from time to time. For Willow Smith, that negative comments started before even she begins to music-making. In her interview with VM Magazine, Willow and Straight Line Stitch Alexis White shared their opinions on being a black woman in the heavy music industry.
Willow started her words by explaining her memories of high school:
“But being a Black woman in the metal crowd is very, very different on top of the pressures that the music industry puts on you. Now, it’s like an added pressure of the metal culture, the metal world, and just rock in general. I used to get bullied in school for listening to Paramore and My Chemical Romance.”
Alexis White also has similar memories on that topic. She expressed her thoughts by saying “Yeah, there’s a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re Black. You’re not supposed to listen to that.’”
Why is it about color?
They then added:
W: “Exactly! And it’s not okay. Just through the music that I’m putting out right now and the representation that I can bring to the mix, I just hope that the Black girls who are listening to my music and listening to this album see that there’s more of us out there. It’s a real thing, you’re not alone. You’re not the only Black girl who wishes she could flip her hair to the side, and wear black eyeliner, you know what I mean?”
After that conversation, Alexis pointed a very important point. She talked about how race norms affect people’s lives:
I always heard ‘heavy metal belongs to the white people.’ I hated that so much because why is it about color?”
Despite there are plenty of black musicians today, they are a minority in the industry and obviously having problems with the community from time to time. We hope that in the future we overcome that situation and have an interracial metal/heavy metal community. Lastly, here is the music video for Willow Smith’s song:
