SYRE

Jaden Smith once said he thought it was an honor to be called “crazy.” It was his way of explaining the pseudo-philosophical babble spewing from his Twitter feed—a mix of stoned thoughts and even more stoned thoughts. Of Hollywood’s millennial generation of stars, he is among the funniest and most vexing. He’s a film and television actor, fashion designer, water-bottle company entrepreneur, and rapper whose pantheon of icons includes Kanye West and Silicon Valley tech-billionaire Elon Musk. In his music and his life, he’s a prankster and exhbitionist—showing up to public events in a Batman costume, or offering bits and pieces of his recently-shorn dreads as gifts on a talk show.

For as long as Smith has been a public figure, he has played up the thin, almost invisible line between being a hoax and being completely serious—he tries to be as transgressive and misunderstood as a Duchamp or John Waters. Still, Smith earnestly wants his art to be given the credit he thinks it deserves because he really does consider it revolutionary. He calls SYRE, his debut studio album, a “love letter to the world.” The 19-year old says this record is “very honest,” a Rosetta Stone that only people from the future may understand.

All of the sophistic ideas, musings, and pretensions that Smith has trafficked in are present, quite loudly, on SYRE. From its opening moment, he’s talking about the biblical story of creation, referencing the myth of Icarus, calling out crooked cops selling “crap,” and drowning his sorrows at the club. The opener, “B,” is part-one of the four-part song “BLUE.” On it, his sister Willow recites a sermon about the creation of man and the powers of Nyquil. Xylophone plinks meet church choruses, exploding electric guitars, and finally colossal bass drums, as Smith barrels into the track showing up haters and trying to get back with his girl. It’s incredible: it sounds like he’s trying too hard while at the same time not trying hard enough

A minute later, on “L,” he raps, almost too hilarious to be believed: “Girl I’m Martin Luther, Martin Luther King/Life is hard, I’m Kamasutra-ing.” On “U,” he somehow tops himself, delivering the second most cringe-worthy line of the year: “Man I’m artichokin’/I can’t breathe, that’s the art of chokin’.” The most cringe-worthy line of the year, appearing a few songs later on “Hope,” is actually shocking—Jaden endorses 9/11 trutherism: “Look, Fahrenheit 451/Building seven wasn’t hit and there’s more shit to come/The Pentagon is on a run.” It’s legitimately upsetting and speaks volumes to how careless Smith is on this album.

It would be generous to call this kind of songcraft scatterbrained. Smith refuses to stand still, shifting from sound to sound and thought to thought restlessly: Trap, stadium rock, John Mayer-like acoustic guitar licks, and sputtering noise can all appear in the frame of a single song. He cites Frank Ocean’s Blonde and West’s The Life of Pablo as primary influences here, which says more about his misplaced ambition that the actual sonics and content of the album. The beats are mostly helmed by Norwegian rapper Lido as well as members from Jaden’s MSFTsrep collective, which, in Smith’s own words, is “dedicated to supporting and waking up the population of planet earth.” The crisp sound of the production is the album’s one saving grace. It sounds top-shelf, as well it should since this album was three years in the making. While there are some musical highlights—like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track—the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds.

Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence. He bungles his way through a world of luxury hotels (“I’m at the SOHO House/If you wanna come through”), conspiracy theories (“The Illuminati’s real, that’s the deal”), and uneducated wokeness in a way that is so artless, it becomes its own hollow kind of performance art. To spend an hour in Smith’s world is to be subject to a paranoid fantasy that mixes new age thinking with apocalyptic rhetoric. If you’re into this kind of thing, you might be better off drinking a cold pressed juice and watching a marathon of “Ancient Aliens.” It will be better for you than SYRE ever could be.