At this stage of this incarnation of Kevinisabastard.com I’m trying not to include songs by the same artists. There will be a time when I’m happy to repeat artists but I think it’s important to try and keep things varied right now. With that in mind, I was a bit conflicted selecting a Will Smith song. I’m not a big Will Smith fan. I’m more inclined to think of him as some kind of an alien who studied humans but hasn’t got his imitation completely right. However, he has some songs that are top tier, including Miami.

Miami is based around a great sample from And The Beat Goes On by The Whispers. That’s all you need really. From that point it’s paint by numbers. The chorus is nice and simple, easy to sing along to. There’s plenty of repetition because they knew what people wanted. Will Smith is a decent rapper and Miami is lyrically one of his better songs. Everything is nice and safe and child friendly and as marketable as possible. The video is mad goofy but it was the 90s so that’s the charm. There’s a very nice Bentley and Eva Mendes makes an appearance before she was particularly famous. The video version also has the mad part with the Gloria Estefan samples which is fun but is less relistenable – if I had to listen to the track on loop for the rest of my life, I’d pick the album version to the video version. Hopefully the situation doesn’t arise.

You can listen to Miami by Will Smith here.