The One Cover That Hits Harder Than the Original

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme is one of those songs where everyone knows the words before the music even starts. Will Smith wrote it in roughly thirty minutes back in 1990, loosely adapting the original show theme. Carlton Banks made it immortal with a single dance. The show itself turned Smith from a rapper into a movie star and gave us Alfonso Ribeiro, which is worth a lot on its own.

What I didn’t anticipate was David Hasselhoff covering it and the result being genuinely something.

Hasselhoff occupies a mythological space in German culture that’s almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t grow up watching Knight Rider reruns on Saturday afternoons. Baywatch is the obvious reference, but that undercuts it—over here he was something closer to a folk hero. There’s the New Year’s Eve 1989 story, possibly embellished, of him performing at the Brandenburg Gate as the Wall came down, wearing a piano-key scarf and personally claiming some credit for the end of the Cold War. He told that story for years and somehow kept getting away with it.

So when Hasselhoff sings Now, this is the story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down, it arrives pre-loaded with mythology. The man survived Baywatch, Knight Rider, a very public personal collapse, and German reunification. He can handle West Philadelphia.