King of Tokyo

Jaden Smith is in Harajuku doing Kamehameha poses for a music video. The tourists don’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t care. Digital effects get added in post—blue waves of energy, very anime—and that becomes the actual art. This is what happens when your dad is Will Smith and you’re too spoiled to just accept it.

He basically lives in Tokyo now. Harajuku, Shibuya, Akihabara—constant videos, constant posts. He made an anime series called Neo Yokio that was genuinely terrible, like aggressively bad, but it was entirely his terrible and that’s what counts. No committee, no network notes, just pure unfiltered Jaden.

The new song Goku sits somewhere between early Kanye and Fruit Loops. Lyrically, he’s confusing pseudo-deep thoughts with actual poetry, and he either can’t tell the difference or doesn’t care. He wants to be his own artist instead of Will Smith’s son. Wants to matter like Kanye or Frank Ocean. He’s trying, which is almost enough sometimes.

The remarkable thing is how completely unbothered he is by any of it. He gets destroyed online constantly—the songs get mocked, Neo Yokio is a punchline, everyone points out he can only fail this publicly because he has money. And he just keeps floating above it, making more art, posting from Tokyo, existing in a frequency where criticism doesn’t register. Not because he’s confident. More like he genuinely believes your opinion is less real than his.

I don’t know if that’s privilege or blindness. Probably both. Either way, he’s having more fun than everyone criticizing him, and I think he’d choose that every time. Which might actually be the whole game.