Excerpted from Brian Coleman's Check the Technique Volume 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (Wax Facts Press).
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper
(Jive / RCA, 1988)
"PARENTS JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND"
DJ JAZZY JEFF: That was the first single off the album. To me, "Girls Ain't Nothing But Trouble" [from Rock The House] and "Parents" were pretty much the same record. Definitely the same subject matter, in a lot of ways. We didn't like having that as our first single, at least at first. Pete Q. Harris said, "This is a smash hit," as soon as we did it. We, of course, wanted a DJ record or something that was a little more "hip-hop" as our first single. But Pete knew, and we went with it. After that song was completely done, Pete played the [Jeff hums bassline to the song] part. He added some spice more than produced anything on there. We thought it was a great record, we didn't hate it. But we just didn't want it to be our first single. We didn't think it would get as big as it did, definitely not. I think the biggest reason for the song's success was just how relatable it was. It was relatable outside of hip-hop. And the video definitely helped, of course.
But everything just kind of lined up. Everybody has that transition from a kid to an adult, and it sucks. It was a timing thing, too – if that song had come out two years earlier or two years later, who knows if it would have been anywhere near as successful. With the lyrics, they didn't take Will long at all. He used to always say that coming up with a concept is always the hardest thing. Once he had a concept, he could come up with lyrics in 15 minutes. And that's literally how long it took him to come up with those. A lot of those stories were from Will's real experiences.
The video director was Scott Kalvert. Different guys gave different treatments, but his was the coolest. The main thing I remember about shooting the video was just how long it took. It was like 18 hours, in a sound stage in New York. When we were touring for the He's The DJ album at first, every night I noticed the cheers for us getting louder when they announced us. We were on the road, so we had no idea how the record was doing on the radio. I remember one night we tried something. Will did the first verse and then did the first line of the second verse, but told the crowd to finish it. And I thought, "Oh no, this could be the biggest disaster in the world!" But Will did it and 20,000 people finished the verse. So we did that for the rest of the tour. When the song got to be so popular, the toughest thing was that the record company wanted another one of those.
JOE "THE BUTCHER" NICOLO [producer]: That was definitely a track we did in Philly that they re-cut in London. The final has the same beat and Jeff's musical ideas, they just re-did the song, with their "Jive sound," pasteurized for your protection [laughs]. That song was really just "Girls Ain't Nothing But Trouble, Part Two." The beat structure on the final was similar, they just added the keyboards. "Girls" was such a hit in Philly and it made a splash everywhere. So it seemed that "Parents" was a logical next step. And they had gotten even better at what they were doing, so it was destined to be even bigger. I think we all knew it was going to be big.
Media Platforms Design Team
PETE Q. HARRIS [producer/engineer]: The first day we were in the studio together, they played me an early version of "Parents." It was about nine minutes long and had so many verses. Over a period of a week we worked on that song, along with others. One of the main things for us, as producers, was to focus Will's rapacious rhyme output. He was always writing. We had to fit it all into a three- or four-minute song. That was our biggest achievement in many ways, because many of the other elements were already there in the songs they brought us. Jeff brought a lot of beats to the studio. There's a weird bass sound in the song, and I can't even remember where we took it from. There's that drum-fill sound all throughout the song, that was off another record that I brought in. I can't remember where that one came from, either. I played most of the elements of that track, including the snares, on the Fairlight. There wasn't that much back-and-forth, musically. We put music together when Will and Jeff weren't even there, on occasion. I don't even think that on the original version they had a proper bassline. The one I put on there was really just a doodle that fit with the pitch of the brass samples we were using. We definitely knew that song would be a hit, because we had recently done Samantha Fox's "Touch Me" [from]. We knew what a hit was, especially a pop hit. And those lyrics on "Parents" are so funny and so accessible to so many people. We felt that it only needed a good bassline. It sounded very commercial to us.
Media Platforms Design Team
ANN CARLI [Jive Records]: That video changed Will's career, and it changed my career, too. It was shot by Scott Kalvert, who went on to do The Basketball Diaries. It might have been his second or third video. He had done one of Kool Moe Dee's videos for us, either "Wild, Wild West" or "How Ya Like Me Now." We didn't send the song out to a bunch of directors and ask for treatments, because we knew Scott would be great for it. We contacted him when we knew that was going to be a single, so we could work on it collaboratively. He basically followed the idea of the song. I'm actually tagged up on the walls, as "Tokyo Rose," if you look close. That was a one-day shoot, probably 18 hours. It was fun doing all the artwork on the walls for it. We got there early to do that, there was a great artist named Greg Harrison, he was the production designer. He was the guy that came up with the look on the walls. He designed things for the "Nightmare On My Street" video set, too. There were a lot of influences to the look of the walls. We were in New York, so there were a lot of comic fanzines, Keith Haring, lots of pop graffiti. Some of the characters were Greg's, characters he used in his own work. After the video, we had to repaint the walls immediately. We shot it somewhere in Midtown or Queens. Everybody painted on the wall: me, Jeff, Will, the whole crew.
Vanessa Williams – not that Vanessa Williams – plays the girl in the video. She's an actress, I think she was on "90210" for a while. I remember the guys being mad at me because she wasn't the "video kind of girl" that they were looking for. But I was looking for an actress [laughs], and she was really good. JL [James Lassiter, the group's road and personal manager at the time] is in it, he plays the cop. Greg Harrison designed all the furniture as well. We had some interesting times trying to get the drawers to open up, using special effects. There's a bit of Pee Wee's Playhouse with that. After Scott and I were watching the takes and had realized how impressive Will had become on film, I called two people the next day. The first was Clive Calder, and I told him, "The Fresh Prince is going to be a big movie star and I think we should make a movie with him right away. He's going to be bigger than Eddie Murphy." Clive, who I love to death, laughed and said, "Ann, do you know how to make a movie?" And I said, "No, but two years ago I didn't know how to make music videos either!" Clive thought it was a good idea but he said Jive was still building the record company, so he couldn't get into movies at that time. Then I called Russell Simmons and told him the same thing. Russell laughed at me, and said, "Well, he may be Malcolm Jamal-Warner but he ain't no Eddie Murphy."
From CHECK THE TECHNIQUE, VOL. 2: MORE LINER NOTES FOR HIP-HOP JUNKIES, by Brian Coleman. Copyright © 2014 by Brian Coleman. Published by Wax Facts Press. Reprinted with Permission.
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