Tony Rock believes that Will Smith had harbored anger due to his wife Jada Pinkett always bringing up her ex-lover Tupac and had to unleash it on Chris Rock at the Oscar.
Everything shows Jada is obsessed with Tupac, and if not, he’s dead, he would have dumped Will Smith and run into his arms.
According to Vlad;
Tony Rock further opined on the “slap heard around the world” where his older brother Chris was on the receiving end of an open-handed slap from Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars.
“Maybe it was the Jada look, but I think that slap was the accumulation of being slapped on other levels. He said it himself, he always hated the soft moniker,” said Rock. “Jada, she won’t let Tupac die. It’s always something about Tupac and his daughter brought up Tupac and I’m not bringing up family stuff that people don’t know.”
He continued, “As a married man, you tell this woman, ‘Damn, is what I’m doing not enough?’ And maybe my brother said some jokes before about them that he didn’t like,” Rock continued. “I said before, that’s what backstage is for. If there’s anything you wanna say to somebody, say it back here.”
He isn’t lying Smith himself said he was tired of people thinking he was soft.
Smith is among the slate of guests on the recently released new season of Letterman’s conversational Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. The interview, notably, was recorded prior to the Oscars slap. Early into the discussion, Smith—who this year won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Richard Williams in King Richard—looked back on how childhood trauma had an impact on the unique drive behind his entire career.
Later, about 12 minutes into the episode, Letterman told Smith his “first awareness” of him as a star was during his early work with DJ Jazzy Jeff. After touting Jeff’s influence as “one of the early masters of scratching and cutting,” Letterman pointed out the use of humor in his music.
“That was really our major distinguishing quality at the time,” Smith said. “It was comedy, it was punchlines, it was fun. We stood out in a really a good way.”
When asked by Letterman if he ever felt any pressure within the industry to more or less “move out” of that specific lane, Smith opened up about being called “soft” and mentioned some remarks from his grandmother that have received ongoing attention throughout his career.
“Not pressure as much as it was always that I was ‘soft,’” Smith said. “Dave, I hated that, being called soft. The origin of my style and why I pursued it in that way [is] when I was about 12, my grandmother, she found my first rap book.” In that composition book, Smith recalled, he had kept lyrics, some of which featured perceived profanities.
“I couldn’t even curse well,” he joked. “It was like, ‘Shit ass damn/Will, you the man.’ Not even good cursing. My grandmother found my rap book and wrote a letter in [the] front of my book and said, ‘Dear Willard, truly intelligent people do not have to use words like these to express themselves. Please show the world that you’re as smart as we think you are. Love, Gigi.’ And that was the reason I never cursed in any of my records.”
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