Escaping into "WILLOW"
We all feel the overwhelming need to escape sometimes.
Whether it be from our jobs, our social lives, or even our own minds—it is nice to get away from your own life sometimes. And the world can often feel unwelcoming for Black women, leaving us to dream up our own special utopias. These worlds may exist in our minds, or the art we create. Art is the most tangible medium for this kind of world-building, and through work that entices at least one of the senses, we can romanticize, idealize, and fantasize about where are lives are and where we’d like them to go. Willow participates in this ritual through self-titled WILLOW and examines this feeling of discontentment within herself.
Produced and written by Willow Smith and MSFTS collaborator Tyler Cole, the album is a glimpse into an artist’s dream world. In a brief 22 minutes, Willow fantasizes about a time that exists outside of her own reality and tells of how she’s brought the peace of her musings to life—giving listeners the key to share that space with her.
WILLOW is an escape into Willow’s dream and a guide for reshaping your reality when you must leave your own sacred realm.
Willow is no stranger to comments on her deviation from mainstream beauty ideals. Young women are constantly faced with impossible standards of appearance, standards that are based on heavily filtered images and ads. On “Pretty Girlz” she laments over our collective internalization of these unrealistic conventions despite her own attraction to beauty that is unconventional and is admired though assets not captured in a photograph. In the chorus’ second iteration, Willow leans into a declaration for her desire of her own “pretty girl,” and not the pretty girl “they” want. Her thoughts, feelings, and wants are at odds with societal expectations, so she goes to a safe space where that pressure does not exist for her.
Willow artfully latches onto nostalgia for an era that escaped her own lifetime in “Time Machine.” She wishes to know Basquiat intimately and experience the MTV that lived up to its own name. Here she can enjoy these cultural artifacts before they were tainted by the 21st Century. In this place, she can achieve the pinnacle of a successful existence by being truly free. And in this place, she can escape the monotony of routine that breeds feelings of loneliness and isolation.
“Are you in prison? No the city is killing me.”
Willow longs to know something other than her own unfulfilling reality, and a person’s will to continue living without comfort and purpose lies in routine. Our lives often fall into routines that revolve around doing the same work and seeing the same people, and before we know it, we get too complacent to work on our own growth, longing for a break from the simulation instead. And as we watch pretty people live exciting lives in the endless stream of internet content (with the unmotivated hope of manifesting that freedom), we try to mimic these people who aren’t even really telling the truth. And all of that just goes on and on—up until we understand and accept our own truths.
Willow rejects unrealistic standards based on aesthetic and reshapes her reality according to her own blueprint.
The album ends its journey at the beginning. “Like A Bird” is a euphoric expression of lightness and freedom. The song explains how this freedom can be interrupted by life (“Feel like a bird with a broken wing”), but Willow ultimately settles on being at peace with her reality. The key to finding this peace can very well mean doing nothing at all. On “Overthinking IT” Willow sings “wanna be here, I wanna be there, I'm overthinking it. I'ma need to breathe now. I wanna be here, I wanna be there, I'm overthinking it. I'ma need to leave now.” Willow’s reality exists in her own vision because she doesn’t worry over things that bring stress and sadness. We can’t always control every circumstance, so it’s best to build where we can and make peace with the matters out of our control. That can mean actively translating dreams into achievable goals or just wearing those jeans that your mom hates and letting her be mad by herself. Allow yourself to dream, but also learn how to cope and find ways to find fulfillment in being present. And I don’t really know what that journey looks like for anyone else, so I’ll just leave you with this mantra of sorts from Willow:
