Willow Smith – “F Q-C #7” Video
Leave it to Willow Smith to make skipping class into a catchy as hell summer jam. There are a few artists in every generation who possess the fiery willpower to remake pop in their own image — Willow is one. Between her unaffected, guileless adoration of one of our own new favorite acts, Girlpool (a phenomenon that Fader has lovingly chronicled ICYMI), and the rash of experimental new tracks she’s unleashed over the last few months, Will and Jada Smith’s daughter has begun to wield her own creative power with real force.
The video for her new song “F Q-C #7″ channels the same rebellion as her 2011 pop smash “Whip My Hair,” but that’s where the similarities end. Willow isn’t rapping here — her voice is too much AutoTuned-honey to really be a flow — but she sings with the same arrogant authority that makes the best rap so fun to listen to. Sorting through the anxiety of school hallway crushes and swearing wide-eyed by the powers of Amethyst crystals under pillows over a self-produced skittering xylophone-backbone, Willow ushers in the era of chakra-pop. Topanga Canyon’s got nothing on this girl’s spiritual dimensions, and she’s managed to funnel all those powers into pop without weighing the song itself down. Instead, it floats and sways like the twilight wheat fields in her video that she co-directed with Mike Vargas. Check it out below.