If you were to explain hip-hop to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, which artist would you choose to start with? In the newer generations, fans might opt to pick Kendrick Lamar. If we want to be true to the genre and culture’s history, Rakim was the forefather for how rappers flow today. Or, maybe you just opt for one of the golden age legends like Tupac and Biggie as Will Smith did.A clip resurfaced online where the rapper-turned-actor gave his take on the state of hip-hop at the time. He called Tupac a “genius” and argued that the same word applied to Biggie. Then, he said that his classic debut album Ready To Die “should be used in psychology classes.”“I think it so brilliantly depicts the mindset of the urban n*gro male,” Will Smith explained. “Every question you ever had about a Black man, why he feels a certain way about certain situations, everything you ever wanted to know, you can find between the lines of that album. I think it’s brilliant.”Although he was highly complimentary of Ready To Die, the clip resurfacing has made a lot of people tilt their heads and raise their eyebrows. For instance, in the Facebook comments on Worldstar Hip Hop, some fans even agreed with him. But it was something about the way he phrased the mindset of Black men that threw them for a loop.Will Smith Once Lauded Biggie’s Album in a Way That Still Throws Fans OffOne person simply joked, “No one who grew up in the hood would call it a ‘n*gro’ mindset lol.”Meanwhile, another person felt like Smith used questionable language to ultimately make a salient point. “He took us back to pre-civil rights with the verbiage, but he’s entirely right. Both Biggie and Pac captured the psychology of young Black men in urban areas. Pac was about how they turn militant and resentful of power and Biggie was how hopelessness and apathy turns into crime. Ready To Die was that to a T,” they said.Questionable phrasing or not, it’s clear that Will Smith held Biggie and his work in high regard. It’s why it broke his heart that he only got to meet the late Brooklyn MC once before dying just hours later. “I don’t even want to say this out loud ’cause it’s like a terrible jinx–I met Biggie four hours before he got killed, and I talked to Prince eight hours before he died,” he recalled on the Broken Record Podcast.(Photo by Joshua Sammer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)The post Will Smith Once Said Biggie’s ‘Ready To Die’ Should Be Taught in Psychology Classes (But His Choice of Words Still Raises Eyebrows) appeared first on VICE.