Willow Smith burst onto the scene when her debut song reached the radio, and it took a huge display to tell her father how she felt about it.
While you might know her from her 'Meet Me At Our Spot' and 'Wait a Minute!' Anthems, Willow’s hit 'Whip My Hair,' catapulted her into fame.
As the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, Willow quickly established herself as a bop maker at just 10 years old. Her song, which came out in 2010, told the story of being able to shake off the haters as she carries out her musical dream.
But when Willow was right in the middle of her global world tour, headed by Jay Z’s record company, she shaved her head. Her dad has now opened up on why she did it.
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Smith, who has been publicly supportive of his daughter’s artistic endeavours, sat down for a new documentary called Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood.
There, he explained that Willow was on tour with Justin Bieber at the time, and had just finished a set when she told her dad she was ‘done’, but he didn’t understand the meaning behind the word.
“We were in Dublin, Ireland. Willow comes off stage, she was on tour with Justin Bieber,” the actor said in a new documentary," he said.
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“Hit record, 20,000 kids whipping their hair in Dublin, and she comes off stage and is like, ‘I’m done, Daddy,’” the actor added. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, baby, that was a great show!’ And she was like, ‘No, no ― I mean I’m done! I’m ready to go home!’”
Puzzled, he tried to explain to her that this was something that had to finish at the end of the schedule, not halfway through.
“I was like, ‘Well, no ― you can’t go home, sweetie, you promised Mr. Jay-Z that you were gonna do these 30 days of this tour,’” said Smith.
But that’s when his daughter hit back and revealed that she didn’t promise anything.
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Smith said: “She said, ‘No, Daddy, you promised Mr. Jay-Z.’
“And I was like, ‘Sweetie, I get it, but we promised as a family and you have to finish.’”
That’s when she looked at him and asked: “It doesn’t matter to you that I’m finished, Daddy?”
When he told her it does matter, but she needed to finish the tour, she apparently lamented and said a simply, ‘oh, ok’.
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Believing all was cool, the pair returned to their hotel room and the very next morning, he was in for a shock.
He revealed she walked out and ‘she had shaved her head bald’.
“In the middle of her ‘Whip My Hair’ tour, she had shaved her head bald. And it was like a magical moment. I was like, ‘Got it!’,” he said.
According to his 2021 memoir, Will, he revealed Willow skipped into the kitchen and said: “Good morning, Daddy.”
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“My jaw nearly dislocated, dislodged and shattered on the kitchen floor: My world-dominating, hair-whipping, future global superstar was totally bald,” Smith wrote.
He added: “During the night, Willow had shaved her entire head. My mind raced — how was she going to whip her hair if she didn’t have any? Who the hell wants to pay to watch some kid whip their head back and forth?”
According to Willow, she felt she needed to take action to get her point across about how the tour was making her feel.
The 24-year-old told People magazine in 2019: “I was super young, and I had a dream, but all I really wanted to do was sing, and I didn’t equate that with all the business and the stress that ended up coming with it.
“I was just like, ‘Whoa, this is not the life that I want’.”
Well, it seems like she’s handling it better now that she’s a superstar with numerous hits under her belt.
Topics: Celebrity, Music, Will Smith, Parenting
Britt Jones