Watch Will Smith and Jimmy Fallon Beatbox ‘It Takes Two’
Will Smith, the Hollywood superstar, has been so busy the past decade making blockbusters that Will Smith, the multi-platinum rapper formerly known as the Fresh Prince, hasn’t released new music since 2005’s Lost and Found. Aside from the occasional Carlton Dance, Smith has shown almost no desire to rejoin a music world now occupied by his children, but on The Tonight Show, Smith reconnected with the Fresh Prince of yesteryear to beatbox and then perform Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” with Jimmy Fallon.
“You’re a famous rapper, and I’m a classically trained beatboxer, so I want to try something fun with you here,” Fallon tells Smith. Using a beatbox iPad app that layers and loops vocal tracks, Smith and Fallon build the song from the drum breaks up, ultimately taking their creation to the Tonight Show stage where the Roots add their own instrumentation to the 1988 single. This isn’t the first time Fallon has busted out this music app: Last year, he and Billy Joel put their vocal powers on display with a doo-wop cover of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Ever since The Tonight Show arrived back in Los Angeles on Monday, the stomping ground of previous hosts Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, it’s been a nostalgic look back at the early Nineties as Fallon recreated The Fresh Prince of Bel Air opening and reunited with most of the Saved By the Bell cast in the halls of Bayside High. The L.A. visit also found Neil Young performing “Old Man” with “Neil Young.”