Hip Hop Horror? Will Smith and ‘A Nightmare On My Street’
by Justine Norton-Kertson
I was nine years old in January 1988 when the album He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper dropped. It was DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s second album, and I was hooked. Convinced I was edgy as fuck, I cruised around the trailer park with my Walkman portable cassette player, headphones on of course, rapping along to “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”
But that’s not the song we’re here to talk about. In this deep dive into the nerd horror archives, we’re taking a look “A Nightmare On My Street.” The opening track of their sophomore album leans heavily into the horror genre in the kind of fun and playful way one might expect from this early pop hip hop duo.
The previous summer my friends Melissa, Shane, Tiffany, and I watched our first horror movie together, A Nightmare on Elm Street. None of us had parents who would have let us watch horror movies at that age, but latch key kids were common and so it wasn’t hard to find places to hang out where there wasn’t any parental supervision. We were fairly young and it scared the shit out of us in the kind of way that jumpstarts a lifelong love affair with a movie genre. And of course, six months later when the new DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince album dropped, I felt secretly rebellious when I listened to “A Nightmare on My Street.” It was like I was getting away with something, something big. For a nine year old, it felt thrilling.
But the music video isn’t about the movie it takes its name from. The song and video are more like a general tribute to horror. The music video stars a Frankenstein-like zombie named Fred, for example. Will Smith and his crew going to a theater and watching a horror movie makes up the plot of almost half the video. Other examples of horror imagery and symbols in the music video include an electric chair, vampires, boarded up windows, a bed with a headboard that has devil’s horns and glowing red eyes, a monster coming out of a TV., and more. The video even made frequent use of dark scenes with blue lighting, a common aesthetic found in horror movies.
While hip hop horror may not have ever become a thing, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince sure gave it a good try.
