Album: Will Smith

Born To Reign, Columbia

At its most rarefied levels, the entertainment industry moves with the massive, implacable force of tectonic plates. Despite the notoriously fickle nature of youthful tastes, important and costly decisions are made well in advance, based on the flimsiest of suppositions about what may be popular years down the line. Hence the catastrophic performance of Michael Jackson's ludicrously – some might say "suspiciously" – expensive Invincible album, playing to a public that had moved on to newer beats. Hence, too, the appearance of Will Smith's new album at the same time as the Men in Black sequel arrives in our multiplexes, a cross-promotional campaign riding largely on the jiggy one's supercilious smirk. There's not, to be honest, an awful lot more going for Born to Reign, which abandons even the slight streetwise mannerisms of 1999's Willennium – along with the contributions from old-skool types such as Kool Moe Dee, Biz Markie and, most important, Smith's old partner DJ Jazzy Jeff – in favour of a limp assemblage of parentally approved, expletive-free raps that feature the star lecturing his audience about smoking ("Chill with that cigarette/ Take it outside!") and explaining "why I go light on my vices" with the smug pomposity accessible to only the very rich. Between Smith's overweening self-satisfaction and the grim, businesslike mien of demographic duties such as the Latino pastiche "I Can't Stop" (complete with obligatory reference to "La Vida Loca", of course), there's not an awful lot here to inflame the imagination of the average inquisitive teen. Can super-stardom really be this dismal? Quite probably.