Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince - Greatest Hits (1998)

Before Will Smith expanded into acting on large and small screens, he played rapper to Jazzy Jeff's scratcher in a series of semi-novelty radio and video smashes. A teenager empathizing with the peer group his records were aimed at, the Fresh Prince communicated ground-level dispatches on home life ("Parents Just Don't Understand"), would-be romance ("Girls Ain't Nothing But Trouble") and Walter Mitty-style flights of fancy ("I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson"). Movie stardom led Smith to put the mic down until the recent Big Willie Style; the success of that disc makes this the right time to revisit his early work, which shares space here with the newer "Men in Black" and "Just Cruisin'." Is it jiggy? Yeah, pretty jiggy. --Rickey Wright