Willow Smith Eloquently Takes on Teen Angst in "Why Don't You Cry"

14-year-old Willow Smith recently debuted a music video for the song "Why Don't You Cry." The coming of age video features "teenage angst, family conflict and enlightenment," written by Smith herself.

 Smith explained the concept to i-D Magazine:

"This teenage girl wants to be an artist. Her parents are very very strict and she suppresses all of her negative emotions towards them. She never cries. They rip up the invitation to her performance that night, telling her she is never going to succeed in an artistic career and that this kind of behavior isnt acceptable in their household - 'She is just a child.' The girl ignores them and does what her heart is telling her anyway. She gets on stage to find nobody in the crowd but her higher self who has been trying to communicate with her throughout the entire video. On stage she comes to accept all aspects of herself and lets out all of her suppressed emotions. The black abyss that AcE and the girls higher self are perfoming in is the teenage girls subconscious, they are the music bubbling up inside of her, that her parents want to keep under wraps. When she is backstage letting out the last bits of her tears, the higher self appears and is ready to become one again - through the teenage girls emotional release. She has come to terms with her divinity." 

Although the video is very personal, Smith's parents are known for encouraging their children's creativity and vision. “If it wasn’t for my parents, I wouldn’t have learned that becoming still and traveling within is the only thing that really matters,” she told i-D. “You can try and point the finger at everybody else as much as you want, but the only reason you’re feeling the way you’re feeling about something that somebody else is doing is because of the way that you’re perceiving it, and that has everything to do with your conditioning and the way you’ve been raised.”

Watch below.

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