Help, I Cannot Stop Listening to Willow Smith's Perfect New Pop-Punk Track

If there’s one good thing to come out of Y2K revival, it’s Willow Smith collaborating with Blink 182’s Travis Barker to create a pop-punk banger for the ages.

On Tuesday, Smith released “Transparent Soul,” a tune that has the DNA of Paramore and aughts J-Rock with a video that will make you want to buy Tripp pants and a chain wallet. But it’s all coming from a Black woman, a factoid that I—a Black woman who fell in love with punk in the 2000s—deeply appreciate. Sure, there were plenty of Black girls at the time who were shopping Hot Topic, reigning as scene queens on MySpace, and forgoing a press and curl for choppy cuts and emo bangs, but we didn’t see ourselves reflected in the artists we listened to at the time. We had Fefe Dobson for a hot second and that was about it. Despite Black womens’ contribution to rock—from X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene to Smith’s own mother, actor Jada Pinkett Smith, who was the frontwoman of nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom—the genre was still dominated by white men and was regarded as a white genre for white people.

Smith’s song doesn’t so much make the case for Black women in pop-punk as much as it serves as a reminder that we’ve always been here.