The one music genre Bruce Willis hates with a passion: “I can’t stand it”
Actors fancying themselves as musicians have thrown up plenty of good, bad, and ugly work over the years, but few things have ever been as bizarre as Bruce Willis releasing two albums through Motown.
That’s not even the weirdest thing about The Return of Bruno, either. A companion piece to the HBO mockumentary of the same name, where Willis introduced his alter ego, Bruno Radolini, the record was somehow certified gold in the United States despite not being very good, and features Booker T Jones, the Temptations, and the Pointer Sisters, among others, as backing musicians.
It was a strange time in the Die Hard icon’s career, but after debuting his second Motown-backed album, If It Don’t Kill You, It Just Makes You Stronger, in 1989, Willis never stepped into the recording booth again. The music he produced offers a good indication of what he’d listen to in his spare time, and the genre he hated with a burning passion was a curious coincidence of life imitating art.
In Tony Scott’s Shane Black-scripted buddy caper, The Last Boy Scout, the actor’s rugged cop, Joe Hallenbeck, is captured and threatened with torture. When his tormentors insist that they’d love nothing more than to hear him scream in agony, he offers a simple solution that would cause him physical pain without the use of violence: “Play some rap music.”
It was a throwaway line in an underrated thriller, but it was about as close to the truth as it gets. While it’s hardly jaw-dropping to find out that a movie star who had a soft spot for blues, soul, and rock, who also dabbled in a spot of crooning in his spare time, wasn’t the biggest fan of hip-hop, he really didn’t like it at all.
In the book, Naked Under Our Clothes, by the stars of the long-defunct TV series Yo! MTV Raps, Willis didn’t even try to hide his contempt. Recalling their time as the hosts of the show, Ed Lover and Doctor Dré (not that one) dished the dirt on some of the big names that they encountered, with the former revealing the retired actor’s complete and utter disdain for rap.
“I did one thing with Bruce Willis,” Lover recalled. “I had heard he didn’t want to work with me because I was hosting Yo! MTV Raps. We were all right because we both understood each other. I did something with him for Planet Hollywood. I was interviewing him, and I said, ‘I heard you hate rap music’. He said, ‘Yeah, I can’t stand it.'”
Seizing what proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he fired back with a shot of his own. “I said, ‘Well, I hate that harmonica bullshit you be playing, too,'” Lover retorted. “‘So now we understand each other, so let’s get the interview going on.’ He was cool after that.”
Admittedly, this would have been somewhere around the early 1990s when the first few Planet Hollywood restaurants opened, so maybe Willis changed his mind and opened his ears to hip-hop in the years to come. Then again, since he said he couldn’t stand it, probably not.
