Will.i.am (8 page)

Mulling over the critical response to their latest release, Will, in part, did understand the perspectives of the critics. ‘If I was a journalist and I knew The Black Eyed Peas when they
first came out and where they are now, I would write some of the same things too,’ he told
The Times
. ‘The way things were marketed didn’t honour how it was built. But we
weren’t trying to make hits when we made
Elephunk
. You think I would have called the CIA terrorists [as he did in ‘Where is the Love?’] right around the time America went
to Iraq if I was trying to make a record to get played on the radio?’

Meanwhile, he wondered whether the post-September 11 era might herald changes in the hip-hop industry. ‘Everything affects hip-hop,’ he told
The Onion
. ‘The question
is, how does it affect the money that corporations are going to invest to put out different kinds of hip-hop? Hip-hop may offer negative feedback on the world’s problems, but that’s
just the hip-hop that’s being promoted now. There are hip-hop groups in different sectors and different communities that are doing positive shit, but corporations and
companies don’t want to spend the money on them that it would take to get them out there.’

Will hoped that the ‘positive shit’ might get more airtime and investment. Not that his focus on positivity and unity was blinkered. He realized that his vision was as vulnerable to
cash-in and distortion as any. ‘The only thing that I’m afraid of is that if we get too big, the labels are going to be like, “Get a fucking Indian guy, and a black guy, and a
fucking Pakistani, and make them dance!” That’s the only thing that I’m afraid of.’

A renewed wave of accusations that the band had sold out rolled in. ‘All that “sell-out” stuff comes from the same people who held us close to their hearts for our first two
records,’ Will responded in an interview with
Faze
magazine. ‘And they call it “sell-out” for what reason? Because we have a white girl in our group now? I
don’t think that just because one day you do a jazzy record and then you do a funk record means you sold out. It just means you like music and you’re trying to dabble in every ray of
colour in the music world.’

In 2002, the sell-out allegations had reached their peak when the band featured on an advertisement for the soft
drink giant, Dr Pepper. For Will, their involvement in the
project was a true ‘eureka’ moment. It was also something that he easily resolved in his own mind. ‘I realized I made more money doing a thirty-second piece of music than two
hours worth of music,’ he said. He also insisted that the band retained control over all the creative aspects of the project. To him, this meant there was nothing wrong with their getting
involved, whatever the snipers might say. ‘If you are in control of the video, which we were, if you are in control of the clothes, the song, which we were … what’s not to like?
And the people are getting the music for free anyway … so who cares?’ Will believes that even performing something as ostensibly authentic as a live concert puts his band at the
epicentre of a storm of commercial activity – including the sponsorship of the venue, the petrol bought as a result of the thousands of fans driving to the concert and so on.

The second single from the album was called ‘Shut Up’, a catchy song about the break-up of a relationship, and the song that had brought Fergie to the party. It
reached number one in fifteen countries. In 2010, funk star George Clinton took legal action against the band, claiming they had used a sample from his 1970s song ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’
without
his permission. It was a testing moment for Will when news of the suit first reached him. (The case would be settled in 2012. Although the terms were not disclosed, in a
court filing, mediator Gail Killefer said the settlement ‘fully’ resolved the dispute.)

So hectic had been the response to
Elephunk
, that for the band members it sometimes felt as if they had gone from relative obscurity to international acclaim overnight.

Will, meanwhile, had been hard at work on his second solo album. Entitled
Must B 21
, it is a seventeen-track release that was described by RapReviews.com as ‘an exercise in
hip-hop in its purest most unadulterated form, packed into a highly concentrated dose’. The same reviewer urged people to buy the album not just to enjoy its music, but also to support
Will’s solo career and the fortunes of the label, Barely Breaking Even, through which he was releasing the material. Lest the critic appear to be asking people to buy it on only a charitable
basis, he concluded: ‘It deserves to go gold, because it’s that damn good.’

Will hired an impressive selection of fellow artists to appear on the album, including KRS-One, MC Lyte, Planet Asia and Phife from A Tribe Called Quest. Their contributions took the album to a
higher plane than Will’s debut solo effort. His track ‘Go!’ was featured on the Xbox computer game soundtrack for NBA Live 2005.

Will was about to take a break from the solo wing of his output:
Must B 21
ensured he did so from a position of some strength. When he returned, it would be in a
more fully solo sense, with the mass of collaborating guests consigned to the past.

First, though, he had to hold on tight as his already soaring band rocketed ever higher. The Black Eyed Peas were proving to be an unstoppable force. No wonder a growing number of other famous
artists were so keen to join the fun.

W
hen Will attended the 2005 MOBO Awards in London, the highlight of the evening should have been the sight of hip-hop royalty Public Enemy landing
the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Black Music’ gong. The genre-defining rap icons are a band that Will has often admired, but while he was delighted to see them recognized in this way,
he was not about to switch his opportunistic senses off for the evening. His mind ticking away as quickly as ever, Will glanced around the venue to see which other musical figures were ‘in
the house’ for the ceremony. Suddenly, he noticed that one of his all-time heroes was present. ‘Shit,’ Will exclaimed to his bandmates, ‘it’s James Brown!’

In an era in which the stature of ‘legend’ is awarded far too easily, Brown remains richly deserving of it. His influence on the musical scene, particularly black music, is immense.
His charisma is also huge and his entourage
on the night was far from insubstantial. Therefore, most people were far too nervous and in awe to even consider approaching Brown
for a chat.

Will, though, is not like most people. He took a deep breath, marched over to Brown’s table and introduced himself to the man he admires so much. He told the godfather of soul just how
much he admires his music. Then he took the conversation to another level. ‘One day,’ Will told Brown, ‘we would love to work with you’. It was an enormously audacious
pitch. A successful one, too. ‘All rigggght,’ Brown told Will. ‘We’ll make it happen.’

He was good to his word, too. Just seventy-two hours later, Brown joined The Black Eyed Peas in their studio in Chiswick, west London. The band were only given an hour’s notice of the
arrival of Brown and his ten-strong entourage. Brown appeared, wearing a violet suit – described as ‘sharp-ass’ by Taboo – with a maroon shirt. With seven fellow musicians
and three assistants in tow, he was every inch the superstar: in Taboo’s telling, Brown was ‘glowing’ and ‘oozing charisma’. He made the band feel like children in
comparison. Brown’s first words were to remind The Black Eyed Peas that he did not normally take part in collaborations. Why? ‘I’m James Brown’. However, he said that
‘something told me I needed to work with The Black Eyed Peas, and that’s why I’m here. So let’s work!’

Meanwhile, one of Brown’s assistants gave the band a sharp reminder of Brown’s stature, after Will had made a faux pas. ‘Yo, what up, James, how you
doing?’ Will had asked as Brown arrived. Brown’s assistant told Will in no uncertain terms that under the expected ‘system’ of behaviour, everyone was expected to refer to
Brown only as ‘Mr Brown’. He added that the surname form should be used universally during the session, so Will should only be referred to by other people as ‘Mr I Am’,
while Fergie would become, for the duration of the session, ‘Miss Ferg’. With that typically show-business system made clear, the artists went to work.

Will had created the foundations of the song he wanted Brown to work on with them. It was called ‘They Don’t Want Music’, and he was nervous as he played the track as it stood
to Brown, anxious for his approval. However, Brown did approve of the song and immediately took charge of the process. He told the assembled musicians of both camps that he would tell them what to
do and it would be he, and only he, who would ‘give you direction’.

The following hours proved an astonishing experience for Will, as he sat next to Brown at the mixing desk and watched his hero bark out orders. Will found it all both dizzyingly fun in its own
right and enormously instructive. Brown told the musicians how to ‘feel the funk’ and make
their performance perfect. Often, his orders to his own band of
instrumentalists and vocalists were delivered via nothing more than a particular grunt sound, which Brown would emit and which they seemed to understand. Will watched it all with wonder.

When the ensemble moved upstairs for lunch, Will got to see Brown’s diva behaviour in its full horrendous glory. Flunkies brushed his hair for him and even cut his food for him. All in
all, Brown’s visit to their studio had been one of the most astonishing experiences of Will’s life in itself – and from it came a track for their new album.

Another special guest on the album was Sting, the former lead singer of the Police. The collaboration came about due to a separate project Will had been working on with Sting. With the band
already considering sampling the melody from Sting’s iconic ‘An Englishman in New York’ on one of the tracks for the album, it was eventually decided that they would invite him to
sing on the track, which was called ‘Union’. While James Brown had blown the band away with his charisma and star-like behaviour, Sting impressed them with the scale of his home, to
which he invited Will and the band to stay while they were in the south-west of England to perform at the Glastonbury Festival.

Lake House, in Wiltshire, is indeed a breathtaking house and Will was mesmerized the moment he arrived at the
800-acre property in Salisbury. The opulent, castle-like main
building houses some fourteen bedrooms and eight bathrooms. In the grounds stands a 350-year-old tree – the presence of which was said to have convinced Sting and his wife Trudie to buy the
place. Will connected well with Sting and Trudie. Together they engaged in lengthy and deep conversations about spiritual matters. Sting also took the ensemble on a trip to the nearby attraction of
Stonehenge.

The majority of the work on the new album, which was to be called
Monkey Business
, took place in London. The band had rented three properties in Chiswick, the one Will
stayed in was a tall, narrow house in the corner of a cul-de-sac. He and the band loved the greenery of the neighbourhood and were amused by the ubiquity of pregnant women and mothers of newborn
babies. It seemed to be an area of many different types of creativity – fertile ground indeed.

The band was focused and productive. As Fergie put it, they were creating a ‘waterfall’ that became ‘this huge ocean that is
Monkey Business
’. During the three
months they worked on the album in London, that waterfall flowed well. Inspiration seemed to be everywhere: following a visit to a bhangra club in London, they recorded the Bollywood-flavoured
song ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’. They also recorded in France, Brazil and Japan.

Will found he was inspired in the strangest of settings. One day they were travelling in Japan on the ‘bullet’ train, which can travel up to 180 miles per hour. He was listening to a
CD of surfing rock-style tunes when one of them, a track called ‘Miserlou’, inspired him to create a new song. He fired-up his laptop and began to work on the new song, using recording
software he had installed for moments such as these. As the rest of the band sat drinking sake, Will was hard at work, his creative juices flowing at top speed as the train raced through Japan.
Later, on a flight, he sat and worked further on the song. When the flight arrived in Tokyo, Will took his computer to the park and recorded the vocals. This was the sort of crazy way in which the
album came together.

The title of the album had a degree of playful protest to it. Over the course of several years, the band had felt that the orders that their management and record label constantly bestowed upon
them had almost relegated the band to the role of performing monkeys. In a harsh assessment of the band’s place in the chain, Will would say, ‘Sing, monkey, dance, monkey, get on stage,
monkey!’ But there was a secondary dimension to the simian stature they felt they had developed. As the band had been driven away from a venue
one evening, so many fans
had surrounded their vehicle that they felt that they were monkeys in a zoo, caged away from the visitors. Finally, the impish ways that the band adopted to get through the rigours of touring also
felt, at times, like ‘monkey business’. Thus the title of the new album was representative of the band’s feelings at the time, capturing well the upsides and downsides of their
growing fame. To a degree, it also signifies the long-term spirit of Will’s band, who always believed that playfulness was a crucial part of the experience both publicly and behind the
scenes.

Released in May 2005,
Monkey Business
made for an engrossing body of work. As well as the aforementioned Brown and Sting, it had guest appearances from other stars, including Justin
Timberlake. Then, of course, there was the Fergie factor. On
Elephunk
, she had been a debuting oddity; now she was a mainstay of the band and therefore her contribution was keenly
anticipated. With
Elephunk
, having been received so well both critically and commercially, the band risked the sort of critical backlash that so often hovers over bands who have enjoyed
the favour of the reviewers.