by Danny White
Indeed she did. At the age of ten, Will got to see a new kind of life after being given a significant opportunity when his mother sent him to school in a wealthy neighbourhood near Pacific Palisades. The Magnet Program, designed to offer specialized educational opportunities to children from any part of society, regardless of family income or background, helped ease his passage to a better school in a better area.
In Los Angeles there’s a saying: If you’re famous you live in the Hollywood Hills, if you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, and if you’re lucky you live in Pacific Palisades. Will must have felt lucky indeed as he arrived in this area each morning: the contrast between it and Boyle Heights is striking. Despite the accuracy of the saying about the district, the reality is slightly more complicated. Famous and rich people do live in Pacific Palisades, but they are often down-to-earth celebrities, those who do not buy into the game of hiding behind literal, metaphorical and brickwork sunglasses. This is a district in which accomplished people live a normal, albeit comfortable, existence. Famous names who have lived there include Ben Affleck, Larry David, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ray Liotta, Ozzy Osbourne and Steven Spielberg. This opened Will’s eyes to the possibilities that fame and fortune can bring. Summing up the difference between where he lived and where he studied, Will told an audience of British students that the gap was: ‘Culture-wise and distance … like sending a kid from London to France for school.’
The sense of opportunity and its rich reward is strong in the neighbourhood, which is little short of heavenly in some parts. It is difficult not to be inspired and enlivened. It was, therefore, a significant moment when his mother decided to send Will there. ‘She wanted me to be challenged,’ he explained. One of the challenges was raised by the demographics of his school. He went from being the only black boy in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood to being the only black boy in a predominantly white school.
The establishment he attended was called the Palisades Charter High School. For him, the basic truth about this area was the most pertinent: ‘it isn’t a ghetto’. It would turn out to be a fateful moment in his life story. However, more immediately these were long days for Will. He would be waiting for the school bus just after 6 a.m. each day, which meant he sometimes missed breakfast. ‘And when you’re on food stamps and lunch tickets, missing breakfast is not good for a kid,’ he told the Financial Times. He was a member of the school choir and an enthusiastic participator in other extra-curricular activities, so Will rarely returned home until 8 p.m. Looking back on the opportunity, Will is not one to complain. Without the Magnet Program, he said, he ‘would never have seen what the world was like … I would be stuck thinking the world was the five miles of my surrounding area.’
Comparing the wealthy neighbourhood he travelled to for his schooling, and the ghetto district in which he grew up, Will sensed that in the latter area, the encouragement to disaster was almost inevitable. ‘There’s a family of influences that dictate behaviour,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘In the ghetto, there’s a liquor store, a cheque-cashing place and a motel. What that tells you psychologically is: get a cheque, cash it. Take a couple of steps. Buy some liquor and get drunk, go home and get kicked out of your house. And here’s a place to sleep along the way.’ In contrast, he said, in richer areas the set-up encourages more positive behaviour. He was learning plenty at school, yet Will’s education was also self-administered – merely by keeping his eyes open and his wits about him at all times.
Former classmates of Will remember him as a charismatic and charming boy. Yvette Bucio told the Mirror: ‘I used to ride the bus with Will or “Willy” as we called him. He was exactly the same then as he is now – stylish, attractive and charming. He used to get along with everybody whether they were white, black, Mexican or whatever. After he left, he wrote next to my picture in the yearbook that he had a crush on me. I was really flattered. But then I found out he did the same to all the girls.’ It seems he was quite the amiable politician even back then. Quite the singer, too: Angelica Pereyra, another former classmate of Will’s, recalled how he began freestyle rapping contests in the playground. The boy who would later appear as a judge on a talent contest was a skilled organizer. ‘He was great and everyone used to gather round him and start cheering and shouting,’ said Pereyra. ‘The teachers would always run over because they thought a fight was going on.’ Instead, what they were witnessing were the first live performances from a boy who would later sell out the world’s biggest stadiums and arenas.
Meanwhile, as his adolescence continued, Will’s sexual awakening was beginning. Given the element of mystery that has long surrounded his romantic life, the origins of it are fascinating. Naturally, those origins are less than straightforward, too. As a teenager he fantasized about Charo, the flamboyant and vivacious Latina television personality. She had already been famous for the best part of a decade when she first came to young Will’s attention in the early 1980s. With her trademark saying ‘cuchi-cuchi’ – often accompanied by a sassy wiggle of her hips – Charo caught the attention of many males. ‘I loved me some Charo,’ Will told Elle magazine. ‘Back in the 80s, she was everywhere – The Love Boat, Fantasy Island.’ He says he enjoyed watching her wherever she appeared.
Will’s sexuality is the subject of mystery and conjecture. By his own admission, his introduction to sex was unconventional. When the subject of masturbation was alluded to by one interviewer, Will offered the information that: ‘I didn’t do that until I was nineteen.’ So, while his male school friends will undoubtedly have been exploring themselves enthusiastically, Will refrained from doing so until he was comfortably into manhood. Asked why, he replied: ‘I think my mom had a big role in it. It was a subject we never talked about growing up.’ Stranger still was that he hinted that he had lost his virginity a year before, when he was eighteen. It was a less than romantic experience as he describes it: ‘her mother was in the other room; it was horrible. And then she cheated on me. But I stayed with her, like a bonehead.’
Will’s explanation that his mother’s lack of commentary about sex as she raised him was responsible for his abstinence is intriguing. It is hard to not speculate that there must be more to it, though. Few mothers, after all, would discuss the subject regularly, even at all, with their children. Perhaps he is, cryptically or even subconsciously, referring more to the absence of a father figure. Without an authoritative male voice to discuss the birds and the bees with him, it seems he learned about sex and romance more delicately than he might have. ‘Because I was raised around girls, I think I’ve adopted that perspective on sex,’ he has admitted.
Even back then, Will was living around the rules that his mother constructed for his relationships with girls. ‘She was real strict, but she could be lenient,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I couldn’t bring girls in the house but she let me talk on the phone. And my phone bill was high. I’d been with my first girlfriend, Carmen Perez, for three months before she kissed me. I told my ma, who was like, “I didn’t send you to school to be acting mannish”.’ She had, it seems, somewhat delicate expectations for her son.
Delicate is not, however, a word that can be used to describe all elements of his development. There were some harsh punishments meted out at home. His mother told him: ‘I am your daddy.’ She was as good as her word, inflicting physical punishment when she felt it necessary. For instance, when he was at high school, Will developed a habit of scrawling graffiti. He used to write the word ‘expo’ – an abbreviation of exposure – on walls and other surfaces. The thrill of graffiti has never quite left Will. In later life he would be caught by the police, but back at high school it was his Uncle Fay who busted him. He duly reported Will to his mother, saying: ‘Debra! Willie over there writing on them walls!’ Debra was furious. She called Will into the house and told him: ‘Sit your butt down on the couch!’ Will feared a formidable ticking off – but he received more than that. ‘She started hitting me,’ he told Elle.
The physical punishmen
t certainly had the desired effect. ‘My mom’s discipline worked out perfectly,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing. And my mom got hit by my grandma, who’s the sweetest person on the freakin’ planet.’ However, while Will is comfortable with the corporal punishment he received, he does not believe it would be as appropriate for today’s children. ‘Cultures change,’ he said, adding that we now live in ‘a different era’.
How influential has the fact Will grew up in a single-parent household been on his life? Later, while in the throes of a less-than-perfect eight-year relationship with a woman, Will saw a counsellor and was encouraged to conclude that the absence of a father in his upbringing had left a specific mark on his mentality. ‘I learned in counselling that me and my ex-girlfriend both have a fear of abandonment from not having a role model in relationships,’ he told the Guardian. ‘My mom’s never been married. I’ve never even seen my mom kiss a dude.’ That said, Will is the first to say that his mother was a pivotal influence in the success he would go on to achieve professionally. She encouraged him to be different, primarily in order to give him the best chance possible to ascend from the tough surroundings in which he’d been raised.
However, her motivation was wider than that. She wanted Will to explore himself and be an individual regardless of the circumstances of his childhood. His was not an upbringing in which unimaginative conformity was automatically valued or rewarded. Nor was undue deference: Debra wanted Will to be a leader rather than a follower. This wish showed itself in a number of ways during his childhood. For instance, rather than encouraging him to join in with the games other kids played, Debra showed him how much more value there was in creating his own games, so other kids would come and join him.
It was during the first half of his teenage years that Will began to experiment with making music. ‘[It was] when I was like thirteen, fifteen,’ he said. ‘At thirteen, I started rhyming. At fifteen, I started making beats.’ Also, at the age of fourteen, he began to learn about how to write his own music. His reasoning was that if you wanted to move to Germany, you would learn German first. Therefore, if you wanted to move into the music industry, you had to learn music.
Which was something he was continuing to do. Before he was will.i.am, Will was Will 1X (sometimes spelled as WilloneX). It is not quite such a catchy moniker, but it represents where he was at this stage in his life. Indeed, according to someone who knew Will at the time, this earlier character was a ‘mini-me’ reflection of the iconic will.i.am celebrity of today.
One of his childhood friends was Stefan Gordy. The son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, Stefan would go on to achieve musical fame himself later in life, as ‘Redfoo’, one of the members of the band LMFAO. Will first noticed him when he realized, with amusement, that Stefan would arrive at school wearing tennis kit.
At this stage, Will was using his younger sister’s talking bear to record some rudimentary raps. ‘I used to record on my little sister’s Teddy Ruxpin tapes to make Teddy Ruxpin rap,’ he told the Huffington Post. ‘So I used to put my little demo inside his belly and press play and he used to kick my lyrics in homeroom show-and-tell.’ To take the recording further, he leveraged his relationship with Stefan. ‘So after homeroom show-and-tell, I gave the tape to Stefan: “Give this to your pops”. And he didn’t give it to his dad, so he gave it to his brother, Kerry, and then Kerry says, “You’re really talented, this is cool.”’ This was enough for Will to impose renewed hustling pressure on Stefan. ‘To make a long story short, in the tenth grade I tell Stefan, “Tell your daddy to get you some music equipment so we can record after school”.’
While studying at a summer school at John Marshall High in Los Feliz, Will first met another boy who would change his life. Allan Pineda Lindo, now better known as apl.de.ap (or simply apl), of The Black Eyed Peas, quickly struck up a rapport with Will. Allan was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and black father. His father left home soon after Allan was born, leaving Allan’s mother to raise seven children on her own. Although he was the youngest of the family, Allan quickly grew an old head on his young shoulders. His family was struggling to survive and so even as a child he worked on a local farm to bring some much needed extra funds into the household. His grace was rewarded when a television commercial, made by a charity called the Pearl Buck Foundation, featured his plight on American television. A Californian businessman was so moved by the commercial that he arranged to adopt the fourteen-year-old and bring him to a new, more comfortable, life in Los Angeles. It was that man, Joe Ben Hudgens – a former roommate of one of Will’s uncles – who set in motion the wheels that would bring Lindo to Will’s attention.
So Will began to write songs with apl and they quickly developed an understanding that was so strong that, to outsiders observing their creative interactions, it appeared almost telepathic. This synergy would make them very rich in the years ahead. For the time being, it provided them with something valuable in a different way: a sense of exciting hope. Will was learning quickly the methodology behind a good song and he soon realized that writing lyrics from personal experience was the best route to a powerful song. He also tended to eschew the use of long words, feeling that simplicity was key to the creation of a catchy message. However, the lyrics were not the part of the composition he generally started with, because he also lived by the rule: rhythm comes first, words later. Indeed, his style of songwriting quickly developed a regular sequence, which lasted into the formation of the Black Eyed Peas. Taboo, who would also be a member of that band, described it as: ‘rhythm-became-mumbles-became-words-became-lyrics-became song’.
As well as hanging out at club nights such as Club What?, Will began to attend raves in Los Angeles. Alongside a childhood friend called Pasquale (Pasquale Rotella, now the boss of Insomniac Events and architect of the annual electronic dance music festival Electric Daisy Carnival), he partied the nights away at some huge and thrilling events.
Will, quite the technology buff nowadays as we shall see, has looked back fondly on the movement around these parties. At the time they seemed to be cutting edge but now elements of their organization seem quaint. ‘In LA in the early, early 1990s, there were raves that were like secret clubs, and thousands of people would go, and the way you found out about it was you went to a map point and the map point gave you another map point and that map point gave you directions,’ he said, during a conversation with the LA Times. ‘Way before pagers, way before cell phones and the Internet. You physically had to go to two locations to get the address. Tens of thousands of people would show up in the desert or in the warehouses or these secret locations where the raves would be.’
These were exciting events with thronging attendances. ‘There would be, you know, between 10,000 and 50,000 people,’ he told the Guardian. ‘People would express themselves with loud colours, DJs would play crazy beats,’ he added. Asked whether these gatherings were legal or not, he admitted they were not. ‘[They were] illegal, yes, all right, OK, you got me there,’ he said. ‘We were kids!’
It is worth restating that Will was still a schoolboy as he and Pasquale partied the night away at these raves. He was, in fact, a tenth-grade pupil. The morning after one of these raves, he and his classmates would be discussing their night out as they sat down in the classroom. He remembers whispering with classmates about how ‘crazy’ a night out had been, and a classmate turning round to tell him: ‘Dude, I’m still rolling.’
Will admits that other kids at his school took drugs at these raves, though he denies he did. ‘I’m talking about eleventh-graders, fifteen-year-olds in high school,’ he said. ‘Where I was going to high school people were rolling, and coming down from the drug. I didn’t do that stuff, and Pasquale didn’t do that stuff. But we went, and we liked the vibe and the scene.’
That vibe and scene captured Will’s imagination in such a way that it has, at the time of writing at least, yet to release its grip. The rave scene quickly peaked and, in its most exciting and authentic
form, disappeared. However, some acts have kept the flame alive by incorporating its light into their own material. The Black Eyed Peas are one of those bands. More immediately, back then, these nights out were great ways for Will to release any tension inside him. His teenage troubles seemed to melt away as he danced.
He was also paying close attention to the music coming out of his radio at the time. He noted the way that hip-hop was up-tempo in this era, and the influence that this had on rave culture. Songs such as ‘It Takes Two’, which he clocked in at 127 beats per minute, and Jungle Brothers, Technotronic and Queen Latifah tracks that added a ‘poppier’ sound to the mix, all fed into the prevailing atmosphere. ‘And we liked that because that’s what we danced to,’ he told the LA Times, describing him and his friends at the time as ‘what you called “house dancers” – we used to dance house’.
The next phase was when Will and his fellow house dancers – we are here effectively describing the Black Eyed Peas and their entourage before the band was officially formed – moved a step further. This started when Will and Allan Lindo began to perform together around Los Angeles. A fellow student named Dante Santiago sometimes joined them for these performances. They called themselves Atban Klann, and during one of their performances, they were to be noticed by a highly revered figure on the rap scene.
Born with the less-than-gangster name of Eric Lynn Wright, Eazy-E would grow-up to be so influential he would be declared the ‘the Godfather of Gangsta Rap’. He formed a label, Ruthless Records, and then a band – N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude). His band would prove to be a huge hit, practically defining the gangsta rap movement in the eyes of millions around the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While the band remained a controversial one due to their name and many of their lyrics, songs such as ‘Express Yourself’ made for a more mainstream and positive dimension to their act. Meanwhile, Eazy-E scouted for new acts to sign to Ruthless Records. One of them would be Will. ‘I was free-styling at a club event that David Faustino from Married With Children was hosting, and there were some Ruthless Records representatives there,’ Will explained later in an interview with the AV Club website. It was an arrangement entirely free of red tape, which suited him at first. ‘They signed me just off my free-styling. Once again, there were no contracts, no demo, no lawyers, or any of that dumb shit. I got fucked in the long run, but it started out well.’
