by Danny White
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.
The critics were harsh in some quarters. A regular theme the critics noted was that this fourth studio album signified a drop in form from the band’s previous effort, Elephunk. PopMatters, for instance, sniffed: ‘If ... you’re in the market for dance music, although admittedly excellently produced, but which can’t sustain any substantial intellectual investment, then Monkey Business should be right up your alley.’ Entertainment Weekly was scarcely kinder, ranking the album ‘a bland meringue: a succession of cotton candy raps about chicks, partying, and partying with chicks, broken up by choruses destined to evaporate outside a shindig’s perimeter’. It even ranked the Brown collaboration as ‘trite’ and lacking ‘much innovation’.
Rolling Stone, meanwhile, awarded the album three stars out of five, concluding: ‘Monkey Business is just as bright if not quite as fun as Elephunk’. The BBC attacked the album’s lyrics, contending that their ‘flimsiness ... may let the album down for traditional Black Eyed Peas fans who’ve been following the group since the days of 1998’s Behind the Front’. The Guardian felt that ‘the choruses are just as catchy as those on 2003’s Elephunk,’ but added that ‘the lyrical inspiration has evaporated’, before truly putting the boot in with the conclusion that: ‘Only James Brown comes out of the wreckage of ideas and ideals with any dignity’.
Despite these harsh verdicts, the album was a commercial success: it has, at the time of writing, sold over eleven million copies worldwide. It reached the top of the album charts in eight countries, including Canada and France, and has gone triple platinum in the United States.
The album’s first single, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’, was also a hit in America: it reached number three on the US Hot 100, and won them a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. It was a number one in Australia, a number three in the UK and a number five in Canada. The second single from the album was ‘Don’t Lie’, which reached number fourteen in the US Hot 100, and hit number six in both the UK and Australia.
The album’s third single, however, proved to be a more contentious affair. ‘My Humps’, with its bawdy lyrics, hit number three in America. However, it was not to everyone’s taste. John Bush of AllMusic called it ‘one of the most embarrassing rap performances of the new millennium’, which must have hurt Will, if he became aware of it. Readers of the Global Gathering website named it the dance track with ‘the most ridiculous’ lyrics of all time. Rolling Stone placed it at number one on its Twenty Most Annoying Songs chart. Kelefa Sanneh, writing for The New York Times, declared that the single is ‘most likely to live in infamy’, deliberately invoking a description of the Pearl Harbor disaster of World War II. While another critic damned it as ‘so monumentally vacuous, slapped together and tossed-off that it truly tests the definition of “song”’.
Elsewhere, it was compared to Kelis’s catchy 2003 hit single ‘Milkshake’. Harsh words, yet Will himself would later dip a toe into the chorus of disapproval and distance himself from the track. ‘It wasn’t lyrical miracles,’ he told the Daily Record in 2011. ‘It got to the point where we didn’t want to play it no more. But the beat was rocking.’
As they toured the album, Will was struck by a stampede of tangible signs of how far he had come. Thanks mainly due to the stature of the band, and partly due to the changing face of music-industry finance, the tour was bankrolled by two corporate sponsors: technology giants Verizon and motor company Honda. Not only did the band now travel first-class and stay in elite hotels, they were even each given a limited edition, specially manufactured Honda Civic car. Month after month they flew first-class from country to country, from continent to continent, playing to huge venues bursting with hysterical crowds. From Hong Kong to Honolulu, Tokyo to Tel Aviv, Santiago to Shanghai, they wowed audiences. Their road crew was now a multi-team operation. Even their road manager now had a considerable team at his command: the entire operation was benefiting from the band’s success. Gwen Stefani was support act for several dates.
Perhaps the crowning evening of the Monkey Business tour came in Brazil. The band arrived at Ipanema Beach to headline a New Year’s Eve concert. They did not expect the size of the crowd that greeted them: around one million people. Given that it was one million Brazilian people – often a naturally festive bunch – and the sense of occasion that the date brought to the party, and the audience made for a breathtaking, bopping vista. At the end of the show, which Will and the band crowned with an excitable rendition of ‘Where is the Love?’, the band feared being crushed by the audience, which began to descend en masse backstage. Will and the others were bundled into ambulances, whose sirens managed to clear a way to safety for the headlining stars.
Among the purely commercial work were more philanthropic moments, foreshadowing Will’s subsequent march into such activity. While in South Africa, the band took some time out of their schedule to hold a creative event for children from deprived parts of Soweto. It was there that Will had used the example of one fourteen-year-old boy to show what was possible.
Another lad there, called Bongeni Moragelo, was like a mini-Will. As Moragelo rapped and danced, Taboo could not help but remember the Will he had first met in California, the Will who had so bossed those rapping competitions. The fire, hunger and sheer ability of the boy were astonishing. Will invited him to join them onstage in Johannesburg, a memorable moment for all concerned, particularly Moragelo. Will built a charitable sponsorship relationship with the boy, to ensure he made the most of his talents.
Also during the trip, the band met South African legend and ex-President Nelson Mandela. It was a proud day for Will, who wore a neat white suit for the occasion. He was unimpressed by Taboo’s comparative shabbiness of dress and punctuality, chiding his hung-over bandmate with a sarcastic: ‘Hey, glad you could join us’, when his still-wayward bandmate arrived.
This was an understated rebuke to a bandmate and friend who Will loves, rather than anything rougher than that. It would be easy for Will to have descended into full-blown diva behaviour at such exciting moments as huge concerts and introductions to iconic world leaders, especially after seeing how his hero James Brown had behaved in the simple surroundings of a recording studio. Yet he has largely maintained a sense of humour and balance. His demands on the road have rarely been monstrous. They mostly centre around the space and ability to continue his songwriting and creativity wherever he is.
However, one way to have him turn his nose up is to present to him a lavatory with no moist baby wipes as an option. If there is only ‘dry toilet paper’, he will not be happy. To describe why this is important, he constructs a metaphor which is best skipped by the queasy or those eating. ‘Here’s proof on why people should have baby wipes: get some chocolate, wipe it on a wooden floor, and then try to get it up with some dry towels,’ he told Elle magazine. ‘You’re going to get chocolate in the cracks. That’s why you gotta get them baby wipes.’ When he puts his case that way it is terribly difficult to argue.
Will was, at this stage, living in a fine home, in which the presence of baby wipes was just one of the luxuries. The $7m home, near Griffith Park in the Los Feliz neighbourhood, was physical testament to his success. Particularly poignant and significant was the fact that from the roof of his house, Will had a commanding view of the city, all the way to the building in which he grew up. Although the properties were nearly twenty miles apart, the symbolic distance was even greater. With a neat, terraced garden accompanying the lavish building,
Will was living in some comfort. He had designed the house so he could work and record in almost any of its rooms – and beyond. ‘It’s not really a house,’ he told The Times, ‘it’s a studio. There are microphones and places I can plug in everywhere; a wireless controller, so I can record from anywhere; and I can log on from anywhere in the world, so even if I’m in London or Tokyo, I can still be making music.’
Indeed, even after purchasing this property, Will continued to sleep most evenings in a hotel, even when his itinerary did not require him to. Although the hotels he chooses are plush, including one overlooking London’s Hyde Park, he is happiest with a fairly small room. ‘I like to be cosy,’ he said. ‘I need a place to recharge.’
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After releasing his first two solo albums in fairly quick succession, Will had taken a few years out from solo releases. In 2007, the third was finally unveiled. It was originally going to be titled Keep the Beeper, but the title Will eventually settled on was Songs About Girls. Taking at face value the widespread perception that this piece of work is at least semi-autobiographical, here we get a rare glimpse into Will’s personal life. Indeed, as he explained to Billboard, it was the personal dimension of the project that encouraged him to persevere with it, when he could just as easily have scrapped the work and concentrated on his band. Instead, he ploughed on with the album ‘where all the songs could tell a story of falling in love, falling out of love, trying to get back in love, destructing love and destroying love and then starting a new situation. That journey is what makes this unique’. Rolling Stone magazine described the narrative of the album as: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy goes to strip club. Boy gets caught cheating. Girl leaves. Boy and girl somehow get back together.’
In an imaginative overall package for the album, Will recorded videos for eight of the twelve songs, creating, in his words, ‘a movie about making a movie’. Even more worthy of note was the online music player he developed to accompany the album. The music player, developed alongside technology company Musicane, enabled Will to add to the album’s track list as many times as he wished, with the fans sharing the profit. Fans could embed the player on their own websites, blogs or MySpace pages. Then, each time a visitor downloaded a song from that player, the website owner would share in Will’s profits.
‘I thought, “If I have an album filled with songs about girls, what happens if tomorrow I write another song about a girl?”’ he told The Times. ‘So something that started off just with fifteen songs, in the next ten years could have 100 songs. Having twelve songs on a record? That day is done.’ He described his media player arrangement for Songs About Girls as ‘the whole multimedia enchilada’. Fans enjoyed both snacking and feasting on the music tortilla and its contents.
The album had originally been due to include collaborations with Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Q-Tip, Common, Snoop Dogg, Too Short, Busta Rhymes and Ludacris. However, the only one that made the final version was that with Snoop Dogg, who appears on ‘The Donque Song’. In due course, Cheryl Cole would contribute backing vocals to the single release of one of the tracks.
The BBC reviewer felt that the lack of collaborators made the album a lesser thing, saying: ‘The soulless record would have benefited from Adams tapping up contributors from his extensive list of heavyweight contacts and adding some bite to its bark’. That said, the reviewer was less than impressed by the one guest appearance that did make it, describing it as: ‘Snoop Dogg’s most vacuous cameo for some time’. The Sputnikmusic reviewer was even harsher on the album. ‘There’s not even one song here that sounds good enough to be a big single,’ he wrote, declaring the record ‘an abject failure on practically every level’.
Entertainment Weekly was similarly comprehensive in its dismissal of the album as a: ‘half-assed exercise in superficiality’, while Slant Magazine attacked its ‘appallingly bad’ lyrics. AllMusic was far more impressed, awarding the album the honour of the ‘best album-length production of the year’, and declaring it ‘a tour de force of next-generation contemporary R&B’, that ‘percolates with more innovation, enthusiasm and excitement than contemporary work by Pharrell, Kanye West, Mark Ronson, or anyone else remotely in the same league’. Commercially, the album outperformed his previous solo efforts but still failed to make much of a dent in the charts. For the time being, Will’s solo adventures would be relatively disastrous commercially when compared to the mammoth success his band was increasingly enjoying.
In promoting the album, Will gave glimpses into his personal life. He described to the Guardian how he makes relationships with women work. ‘These days I’m a masseuse and a cook,’ he said. ‘Then I become a cuddler, and a spooner. I’m a conversationalist. I just like to talk – to have random conversations about odd things, like dance music and jogging. If you don’t talk about a girl’s interests, then forget it. You need to inspire them to achieve all the things they want to achieve. As well as just saying, “You look hot today”. And in a good relationship, time is nothing. You’ve got to always keep your phone on, you’ve got to get Skype, get a webcam, get MSN, get Yahoo; get ’em all. You know? So you’re always available. That’s hot.’
As well as communication, he said, he is also keen on honesty in relationships – but only from a realistic starting point: ‘And you’ve got to try your hardest not to lie. But you can’t say you’re never going to, because then you’re lying.’ Fine words, yet Will’s personal life continued to be an enigmatic affair.
With his third solo album on the shelves, albeit not moving from them with much enthusiasm, Will turned his attention back to The Black Eyed Peas. However, he also had his fingers in a splendid feast of other pies. From production to politics, Will was spreading his gaze far and wide. First, though, he had to weather an emotional storm.
Will sets the scene of how he felt at the start of 2008. ‘I was feeling depressed,’ he later told the Daily Mail. So he decided that the best way to beat his blues was to drive out to the freeway and spray some graffiti, or ‘tag’, in Will’s lingo. ‘I stopped under a bridge on Route 101 and wrote “No” in big letters using a can of black paint,’ he said. ‘I’d almost finished when two cops arrived.’ There then ensued a chase. Will was unsuccessful in his getaway plan and ended up adding physical pain to the emotional torment he was suffering. ‘I broke out running across the freeway, tripped and broke my fifth metatarsal bone,’ he said. According to the Young Hollywood website, Will’s representative refused to comment on whether there had been any further repercussions after this incident.
What he really needed was not to spray graffiti, but to find something that would reignite his fire. Such an opportunity was just around the corner.
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The election campaign that propelled Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 was one of the slickest and most innovative force fields in political history. Just as John F. Kennedy had first harnessed the power of television during his campaigning in the 1960s, so did Obama successfully grapple with a new campaigning medium: the internet.
At the centre of his online electioneering was the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, and Will directed a campaign video harnessing this slogan into a musical force. It was inspired by a speech in which the candidate moved millions of listeners – including Will himself. ‘It made me reflect on the freedoms I have, going to school where I went to school, and the people that came before Obama like Martin Luther King, presidents like Abraham Lincoln that paved the way for me,’ he told ABC News.
The video he made was imaginative and attention-grabbing. It featured Will and a few dozen other stars including Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Scherzinger, Adam Rodriguez, Amber Valetta and Nick Cannon, speaking and singing along to a video of Obama’s benchmark speech. Will had teamed up with Jesse Dylan, the filmmaker son of Bob Dylan, to direct the ambitious project. Over forty-eight hours, they invited the galaxy of stars to pass through their studio and film their contributions to the campaigning collage. ‘I’m blown away by how many people wanted to com
e and be a part of it in a short amount of time,’ said Will when the project ended. ‘It was all out of love and hope for change and really representing America and looking at the world.’
The video, clocking in at a little over four minutes long, is shot in basic black-and-white, and its sparse and simple feel adds to the ‘community’ feel of the work. However, this on-the-surface modesty belies the slickness and thoughtfulness that went into its making. It premiered on ABC News in February 2008. However, as had always been the intention, the video’s true impact and influence was felt online, after it was uploaded onto the YouTube network and shared on Obama campaign websites. The online onslaught began on the campaign’s ‘Super Tuesday’. It became a truly viral effort and has now been watched over twenty-six million times. In August, Will performed the song live at an Obama campaign convention in Colorado, where his energetic performance whipped the crowd into quite a frenzy.
By this stage, the overall campaign was gathering such momentum that an Obama victory began to seem inevitable. Will’s part in that campaign was significant: it was to a large degree thanks to this video that the ‘Yes We Can’ slogan became so well known worldwide. However, the video was not without its critics. A Wall Street Journal writer described it as ‘deeply creepy’, dismissing its stars as people who ‘appear to be in some sort of trance’, before concluding ‘the whole thing has the feel of a cult of personality’. Other critics, including ostensible supporters of Obama, claimed to be ‘weirded out’ by it all.
None of these criticisms stood in the way of the video’s momentum, however. It won an Emmy award for ‘Best New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment’, with the panel praising its ‘passion and inspiration’. Will’s fellow executive producer of the video, Fred Goldring, said: ‘We are thrilled and honored to have received a prestigious Emmy Award, particularly in a brand-new category which acknowledges the ever-increasing impact of the convergence of digital content and delivery’.
