Will.i.am

by Danny White

  In a separate interview, with Extra, he elaborated. ‘It’s mean, but a nice mean. It’s hard, but melodic. It’s aggressive, but smooth. It’s the next level, but today. She’s a sweetheart. We made music and that’s what I like. When you’re doing things because you just love it, without the, ya know, “we need a single” pressure, when you’re just in there having fun, that’s what I love.’

  His boyish enthusiasm shines through afresh in his words. One senses that, to a large extent, it is when producing for other artists that Will is at his happiest. The innocence he feels in such scenarios is robbed from him when working with his own band, with all the added pressure that entails.

  He has also entered that bubble of innocence with Irish rock icons U2. He felt too nervous and in awe of them to suggest one of his songs for them to record. Instead, he said, he stuck to production duties. ‘I recorded for a month with U2. Even though I worked with Michael Jackson, their U2-ness intimidated me,’ he told NME magazine. Indeed, Will has been accused of borrowing the melody for ‘I Gotta Feeling’ from the U2 track ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’.

  Jimmy Iovine has pointed out that there is a connection between the tracks, but only in the sense of inspiration. ‘I sent will.i.am over to the studio to do some remixes on “I’ll Go Crazy”,’ he told the Sun. ‘He works on them for two weeks, comes back and writes “I Gotta Feeling”.’ Iovine added: ‘The chords are U2 chords, 100 per cent. Will even told them.’

  Will’s excitement at working with rock gods U2 might surprise some. However, his musical tastes are far broader than casual perusal might suggest. Furthermore, Will was inspired by the band’s longevity as much as anything. Formed in 1976, the Irish band has dominated the music scene since they first enjoyed chart success in the mid-1980s. ‘I look at U2 and think, “Wow, I hope our group can stay together that long and still make brilliant music”,’ Will told the Sun. ‘And just being around Bono and the guys is inspiring. It’s like how a government should be. Bono for president of the world, I say.’

  When The Black Eyed Peas had toured with U2, they had been impressed by how down to earth the Irish front man was. In sharp contrast with their experience with the Rolling Stones a few years earlier, the two bands had mingled happily backstage. In his autobiography, Taboo writes that the most contact they had was a brief ‘Hi, guys’, from the Stones, before going their separate ways. There were no hard feelings from Will and his band over this – Will would later work with Mick Jagger – but the open and friendly Bono certainly made a refreshing change.

  It is little wonder that Will so admires the energetic Bono: the tireless way in which Will himself approaches life is remarkable. Observed from afar it would be hard to believe that here was a man already a multimillionaire. Although the royalties from his Black Eyed Peas material were rolling in, he continued to work with the ferocity and energy of a man struggling to keep his financial head above water. No amount of money, it seemed, could satisfy his hunger, not least because Will has never been motivated by purely financial dreams. Rather, it is the satisfaction of creativity and positivity that so drive him.

  His fortune was about to be added to dramatically, though, as the band released a song that would dwarf even the iconic ‘Where is the Love?’.

  5 The E.N.D. and the Beginning

  During the summer of 2009, The Black Eyed Peas made chart history when they had singles simultaneously at number one and number two in the US Billboard chart. How they got to such a position itself tells the story of their fifth album: The E.N.D.

  For Will, that story began down under in Sydney, Australia. He was there to film his part in a new movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Having made his cinematic debut voicing the part of a hippo named Moto Moto in the 2008 animated film Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, he took a step up with the X-Men franchise. He explained his role, and its filming, in an interview with MTV. ‘I’m a teleporter, I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere. Boom, boom, boom!’ he said. ‘My character’s name is John Wraith. He’s a black Texan. He’s not a cowboy, but his gear suggests that he is. He’s just a badass who’ll whoop your ass.’

  He was so excited to land the part, and had a battle scar to show for his involvement. He explained that he acquired the scar during the filming of an intense scene. ‘It was my fight scene. I was real into it, and then I missed my mark, and I punched the camera and broke the lens! But that goes to show you. I ain’t to be messed with, because I break lenses!’

  The camera was fixed and filming resumed, but, by Will’s own admission, the scene had to be reshot a number of times before he nailed it. ‘It probably took me fifty times, but I got it. It was hard for me, but it was cool and fun at the same time.’ (Another challenge the experience threw up was its placing of Will alongside the action-movie hero actor Hugh Jackman. Will said that this made him feel fat in comparison. ‘Hugh is ripped, man,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I saw him every morning and felt bad about my body.’)

  While filming in Australia, he had asked some youngsters where the best hip-hop clubs could be found. They could not know it at the time, but their reply would ultimately shape the sound of the next Black Eyed Peas’ album. They told him that as far as they were concerned it was not hip-hop that was cool any more, but electro music. He investigated the scene and was enlivened and inspired as a result. He loved this new sub-genre of dance music, with its basic, but almost hypnotizing, beats.

  He returned to Los Angeles even more inspired than usual and told his bandmates all about his discovery. Together, they continued and deepened the research into the burgeoning electro scene so they could incorporate it into their own material.

  Taboo was not immediately won over by the plan, but Will was insistent. ‘This is the shit that is going to take us to places we have never been,’ Will told him. He then told the rest of the band that the electro sound was going to do ‘big things’, so it was imperative that they all ‘listen to it, learn it, study it, believe it – and become it’. It was the most excited he had been for some time, and his bandmates took heed of his words. They had lost count of the number of times that Will’s policy announcements had proved winners.

  The result of their immersion in electro was their fifth album, The E.N.D. The title has two meanings. First, it was the band’s subtle and mischievous dig at the media, which had for some years been predicting the band would split – even at one point reporting that it had. To Will’s surprise, the media seemed unable or unwilling to compute the concept that he could have a solo career at the same time as being fully committed to his band. To them, his solo activity could only mean he was about to jump ship.

  He thought the title he chose for the album might ‘cause some controversy’. The initials of the title stood for ‘Energy Never Dies’, a clever inversion of the word they spelled out. They worked on the album in London – where they returned to the Metropolis Studios – and Los Angeles. David Guetta produced the album, having had a curious introduction to Will in Ibiza. While partying in a nightclub, Will was passed a microphone and invited to perform some impromptu rap. Only later did he realize that the man who had passed him the mic was Guetta, a Frenchman who has been a leading light of the dance scene for decades. He contacted Guetta and invited him to work with the band on their new material.

  These were fertile times for the band, and their sessions resulted in a long list of around fifty songs from which to choose for the final cut. Eventually, the track list was cut down to just fifteen songs, which formed The E.N.D., a piece of work that Will himself described as: ‘an album that was about escapism – light on grey matter but heavy on good-time vibes’.

  In no other track on the album – indeed, in no other song ever released by the band – was the good-time vibe stronger than on the one that became their biggest hit, and the song that is so widely associated with them. It was Guetta who provided the spark that ignited into this monstrously successful party hit. He sent Will a basic beat, which immediately set
him into action. Just over an hour later, Will had developed it into the best part of a song, which would be called ‘I Gotta Feeling’. Interestingly, as Taboo reveals in his memoir, at first, the band did not realize what a hit they had on their hands. They loved the song but had no idea how huge it was to become. Will was unabashed about the song’s message, and its part on the album.

  ‘It’s dedicated to all the party people out there in the world that want to go out and party,’ he told Marie Claire. ‘Mostly every song on The Black Eyed Peas record is painting a picture of our party life. It was a conscious decision to make this type of record. Times are really hard for a lot of people and you want to give them escape and you want to make them feel good about life, especially at these low points.’

  Another pivotal song on the album was called ‘Boom Boom Pow’, in which the electro influence could be strongly heard. Heavy on beat but light on lyrics, it was an unlikely hit, but a hit all the same. It only became a single by chance, after a rough version of it was somehow leaked on the Internet. Will decided the best response to the unfortunate leak was to release the song as a single right away. Although the band had never considered it to be a radio-friendly song, they put it out as a single to see what the reaction would be. Contrary to their assessment, the song turned out to be hugely popular on the airwaves. It received, in the words of Taboo, ‘humungous’ airplay and sold enough copies to reach number one four weeks after its sudden release. The band was stunned that this unfancied song had reached the summit. Imagine their surprise, then, when it stayed there for the best part of three months. It was also a number one hit in Britain, Canada, Belgium and Australia.

  If the band believed this was to be the peak of their success, they were about to be pleasantly surprised. When ‘I Gotta Feeling’ was released, on 16 June, ‘Boom Boom Pow’ was still enjoying itself at number one. On its release, ‘I Gotta Feeling’ went straight to number two, giving the band their top-two domination. At that stage, only eleven bands in US chart history had managed that feat, and it had been five years since anyone had pulled it off.

  As ‘I Gotta Feeling’ became a favourite among first club-goers and then the wider public, sales rocketed. It replaced ‘Boom Boom Pow’ at number one and stayed there for eight weeks. This meant that the band had been at the top of the charts with one song or the other for twenty consecutive weeks.

  The band was suddenly making chart history. The frenzy around them was becoming ever wilder. When ‘Gotta’ was featured on the opening episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, it reached an even wider audience. The song was the soundtrack to a spectacular ‘flashmob’ surprise for the show’s host. Some 20,000 people took part in the stunt, on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Will, a friend of Winfrey, was so proud to have been at the centre of such a memorable opening to the television queen’s new series. The band’s interaction with the audience, spearheaded as ever by Will’s charisma, took an already remarkable spectacle to new heights. ‘There’s something really special when you take an audience and, instead of just being passive and watching, you invite them to participate,’ said director Michael Gracey. ‘That’s why it was so magical for both parties. Two groups of people came together to create something that neither of them could have done alone.’

  The band performed the hit song at a number of other prestigious, high-profile events. These included the Super Bowl XLIV in Miami, Florida, and at the Grammys. However, none were as eye-catching as the Oprah flashmob. Here was a thousands-strong, visual spectacle that defined perfectly the themes of positivity and unity that have been so important to Will throughout his life.

  When The E.N.D. was released, this magnificent momentum was maintained. It hit the number-one spot in America and was praised by the critics. This time, Rolling Stone was admiring of the work, and focused on Will in particular. ‘It’s easy to make fun of will.i.am, an LA operator who has become a ubiquitous pop-culture presence, turning up on red carpets and appearing on CNN in hologram form,’ it wrote. ‘On The E.N.D., he does the musical equivalent of the CNN shtick: doing silly, gratuitous, cool things with technology just because, you know, it can be done. As often as not the results are dumb. And that’s an awfully good thing.’

  Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times focused on ‘I Gotta Feeling’, and stated: ‘It’s impossible to begrudge the high. Yes, the song says, this is a sloppy party. But it’s one where you’re welcome. So come on in.’ Only the Independent sneered, arguing of the album’s songs: ‘to call these slim sketches songs is to bestow a dignity they don’t deserve’. Will could easily overlook the insult, as once again the wider and truer jury of public opinion was offering an enthusiastic verdict on the album. The E.N.D. was proving to be a new beginning.

  Will saw the album as a reflection of the post-album era. ‘It’s a diary ... of music that at any given time, depending on the inspiration, you can add to it,’ he said, quoted on the band’s official website. ‘What is an album when you put twelve songs on iTunes and people can pick at it like scabs? That’s not an album. There is no album anymore’.

  To which genre did this multigenre ‘diary’ belong? Will described it as ‘a lot of dance stuff, real melodic, electronic, soulful. We call it, like, electric static funk, something like that.’ Whichever name one chose to apply to the rich, multiflavoured smorgasbord that the album served up, there was no doubting its commercial viability. While Will’s solo career had, thus far, been a more indulgent project, his Black Eyed Peas manifesto was one that had its eye firmly on the market.

  And the market had an eye firmly on the band – intensely so in the cases of some of the band’s more dedicated fans. While in Japan, Will had an encounter with a fan who had paid close attention to his song ‘Boom Boom Pow’, which he later recounted to NME magazine. ‘In Japan this girl comes up and says, “I reckon in ‘Boom Boom Pow’, you say boom 101 times”.’ Will assumed she was winding him up. ‘I was like, “Yeah, right,” but said, “Thank you so much for listening to the song.” I got back on the train, counted my booms and she was right,’ he said. ‘She counted all the booms.’

  This is just the sort of obsessive attention to detail that Will admires. He had, albeit momentarily, just encountered a fan very much like himself. However, as he and his band’s army of fans swelled ever wider, there would also be trolls attracted to them for the wrong reason. Will’s band was about to become the target for one of showbiz’s most notorious critics. By the time their clash was over, things would have become very serious.

  *

  There is nothing quite like a celebrity spat to get the public talking. Feuds of the famous are loved by the media and their readers and viewers alike. Will found himself caught up in one such spat in 2009, when he had a very public falling-out with the flamboyant, opinionated celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton. Hilton, whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr, is no stranger to controversy. He launched a blog, eventually called Perez Hilton, in 2001, the light-hearted wordplay in the title reflecting both his Latino heritage and his friendship with socialite Paris Hilton. However, while Hilton became a firm supporter of several stars – and a personal friend of some, too – he has also become notorious for his feuds with some celebrities. His combination of catty posts about celebrities’ appearances and some hard-nosed news revelations have made him a contentious and polarizing figure. Meanwhile, his notoriety has risen.

  Therefore, Will was far from the first famous person to become embroiled in an argument with Hilton. His clash with the blogger was, though, a particularly spectacular one. The problem started at an after-show party following a music-award show in Toronto. According to Hilton, Fergie had approached him at the party to ask him why he was being so critical of her on his blog. Hilton had also been dismissive of the band’s latest single.

  Hilton’s literary style rarely pulled any punches, so confrontations such as these are not unheard of. However, many celebrities prefer to make their complaints remotely, or via their representatives. Few are willing
to complain directly to their critics. Following this conversation, says Hilton on his website, Will approached him later in the evening and told him: ‘I need you to never write about my band on your website again.’

  Following an exchange of words, Hilton says he was attacked outside the venue. ‘I was in shock,’ said the blogger in a video post. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened before.’ He accused The Black Eyed Peas’ manager Liborio Molina of the assault. Hilton also tweeted his side of the story, in a dramatic 4 a.m. posting. ‘I was assaulted by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and his security guards. I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke.’ On his blog, Hilton claimed that one of Will’s managers had hit him ‘two or three times’.

  Will hit back in a video blog: ‘This is very wrong ... that you are tweeting that I did this,’ he said. ‘Once again, you are disrespecting me [and] all that I stand for.’ He claimed that Hilton shouted at him: ‘You’re not a f**king artist ... you’re a f**king f*ggot.’

  Hilton confirmed, in an interview with the Associated Press, that he had indeed used these words. Hilton said: ‘He was like, “You need to respect me”. He was in my face. He was obviously trying to intimidate me and scare me. I was like, “I don’t need to respect you”. I don’t respect you and I did say this, and I knew that it would be the worst thing I could possibly say to him because he was acting the way he was. I said, “You know what, I don’t respect you and you’re gay and stop being such a faggot.”’

  Video footage, obtained by the TMZ website, backed up that these words were used and that they proved the inflammatory moment in the incident. In its frame-by-frame analysis of the footage, TMZ correctly reports that after the ‘faggot’ word was used to describe Will, ‘the scene suddenly turns chaotic – and in the mess someone punches Perez in the face.’