Will.i.am

by Danny White

  Will had another problem when his car was stolen as he attended the launch party for his own solo album. He had been photographed alongside the car as he arrived at the bash at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, but when he left at 2 a.m. it was nowhere to be seen. ‘My car was stolen ... what the f**k,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘Where is my f**king car ...??? This isn’t funny anymore. I’m going to be optimistic and pray that my car is returned and safe. #givemebackmycar this joke is getting old ...’

  His use of the word ‘joke’ to describe what had happened was precise: Will believed that there was a good chance the car’s disappearance was more of a prank than a crime. For that reason, he stated on Twitter, he did not intend immediately to contact the police about the disappearance of his custom-made DeLorean. ‘I’m not going to the police ... spread the word via tweets in case I’m getting punk’d’, he wrote. ‘I don’t want to waste tax dollars on pranks #wheresmycar’.

  He later returned to Twitter, to write: ‘I’m going to be optimistic and pray that my car is returned and is safe’, adding that he believed the punishment for its disappearance should be ‘hard and swift’. Two months earlier the car had been impounded by police after it was found to be unregistered.

  Prior to the car disappearance, the biggest story at Will’s party had been the arrival of a scantily clad Lindsay Lohan. The controversial, much-derided socialite announced that she wanted to work with Will. How he took that news is unknown. However, he was thrilled when he discovered his car had been found by businessman Ryan Friedlinghaus. Will tweeted: ‘my car has been found ... #bestnewsever thank you so much ryan ...’ However, on the car being returned to him, Will quickly discovered that some of its contents were missing. He hired private detectives to probe the mystery.

  *

  His enigmatic personal life continued to draw much speculation. In April, he was rumoured to be dating the former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell. When she joined him at the Rose Club in London, where he was performing a short solo set, tongues were set wagging. ‘It definitely seemed like they were on a date,’ the ubiquitous, unnamed ‘eye-witness’ told the Sun. ‘They were both really giggly with each other and were laughing all night. They arrived separately and left again at different times.’ Within weeks, Halliwell was revealed to be dating not Will but another celebrity – kooky comedian Russell Brand.

  At the time of writing, Will’s preferences remain mysterious. On the rare occasions that he speaks about his sex life, he tends to masterfully balance each revelation with a further smoke-screen, forever leaving the world guessing. ‘I’m not a gold digger, I’m a boob digger,’ he told the Sun in 2010. ‘I like boobs. But I was always the homie, the friend, rather than the lover. I’d have a crush on a girl and she’d say, “I don’t know, Will, I see you as my brother”.’

  In a rare candid moment, he told ES magazine what romance was like for him. He said that, for him, it is ‘just deep’. He added: ‘Then I like… [huge pause] then I get deep. Like, almost spiritual. Like spiritual and science. The marriage of the two. For me, love is like … that’s why it’s hard. I like talking about deep shit. Just lying in bed, snuggle-wuggles, conversation. I like to communicate, conversate, dive into freakin’ theories.’

  He entered more comfortable territory when, in early August 2012, he drove to NASA mission control to watch the Curiosity Rover land on Mars. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, he watched with childlike wonderment as the rover touched down in the early hours of the morning. He was there to listen as his song, ‘Reach for the Stars’, was the first piece of music ever to be broadcast back to Earth from Mars. He shared his excitement with his Twitter following. ‘I’m here @ #jpl ... I am proud to care and have passion for #stem ... watching humanity at its finest ...’ he wrote. The song was beamed 300 million miles back to Earth, so it could be heard at the JPL, where NASA staff danced and cheered as the accomplishment was confirmed.

  NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said: ‘will.i.am has provided the first song on our playlist of Mars exploration.’

  ‘It seems surreal,’ said Will. Wearing a grey suit as he spoke to a student audience, he added: ‘I didn’t want to do a song that was done on a computer. I wanted to show human collaboration and have an orchestra there and something that would be timeless, and translated in different cultures, not have like a hip-hop beat or a dance beat. A lot of times ... people in my field aren’t supposed to try to execute something classical, or orchestral, so I wanted to break that stigma.’

  This attention to detail was extraordinary. Even when he was breaking the boundary of having the first song played from Mars, Will was ensuring that he broke musical boundaries while doing so. Including in the recording a forty-piece orchestra, complete with French horns, he had handed the song a cinematic, iconic flavour. There was widespread respect for Will in the wake of his achievement. Only the Register and MSN, it seemed, had an issue with the broadcast, the former describing it as: ‘A depressing day for space and technology’, while MSN mocked the song’s lyrics, and sneered: ‘We can’t help thinking there are better songs to have introduced music to the Red Planet with’.

  Just hours after he had celebrated his Mars moment, Will was brought crashing back to earth when he crashed his Cadillac into a parked car in Los Angeles. One way or another, the summer of 2012 was not proving to be a happy one in automotive terms. Following what he described as ‘a long day and night’ in the recording studio with Cheryl Cole, at 3.30 a.m., with Cheryl in the passenger seat beside him, Will accidentally smashed his £100,000 car into a parked vehicle. Eyewitnesses said that his airbag opened and struck him in the face. Though the contact gave him a nosebleed, it certainly saved him from a potentially worse fate.

  Cole’s passenger airbag failed to work, and she was reportedly thrown face first into the car’s plush dashboard. She, too, was left with a nosebleed and bruising. Photographs of her clutching her face, with blood pouring from her nose were quickly snapped by fast-moving photographers. Police were called to the scene and the pair went to Cedars Sinai hospital. Will emerged later wearing a neck brace.

  As is his custom, Will used Twitter to speak to the world about the incident. ‘Car accidents are not dope,’ he tweeted. ‘I’m glad I’m OK’. In a follow-up tweet, he wrote: ‘We’re fine. Cheryl Cole [and I] were coming back from the studio but she and I are fine ... just a little wiplash [sic]’.

  Will’s manager, Polo Molina, then also logged on to Twitter: ‘Just spoke to @iamwill, everything is OK. He and Cheryl Cole are both fine. It was a minor fender bender after a long day/night in the studio’.

  Cole completed the online reassurance-fest, writing: ‘Don’t worry me and @iamwill are fine, promise’. Cole quickly made light of the incident, telling Capital Breakfast co-presenter Lisa Snowdon that it was Will’s loquaciousness that was to blame for what occurred. ‘He’s a bad talker. He was talking the face off us,’ she said. ‘He was talking about NASA and Mars and his song.’ Cole, who had to wear a black sling around her arm, also jokingly dubbed herself a ‘one-arm bandit’ on Twitter.

  Looking ahead to 2013, as well as more cinematic dabbling – having also voiced a character in the animated 2011 film Rio – Will planned to learn more about technology, by signing up for a computer programming course. ‘Next year I am going to school to take a computer science course,’ he told the Mirror. ‘When I am fifty-seven I still want to be relevant in popular culture and the way to be relevant within popular culture in the future is writing code. Code writers, they are my idols. Songwriters are cool – I can write songs, too – and bloggers are cool, but code writers? Those are the coolest in the world. When I was seventeen I had a dream and all the dreams I have had since seventeen I have done them beyond what I thought I was ever going to do. So now I want to go back to school and learn how to write code so I can participate in this whole new era that we are in. Writing songs is dope but writing code is better.’

  Just twelve years earlier, Will
had almost torn his hair out with frustration when the Black Eyed Peas album Bridging the Gap was leaked on Napster. Then, the world of technology seemed a dark, mysterious villain for a while. Now, he saw the virtual world just the same way he saw the ‘real’ world: as a playground, alive with opportunities for creativity, fun and profit.

  The man who was so caught out by the emergence of Napster, has become one of the industry’s most sharpest observers of the drastic changes that emerging technology is causing for the industry. He has even been appointed ‘director of creative innovation’ at technology giant Intel.

  ‘There are no more dreamers,’ Will told the Financial Times. ‘I am dreaming for Intel, to rethink what a computer is going to be.’ Since those dark days when he felt powerless as The Black Eyed Peas tracks were leaked ahead of release, he has grasped the nettle of technology and is now as in control of its seemingly relentless forces as it is possible to be. ‘Technology is so big right now,’ he told Boombox. ‘It’s that advanced, man. You can set your own studio up with a microphone that you bought from Best Buy. You can record your vocals on to your laptop and put a little compression on it because everybody is listening to music now on their phones and computers. Nobody listens to music on big systems anymore like back in the Thriller days.’

  The latter trend is key: with large, bass-heavy speakers now becoming a thing of the past in many homes, musicians have to create music that works on the sometimes weak and tinny speakers of smartphones, pods, pads and computers. Yet for dance acts, the music also has to sound good on the huge speakers of nightclubs. Furthermore, as soon as the industry gets its collective head around one development, along comes another to change the rules once again. It is an industry in astonishing flux. Will is one of the figures who have some sense of what is happening; do not bet against him.

  Although he has ruled himself out of a future in politics – he has said he believes he would quickly be assassinated were he to become a proper politician – Will seems likely to step back into that sphere at some stage. In the Spring of 2012, he was approached by David Axelrod, communications director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, to see if he could conjure up a sequel to the 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ video to help Obama’s campaign. Although Will tried, he was unable to come up with a concept that he felt was worthy of consideration on the same scale as his viral 2008 video.

  He eschewed an immediate encore more out of a sense of high standards than an overall unwillingness. ‘Obama has done a great deal as President up to this point and I don’t care about any backlash,’ he told the Sun. ‘I don’t follow waves or trends or emotions. If I did I would never have supported Obama in the first place. Being President is not a two-year fix. It’s got to be an eight-year ride and I’m in there with him. It took us eight years under Bush to get us in this mess. At least give the dude eight years to get us out of it. Give the guy a chance. I saw him at The White House a few months ago and he was finding it tough. We need to get behind him as a country.’

  He said that Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney was making a key mistake in the 2012 election battle by allowing his supporters to push the wrong button. ‘People say Romney ran businesses and that means he should be president,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘America isn’t a business. America needs to be like a parent – what’s good for our kids, where are they going to school, how can you guide them? Imagine if your parent was Enron and raised you like that,’ he laughed. ‘You don’t want that dad.’

  *

  It is his restlessness that continues to define Will. He has offered up a possible answer as to why he cannot seem to sit still: he suffers from tinnitus. This condition leaves sufferers with a regular ‘ringing’ sound in one or both of their ears. There is no external source for the sound, which sometimes varies from a ringing one to one better described as a buzzing, roaring, hissing or even whistling. Sometimes sufferers experience the sound more or less constantly, others experience only sporadic episodes.

  Will has suffered badly from it, to the extent that he said: ‘I don’t know what silence sounds like any more. Music is the only thing which eases my pain.’ This, he concludes, is one of the biggest drivers of his phenomenal work rate. ‘I can’t be still. Work calms me down. I can’t be quiet as that’s when I notice the ringing in my ears. There’s always a beep there every day, all day. Like now. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve had this but it’s gradually got worse.’

  Even during interviews with the press, journalists have noticed how Will sometimes presses a finger into one of his ears. His statement that work calms him down is revelatory. This reversal of the more usual human experience – that it is leisure, not work, that is relaxing – explains to a large extent why he so enjoys professional activity. It should not, as we have seen throughout these pages, be taken as a definitive explanation, though.

  Will’s ambition and his sharp focus on the commercial potential of life is not universally admired. Some music-industry figures of generations past have wondered what happened to putting artistry ahead of commerce. The spectre of the tortured artist, willing to disappear from the public eye for years at a time, rather than working and promoting relentlessly, is now a rare one. The twenty-first-century celebrity is often a stranger to idleness, unlike many of their twentieth-century equivalents.

  Of this generation’s headline acts, perhaps only Adele operates in the old-fashioned style. Almost all the other big names seem to work at a more frantic rate. This is beginning to draw criticism from the old guard, who feel that today’s stars have their priorities wrong. Damon Albarn of Blur has taken personal aim at Will to this end. ‘I mean, will.i.am was a miserable old sod,’ he told XFM radio. ‘Wearing his own stuff – what is that all about? Never wearing anything other than this quasi-Star Trek, slightly rubbery bondage kind of stuff. Is there never a day when he wears an old T-shirt?’

  Will is, as he likes to put it himself, too busy turning his own dreams into reality to let the criticism trouble him. He never gets used to the trappings of his fame, and the boyish side of him never wants to. More often than not, his every task excites him, however many times he has done it before. His nerves might never entirely lift. ‘It’s like I’ve never been on stage before,’ he told the Daily Star. ‘I’ve played to a million people in Brazil at the World Cup and at the Super Bowl. You’d think I have nerves of steel, but I feel brand-new again.’

  He has also admitted: ‘It’s amazing all the love I’m getting. I was talking to apl ... and saying it feels like 2002 again for me. 2002 was when “Where is the Love?” was about to kick off. In 2012, it’s a different level.’

  As well as performing and producing, he will also continue to manage and mentor other artists, including Cheryl Cole. He claims to have a long-term plan in place for her. ‘The Cheryl that we know now is different from the one we’re going to know ten years from now,’ he has vowed. Should his words come true, this could make for a fascinating turn of events.

  The wheels of Will’s breathless, creative and ambition-driven life continue to turn. Where will they take him next? The sense of urgency that has driven him for so long continues unabated. ‘I’m too, like, right now right now right now right now right now,’ he said of how he operates. ‘Impatient is not the right word. It’s angst. Let’s go. Right now.’

  We return to his hard-knock childhood growing up in the ghetto: an experience that continues to inform and motivate him, but something he is at pains to never glamorize. ‘I come from the projects, but I chose to go this route,’ he said of his career. ‘I don’t wanna remember the s*** I saw, I don’t wanna talk about my friends that got shot: I wanna do music that makes me happy. Dark music gives me anxiety. I get scared! That’s why Black Eyed Peas’ s*** is happy, because I can get inside it and feel comfortable. I can escape from the world and go and live in the music.’ The man who is will.i.am in 2012 is scarcely different from the boy who was Will growing up in the 1970s and 80s: both love to dream and to escap
e.

  Away from work, what could Will’s personal life look like in the future? Might he finally take his foot off the gas of his many professional endeavours and let a truly special someone into his life one day? ‘Working hard and looking to the future is what will.i.am is all about,’ said Will, the third-person vernacular he chose to hide behind proving unable to mask the sincerity of his statement. Even when he admits to personal ambitions, there is a grander mission underpinning them. ‘Soon I want to settle down and have lots of girl babies, because I don’t want to add to the destruction of the planet,’ he told the Guardian in 2008. ‘It’s a man’s world, and I think it’s gonna be a female that changes it all.’

  It is not hard to understand which female in Will’s life gave him such a quasi-feminist perspective on the human race.

  Bibliography

  Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell,

  Tom Bower, Faber & Faber, 2012

  Fallin’ Up: My Story, Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas with

  Steve Dennis, Touchstone 2011

  Index

  Adams, William James Jr, see will.i.am

  Adams, William James Sr (father) ref 1

  Adele ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Aguilera, Christina ref 1

  Akon ref 1

  Albarn, Damon ref 1

  AllMusic ref 1

  apl.de.ap:

  and ‘Fallin’ Up’ ref 1