Will.i.am (7 page)

The band’s next album began to be developed in November 2001 and was released two years to the month later. The heart of the album was the track ‘Where is the Love?’ –
the song that would propel the band to dizzy new
heights of fame, and was inspired by a historic tragedy. On 11 September 2001, the Black Eyed Peas were in northern California,
where they had been working on new material. Will was up early and was watching television when he heard the news of the terrorist attacks on the east coast of America. He watched as the aftermath
of the attacks on New York began to unfold, then rushed upstairs to wake Taboo and tell him the news. ‘Shit, man, this is scary: we’re being attacked!’ he told his bandmate. As
Taboo struggled to absorb the news, Will added: ‘America is being attacked. It’s the end of the fucking world, brother!’

They switched the bedroom television on and were greeted by the day’s horribly iconic scene: the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center. ‘I saw the second one hit ... right
into the building,’ Will told Taboo. ‘Boom! I tell you, dude ... this is it! We’re being fucked. We’re fucked!’

As they watched the towers fall, Will’s fear soared. ‘We’ve got to go home,’ he told the band, ‘we’ve got to go home’. With all air traffic grounded in
America, flying home was not to be an option for several days. Therefore, they hired wagons and a U-Haul to take them and their equipment back to New York. During the six-hour journey they sat
speechless as they listened to the radio report and discuss the day’s events. With a tour due to start in just forty-eight hours, the band members were not in the mood to perform
– and suspected that their audiences would not be in the mood for concerts. Yet they were also mindful that to cancel or postpone the dates would be, to an extent, allowing the
terrorists who had attacked America another victory.

Will visited his grandmother to ask her advice on how they should proceed. She told him that if God had not intended their music to help heal people, then the tour would never have been
arranged. She told Will that he had to offer therapy for people at the time of national crisis. ‘Your music matters, and you are one of God’s angels,’ she said. By this stage, she
scarcely needed to deliver her final verdict: that they should do the tour, as planned.

The tour itself proved to be a dramatic rollercoaster experience. Due to the involvement of Coca-Cola in the promotion of the dates, the audience size varied spectacularly from venue to venue.
On occasion, this made for some peculiar experiences. In New Jersey, for instance, just thirteen fans turned up to the sizeable venue. This meant the entire audience was in the front row.
Naturally, Will managed to make light of the situation by acting as if he were playing to an enormous venue, packed to the rafters. ‘How y’all doin’?’ he bellowed to the
thirteen fans. His humour, and indeed his humility, was the saviour of the evening. The band handed pieces of fruit to each of the audience members and asked them their names so that Will could
embark on improvised,
personalized raps for each of them in turn.

A few nights later, in Manhattan, the audience was 400-strong. At all the dates, Will made an announcement that no terrorist could stop the world from turning or music from being made. His
defiant and uplifting speeches were just what the country needed as it healed itself. Even Will’s positivity was tested, though, by the atmosphere of paranoia, distrust and racism that he
detected among some Americans in the aftermath of the attacks. Where, he wondered, is the love?

That question became the centrepiece of the next song they wrote. As they worked in the studio, each of the band members was trying to express how they felt about the attacks and their
consequences. It was Will who came up with the idea of a child asking his mother what was wrong with the world, the conceit that became the opening lyric of the song. As the song came together, it
still seemed to lack one thing: a really powerful hook to up the emotional stakes. It was Taboo who solved this vacuum, but he had to work hard to convince Will his idea was a winner.

Taboo spoke to *NSYNC pin-up Justin Timberlake, who was planning to launch a solo career, and played him the song as it stood. His task to Timberlake was to come up with a ‘Marvin
Gaye-style’ chorus to complete the song. Within an hour, Timberlake had done so. However, when Taboo
excitedly phoned Will to tell him the news, Will was less than
excited. At first, he – inaccurately – dismissed Timberlake as ‘the dude from Backstreet Boys’. Taboo convinced Will to hear him out and, two weeks later, Timberlake joined
the band in the studio. The session got off on a bad footing, due to the fact that Timberlake had just split from his famous girlfriend, Britney Spears. At first, he was more interested in speaking
about his heartache than performing the chorus he had written. The band found themselves having to act as counsellors, rather than musicians, in order to ease Timberlake back into a more positive,
and, therefore, creative, frame of mind. When he finally entered the booth to sing, he quickly dispelled Will’s fears. After he had sung his part, Will grinned in appreciation and told the
proud Taboo that Timberlake’s performance was ‘dope!’.

In an interview with
Faze
magazine later, Will recalled his initial concerns about Timberlake’s inclusion. ‘At the time, nobody was checking for Justin,’ he said.
‘He had *NSYNC written all over his face. He was not cool in the urban world, not hip, not creative, not groundbreaking. I was like, why are we going to put Justin on “Where is the
Love?”. You put Justin on it, you’re going to mess it up!’

They worked on further tracks and eventually came to the decision that they needed a female voice added to the track ‘Shut Up’. The names of various candidates were
discussed, including Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger. In the end, they called singer Stacey Ferguson – also known as Fergie – to the studio to audition for the song.
Fergie was, at this stage, only being considered to guest vocal on one track, as she had her heart set on a solo career, the launch of which she hoped Will would assist her in.

However, when producer Jimmy Iovine heard the track he not only considered it the stand-out song of the album – superior even to band favourite ‘Where is the Love?’ – but
proof that Fergie should become a full-time member of the band. ‘You need to put that girl in the group,’ said Iovine. Will and his male bandmates were not immediately convinced. They
decided to throw her in at the deep end by inviting her to join them onstage at a festival in Australia. Though they did not make this explicit to her, the simple truth was this: how she fared
onstage would determine whether she would be invited to join the band or not.

As it turned out, Fergie slotted perfectly into their live unit and proved to have bags of charisma. Everyone agreed that she should be invited to join the band full-time. Despite her previous
protestations that she was only interested in becoming a solo performer, she accepted the invitation with relish. It was a big moment for her. She had enjoyed roles as a child actress, a television
presenter and then as the de facto lead singer of a three-piece girl band
called Wild Orchid – and she had developed a reputation as a wild one along the way, confessing
to drug addiction and lesbian experiences.

In the future, her relationship with Will would be a stormy one. For now, though, she was warmly welcomed into the band’s line-up. Her appointment sealed the end of vocalist Kim
Hill’s place in the band. Hill’s relationship with Will – which had begun with her considering him a ‘little brother’ – had declined. ‘Things started to
get a little tricky with Will and I,’ she explained later to the Black Eyed Peas fan site, Portal Black Eyed Peas. ‘It was very difficult for me to stand onstage and perform, because I
felt like the chemistry had been tainted, and once your audience doesn’t believe that what you projecting is organic, it’s just not gonna work.’

With the line-up complete, the band changed their name from Black Eyed Peas to The Black Eyed Peas. Whatever their name, the group were about to experience a surge in their popularity and fame.
That surge began in the summer of 2003, when they released the first single from
Elephunk
, ‘Where is the Love?’ The band had been invited to be the opening act for the
joint-headline tour of Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. Over those forty-five dates, the band measured the growing impact of their new single by the response of the audiences as they
performed it live as
the final number of their twenty-minute set. The single – which was released two weeks into the tour – was receiving growing radio airplay. Each
evening, more of the audience would be singing and dancing along.

The single reached number eight in the American
Billboard
charts. In the UK it went to number one and became both the bestselling single of the year and the twenty-fifth bestselling
single of the millennium to date. It also reached the summit of the charts in several countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia. Will and his bandmates would regularly recite out loud the words:
‘Number one around the world’, just to see how it felt to say them. Eight years of hard work were finally paying off.

With the success came an increase in their workload. They learned how it felt to be dragged out of bed before dawn, to spend the day in hectic promotional activities that only ended after
midnight. Mainstream breakfast-television show commitments sat uneasily with nightclub appearances, but all the different demands had to be met. As they worked harder, their management attempted to
keep their energy levels up by bringing them more and more good news. Nothing could stop personalities and tempers from fraying on occasion.

As well as fraught tempers, there were other consequences – and Will was the first to discover them. At the ceremony
to celebrate twenty years of MTV at New
York’s Radio City Music Hall, he noted the toll that all this was having on Taboo. The evening is now most notorious for the kiss that was shared onstage between Britney Spears and Madonna.
However, within Will’s circles, there was a more immediate issue. Taboo, by his own later admission, drank three bottles of wine in just sixty minutes at the ceremony. He began to draw
attention to himself with noisy, drunken behaviour. With the band due to perform at an after-show party, Will quickly decided that they would have to do so without Taboo. ‘Just get him out of
here before it gets any worse,’ he ordered. Will had warned his errant bandmate about his hedonistic ways before. He followed up with a more direct comment, telling Taboo he had to
‘slow it down’. It would be a while before Taboo heeded those words.

However, the ruthless promotional treadmill continued to move along. For nine intense months, Will and his band travelled around the world promoting, performing and partying. Taboo estimates
that they gave 465 performances in a single year. The title and theme of their next album would be influenced by these heady days. All the hard work was paying off:
Elephunk
was becoming a
hit around the world, propelling the band to new heights. It reached number three in the UK, number fourteen in America and charted respectably in many other territories. This
was significant, as Will had told the band just before they started work on the album, that this was the big one, the make or break moment in their career. ‘We haven’t
proved anything yet,’ he had told them. With
Elephunk
’s sales, they had now.

The critical response to the album, though, was not quite so satisfying. America’s influential
Village Voice
was characteristically grudging in its praise, describing the album as
one ‘in which the unbelievably dull El Lay alt-rappers fabricate the brightest actual pop album of 2003’. However, it was the paper’s rating of ‘A minus’ that
counted.

Rolling Stone
said that ‘cliched observations, preachy lyrics and MTV-ready posturing float atop meticulously detailed production’.
Entertainment Weekly
was sniffy,
too. Its reviewer said that the album ‘courts the mainstream with an almost comic ferocity, jumping on every bandwagon that’s passed’. Thank goodness, then, for the Popmatters
website, which crowned an admiring review with this thundering praise: ‘If
Elephunk
doesn’t move you, if you don’t end up with a massive grin slapped across your face, if
you don’t heed the built-in dance demands, then check your pockets; there should be a receipt for your soul in there somewhere.’
Drowned in Sound
also beat the drum for the
record, saying: ‘Look on the surface, and you’ve
got an album full of memorable songs, hooks that lodge in your mind ... but look in depth, and it’s quality
from the top down.’

In a sense, the sometimes harsh time that the band were experiencing at the pens of the critics was a result of their more admirable traits. The positivity of their message was one that sat ill
at ease with the critics, who tend to be a breed more interested in ‘cool’ than happiness. Although Will’s band have little in common with British stadium act Coldplay, both acts
found that their attitude chimed enormously with mass, mainstream audiences precisely for the reason it did not with reviewers. For instance, take
Blender
magazine’s review, which
concluded of the band’s happy attitude: ‘Problem is, that kind of constant high gets as dull as life on Prozac.’

For Will, the prospect of reining in their upbeat message in order to please a handful of journalists was never on the cards. In time, more and more journalists would come to appreciate his
ways, particularly those on more considered titles. For instance, when they performed at the Grammys, the
Washington Post
said theirs was ‘the most impassioned performance of the
night’. Their appeal to the mainstream was reaffirmed when the NBA chose the
Elephunk
track ‘Let’s Get Retarded’ as the anthem for the play-off matches. The lyrics
and title of the song were edited to ‘Let’s Get It
Started’. They also gave the song to the Democrat party to use for the election campaign of White House
hopeful John Kerry. Will hoped the song would help send Kerry to victory over the much-maligned George W. Bush. It did not do so, but Will enjoyed his brush with politics. Next time he got involved
with a presidential campaign it would be in a much higher-profile sense. An ultimately triumphant one, too.