Will.i.am (3 page)

The physical punishment 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.’

He received $10,000 for his agreement on the deal, but the prestige and boost it gave him were immeasurable. He even began ghostwriting lyrics for Eazy-E. ‘I knew how to write those kind
of rhymes, I just didn’t want to rap,’ he said. ‘Eazy-E was one of those cats that wanted to have dope MCs around him to write his shit, or to just be there. He just wanted to be
surrounded by dope shit. Now, I’m not saying that I was one of his dope-shit selections, but he wasn’t closed-minded, that guy.’

The credibility that this deal lent Will can’t be overestimated. As a schoolboy he had been noted by one of the leading rap artists of the moment. ‘I was in high school, so it was a
dream come true,’ he said in an interview with
Hip-Hop DX
. ‘To be in the eleventh grade, twelfth grade, and you’re running with Eazy. N.W.A. was, still … think
about what they were in ’92, ’93. That was unbelievable. That’s like being in high school right now, and you’re working with … you can’t compare it. You
can’t compare it to 50 Cent or Jay-Z, because Eazy-E was the first nigga.’

He later recalled how he showed off about his success. ‘I come to school with a record deal, like, “Yo, I got a record deal, ten G’s”,’ he added. ‘To a
seventeen-year-old, ten thousand dollars – granted, it was, like, for life, Eazy-E had me signed like for ever.’

Will wanted to confirm the faith that was increasingly being placed in him and so he began to take part in ‘rapping battles’ at a nightclub called Ballistyx. It
was there that he and apl first met their future bandmate, Taboo, putting the seal on the initial line-up of what would become the Black Eyed Peas.

It was a friend of Will’s, known as Mooky, who suggested that he meet up with Taboo. Will remembered seeing Taboo – whose real name is Jaime Luis Gómez – as he was
dancing or, in their words, ‘doing something special’. Wearing ‘thrift’ clothes, complete with a beret, Taboo made for quite a sight. ‘He’s kind of scary
looking, but his dancing is dope,’ apl told Will. Soon, both men began to wonder: ‘Who’s the dancer?’

As for Taboo, he remembered seeing a sixteen-year-old ‘eccentric-looking black dude’, who was ‘rapping like a madman’. As Will rapped he played with his dreadlocks. His
‘wide-eyed intensity’ made Taboo wonder if this eccentric was ‘in some kind of trance’. Will was rapping faster than Taboo had ever heard anyone rap before. It was a
‘whirlwind’, remembered Will’s future bandmate in his autobiography. Even then, Will’s charisma and stage-presence were powerful. He ‘owned the floor’ and had
more energy than the rest of the club combined. ‘He was as colourful as his socks were loud, and as brilliant as
anything I’d seen on the street, in videos, or in
battles.’

From the moment the three band members first got together as a unit, recalls Taboo, it was clear they shared a ‘unity in spirit, intention and meaning’. He recalls liking Will, who
he viewed as ‘a perfectionist, all about the pristine clothes, the focus to be number one, and keen on detail’. However, that perfectionism could flare-up into confrontation with anyone
he felt might be poised to upstage him. During an open-mic battle with a twelve-year-old called Little E, Will at first let the youngster have his moment on the stage. Then, Will’s
competitive spirit kicked in and he fiercely contested. ‘Will turned it on and smoked him,’ recalled Taboo. Will’s performance made him the clear winner of the battle. Afterwards,
the boy’s uncle confronted the triumphant winner, accusing him of ‘disrespecting my little nephew’. Voices were raised and the men began to shove each other. Will’s friend
Mooky had to step in to prevent violence breaking out.