Will.i.am’s gotta feeling about the new decade
Rapper will.i.am is always looking for next big thing
As is clear from his adopted name, will.i.am has a penchant for punctuation. His band the Black Eyed Peas placed a full stop on the 2000s with its 2009 album The E.N.D., which sold 11 million copies. The Californian pop-rappers welcomed the 2010s with another multiplatinum album, The Beginning. Now will.i.am — “creative innovator, futurist and entertainer” in the words of the World Economic Forum — has big plans for the 2020s.
“I really want to graduate to the HBOS, the Netflixes of the world, to tell longer stories,” he says. “Like ‘music-mentaries.’ Like a musical from a documentary point of view. I want to fuse genres.”
To illustrate how a “music-mentary” might work, will.i.am cites Where Is the Love?, the Black Eyed Peas’ breakthrough hit from 2003, the song of which he is proudest. “It could be a documentary,” he explains. “Take every subject it covers, delve deep into them: politics, war, undeveloped communities, child soldiers, refugees. Everything the song talks about. That’s what a ‘song-umentary’ would be.”
We are talking in a music-themed private members’ club in central London. Will.i.am, 44, sits eating a tangerine. He is wearing an orange jacket with no visible means of entry or exit, trousers with zipped legs and shoes without laces — an outfit in keeping with the futurist of the World Economic Forum’s description.
Davos awaits. After our meeting, will.i.am is due to head to Switzerland for a talk about ending gun violence and influencing public policy. London is the Californian’s base for half the year, to fulfil his annual role as mentor for wannabe singers on the U.K. version of The Voice.
He is also back in the charts. The Black Eyed Peas’ song Ritmo (Bad Boys for Life), a collaboration with the Colombian reggaeton singer J Balvin, has notched up hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and Youtube. Seemingly a spent force following a long hiatus in the 2010s and then a flop comeback with 2018’s Masters of the Sun Vol. I, the Black Eyed Peas have bounced back.
Will.i.am waves aside the group’s stumble. “I’m a maker. I love everything I make,” he says. “Masters of the Sun, I made that for me and for people who think like me. Ritmo is, like, ‘Hmm, I wonder what people are going to like? OK, let me figure that out. Oh, boom.’ It’s a different muscle.”
Originally called William Adams, the rapper and producer was raised in East Los Angeles by his single mother, an African-american household in a predominantly Mexican neighbourhood, a deprived area beset by gangs. His mother instilled in him the drive to think beyond it. She sent him to schools in a wealthier part of the city with long daily bus rides.
He began the Black Eyed Peas in 1995. The band’s original members were his former high school friend Allan Pineda Lindo, known as apl.de.ap, the rapper Jaime (Taboo) Gomez and the singer Kim Hill, who was later replaced by Stacy Ann Ferguson, a.k.a. Fergie. A crucial element in the group’s most successful years, she is no longer a member.
The Black Eyed Peas initially specialized in earnest, politicized hip-hop, the sub-genre called conscious rap. But in the mid-2000s they branched into pop-rap. Censorious critics derided them as sellouts. My Humps, the 2005 chart-topper, aroused especially strong ire. But 2009’s I Gotta Feeling epitomized the infectious side of the Black Eyed Peas: a commercialized fusion of pop, electronic dance music and hip hop. Will.i.am takes an astringent view of rap’s rise. In his view, the socially engaged strain of hip hop out of which the Black Eyed Peas first emerged was suppressed in the 1990s by racism and free market economics. He reckons that the rappers promoted by mainstream radio and record labels were those who glamorized guns and drugs.
It became the entertainment arm of the “war on drugs” and its mass incarceration of African-american men.
“I think it’s on purpose that conscious rap is not popular music,” he says. “I mean, if you had a prison-industrial complex and that prison-industrial complex was freaking privatized, you’re going to want the music to promote prisons, right? It’s so freaking sickening that around the same time people were investing in prisons, people were rapping about prison life. Rap is an amazing art form, but that s--- is not accidental. That s--is on purpose.”
He has the do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial mentality that runs through black American pop, from Motown to Jay-z. He was an equity partner in the Beats headphones developed by rap mogul Dr. Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. In 2010, the mobile phone manufacturer HTC purchased a majority stake for $309 million. (It was later sold to Apple for $3 billion.) Will.i.am used his share of the HTC sale to set up his own technology firm, i.am+, in 2013.
I.am+ is headquartered in Los
Angeles, in a high-tech compound called The Future. It has won some big-name tie-ups: an artificial intelligence-based collaboration with IBM has just been announced. But i.am+ has a checkered history of product development. An iphone camera case launched in 2012 sank without trace. A smartwatch called Dial that appeared in 2016 has yet to take off. A will.i.am-designed car, based on the Delorean no less, was impounded by police on its first venture on to the streets of L.A. in 2012. There are reports that i.am+ is facing cash flow difficulties.
“Every startup has cash problems. You name me one that hasn’t,” he responds.
Last October, will.i.am went to the so-called “Davos in the desert” investment forum in Saudi Arabia to promote i.am+’s link-up with the Dubai retail group Majid Al Futtaim — a controversial choice of destination. “Davos in the desert” was boycotted by numerous organizations in 2018 after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Two months after his death, the Black Eyed Peas played the first legally unsegregated concert in Saudi Arabia.
“We got flak for doing the first concert but we went for the people of Saudi Arabia, not the politics,” he insists. “If it’s about that, well, no one is going to come to America if that’s the case, because we got some dirty s--- too.”
Positivity is the will.i.am way. It resonates through his speech as emphatically as the grabby hooks in his songs. “I’m really optimistic about this new decade.”
The Financial Times Limited (2017). All rights reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Limited. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.