Will.i.am (9 page)

The critics were harsh in some quarters. A regular theme the critics noted was that this fourth studio album signified a drop in form from the band’s previous effort,
Elephunk
.
PopMatters, for instance, sniffed: ‘If ... you’re in the market for dance music, although admittedly excellently produced,
but which can’t sustain any
substantial intellectual investment, then
Monkey Business
should be right up your alley.’
Entertainment Weekly
was scarcely kinder, ranking the album ‘a bland
meringue: a succession of cotton candy raps about chicks, partying, and partying with chicks, broken up by choruses destined to evaporate outside a shindig’s perimeter’. It even ranked
the Brown collaboration as ‘trite’ and lacking ‘much innovation’.

Rolling Stone
, meanwhile, awarded the album three stars out of five, concluding: ‘
Monkey Business
is just as bright if not quite as fun as
Elephunk
’. The
BBC attacked the album’s lyrics, contending that their ‘flimsiness ... may let the album down for traditional Black Eyed Peas fans who’ve been following the group since the days
of 1998’s
Behind the Front
’. The
Guardian
felt that ‘the choruses are just as catchy as those on 2003’s
Elephunk
,’ but added that ‘the
lyrical inspiration has evaporated’, before truly putting the boot in with the conclusion that: ‘Only James Brown comes out of the wreckage of ideas and ideals with any
dignity’.

Despite these harsh verdicts, the album was a commercial success: it has, at the time of writing, sold over eleven million copies worldwide. It reached the top of the album charts in eight
countries, including Canada and France, and has gone triple platinum in the United States.

The album’s first single, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’,
was also a hit in America: it reached number three on the US Hot 100, and won them a Grammy for
Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. It was a number one in Australia, a number three in the UK and a number five in Canada. The second single from the album was ‘Don’t Lie’,
which reached number fourteen in the US Hot 100, and hit number six in both the UK and Australia.

The album’s third single, however, proved to be a more contentious affair. ‘My Humps’, with its bawdy lyrics, hit number three in America. However, it was not to
everyone’s taste. John Bush of AllMusic called it ‘one of the most embarrassing rap performances of the new millennium’, which must have hurt Will, if he became aware of it.
Readers of the Global Gathering website named it the dance track with ‘the most ridiculous’ lyrics of all time.
Rolling Stone
placed it at number one on its Twenty Most
Annoying Songs chart. Kelefa Sanneh, writing for
The New York Times
, declared that the single is ‘most likely to live in infamy’, deliberately invoking a description of the
Pearl Harbor disaster of World War II. While another critic damned it as ‘so monumentally vacuous, slapped together and tossed-off that it truly tests the definition of
“song”’.

Elsewhere, it was compared to Kelis’s catchy 2003 hit single ‘Milkshake’. Harsh words, yet Will himself would later dip a toe into the chorus of disapproval and distance
himself from the track. ‘It wasn’t lyrical miracles,’ he told the
Daily Record
in 2011. ‘It got to the point where we didn’t want to play
it no more. But the beat was rocking.’

As they toured the album, Will was struck by a stampede of tangible signs of how far he had come. Thanks mainly due to the stature of the band, and partly due to the changing face of
music-industry finance, the tour was bankrolled by two corporate sponsors: technology giants Verizon and motor company Honda. Not only did the band now travel first-class and stay in elite hotels,
they were even each given a limited edition, specially manufactured Honda Civic car. Month after month they flew first-class from country to country, from continent to continent, playing to huge
venues bursting with hysterical crowds. From Hong Kong to Honolulu, Tokyo to Tel Aviv, Santiago to Shanghai, they wowed audiences. Their road crew was now a multi-team operation. Even their road
manager now had a considerable team at his command: the entire operation was benefiting from the band’s success. Gwen Stefani was support act for several dates.

Perhaps the crowning evening of the
Monkey Business
tour came in Brazil. The band arrived at Ipanema Beach to headline a New Year’s Eve concert. They did not expect the size of
the crowd that greeted them: around one million people. Given that it was one million Brazilian
people – often a naturally festive bunch – and the sense of occasion
that the date brought to the party, and the audience made for a breathtaking, bopping vista. At the end of the show, which Will and the band crowned with an excitable rendition of ‘Where is
the Love?’, the band feared being crushed by the audience, which began to descend en masse backstage. Will and the others were bundled into ambulances, whose sirens managed to clear a way to
safety for the headlining stars.

Among the purely commercial work were more philanthropic moments, foreshadowing Will’s subsequent march into such activity. While in South Africa, the band took some time out of their
schedule to hold a creative event for children from deprived parts of Soweto. It was there that Will had used the example of one fourteen-year-old boy to show what was possible.

Another lad there, called Bongeni Moragelo, was like a mini-Will. As Moragelo rapped and danced, Taboo could not help but remember the Will he had first met in California, the Will who had so
bossed those rapping competitions. The fire, hunger and sheer ability of the boy were astonishing. Will invited him to join them onstage in Johannesburg, a memorable moment for all concerned,
particularly Moragelo. Will built a charitable sponsorship relationship with the boy, to ensure he made the most of his talents.

Also during the trip, the band met South African legend and ex-President Nelson Mandela. It was a proud day for Will, who wore a neat white suit for the occasion. He was
unimpressed by Taboo’s comparative shabbiness of dress and punctuality, chiding his hung-over bandmate with a sarcastic: ‘Hey, glad you could join us’, when his still-wayward
bandmate arrived.

This was an understated rebuke to a bandmate and friend who Will loves, rather than anything rougher than that. It would be easy for Will to have descended into full-blown diva behaviour at such
exciting moments as huge concerts and introductions to iconic world leaders, especially after seeing how his hero James Brown had behaved in the simple surroundings of a recording studio. Yet he
has largely maintained a sense of humour and balance. His demands on the road have rarely been monstrous. They mostly centre around the space and ability to continue his songwriting and creativity
wherever he is.

However, one way to have him turn his nose up is to present to him a lavatory with no moist baby wipes as an option. If there is only ‘dry toilet paper’, he will not be happy. To
describe why this is important, he constructs a metaphor which is best skipped by the queasy or those eating. ‘Here’s proof on why people should have baby wipes: get some chocolate,
wipe it on a wooden floor, and then try to get
it up with some dry towels,’ he told
Elle
magazine. ‘You’re going to get chocolate in the cracks.
That’s why you gotta get them baby wipes.’ When he puts his case that way it is terribly difficult to argue.

Will was, at this stage, living in a fine home, in which the presence of baby wipes was just one of the luxuries. The $7m home, near Griffith Park in the Los Feliz neighbourhood, was physical
testament to his success. Particularly poignant and significant was the fact that from the roof of his house, Will had a commanding view of the city, all the way to the building in which he grew
up. Although the properties were nearly twenty miles apart, the symbolic distance was even greater. With a neat, terraced garden accompanying the lavish building, Will was living in some comfort.
He had designed the house so he could work and record in almost any of its rooms – and beyond. ‘It’s not really a house,’ he told
The Times
, ‘it’s a
studio. There are microphones and places I can plug in everywhere; a wireless controller, so I can record from anywhere; and I can log on from anywhere in the world, so even if I’m in London
or Tokyo, I can still be making music.’

Indeed, even after purchasing this property, Will continued to sleep most evenings in a hotel, even when his itinerary did not require him to. Although the hotels he chooses are plush, including
one overlooking London’s
Hyde Park, he is happiest with a fairly small room. ‘I like to be cosy,’ he said. ‘I need a place to recharge.’

After releasing his first two solo albums in fairly quick succession, Will had taken a few years out from solo releases. In 2007, the third was finally unveiled. It was
originally going to be titled
Keep the Beeper
, but the title Will eventually settled on was
Songs About Girls
. Taking at face value the widespread perception that this piece of
work is at least semi-autobiographical, here we get a rare glimpse into Will’s personal life. Indeed, as he explained to
Billboard
, it was the personal dimension of the project that
encouraged him to persevere with it, when he could just as easily have scrapped the work and concentrated on his band. Instead, he ploughed on with the album ‘where all the songs could tell a
story of falling in love, falling out of love, trying to get back in love, destructing love and destroying love and then starting a new situation. That journey is what makes this unique’.
Rolling Stone
magazine described the narrative of the album as: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy goes to strip club. Boy gets caught cheating. Girl leaves. Boy and girl somehow
get back together.’

In an imaginative overall package for the album, Will
recorded videos for eight of the twelve songs, creating, in his words, ‘a movie about making a movie’. Even
more worthy of note was the online music player he developed to accompany the album. The music player, developed alongside technology company Musicane, enabled Will to add to the album’s
track list as many times as he wished, with the fans sharing the profit. Fans could embed the player on their own websites, blogs or MySpace pages. Then, each time a visitor downloaded a song from
that player, the website owner would share in Will’s profits.

‘I thought, “If I have an album filled with songs about girls, what happens if tomorrow I write another song about a girl?”’ he told
The Times
. ‘So
something that started off just with fifteen songs, in the next ten years could have 100 songs. Having twelve songs on a record? That day is done.’ He described his media player arrangement
for
Songs About Girls
as ‘the whole multimedia enchilada’. Fans enjoyed both snacking and feasting on the music tortilla and its contents.

The album had originally been due to include collaborations with Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Q-Tip, Common, Snoop Dogg, Too Short, Busta Rhymes and Ludacris. However, the only one that made the final
version was that with Snoop Dogg, who appears on ‘The Donque Song’. In due course, Cheryl Cole would contribute backing vocals
to the single release of one of the
tracks.

The BBC reviewer felt that the lack of collaborators made the album a lesser thing, saying: ‘The soulless record would have benefited from Adams tapping up contributors from his extensive
list of heavyweight contacts and adding some bite to its bark’. That said, the reviewer was less than impressed by the one guest appearance that did make it, describing it as: ‘Snoop
Dogg’s most vacuous cameo for some time’. The Sputnikmusic reviewer was even harsher on the album. ‘There’s not even one song here that sounds good enough to be a big
single,’ he wrote, declaring the record ‘an abject failure on practically every level’.

Entertainment Weekly
was similarly comprehensive in its dismissal of the album as a: ‘half-assed exercise in superficiality’, while
Slant Magazine
attacked its
‘appallingly bad’ lyrics. AllMusic was far more impressed, awarding the album the honour of the ‘best album-length production of the year’, and declaring it ‘a tour de
force of next-generation contemporary R&B’, that ‘percolates with more innovation, enthusiasm and excitement than contemporary work by Pharrell, Kanye West, Mark Ronson, or anyone
else remotely in the same league’. Commercially, the album outperformed his previous solo efforts but still failed to make much of a dent in the charts. For the time being, Will’s solo
adventures would be relatively disastrous commercially
when compared to the mammoth success his band was increasingly enjoying.

In promoting the album, Will gave glimpses into his personal life. He described to the
Guardian
how he makes relationships with women work. ‘These days I’m a masseuse and a
cook,’ he said. ‘Then I become a cuddler, and a spooner. I’m a conversationalist. I just like to talk – to have random conversations about odd things, like dance music and
jogging. If you don’t talk about a girl’s interests, then forget it. You need to inspire them to achieve all the things they want to achieve. As well as just saying, “You look hot
today”. And in a good relationship, time is nothing. You’ve got to always keep your phone on, you’ve got to get Skype, get a webcam, get MSN, get Yahoo; get ’em all. You
know? So you’re always available. That’s hot.’

As well as communication, he said, he is also keen on honesty in relationships – but only from a realistic starting point: ‘And you’ve got to try your hardest not to lie. But
you can’t say you’re never going to, because then you’re lying.’ Fine words, yet Will’s personal life continued to be an enigmatic affair.

With his third solo album on the shelves, albeit not moving from them with much enthusiasm, Will turned his attention back to The Black Eyed Peas. However, he also had his fingers in a splendid
feast of other pies. From production
to politics, Will was spreading his gaze far and wide. First, though, he had to weather an emotional storm.