Ever since the band name-checked London during their early song ‘Joints & Jam’, it had seemed inevitable that they would enjoy life in the English capital. So, when they arrived in the country in September 1998, they were full of excitement. They did all the cheesy tourist things, visiting landmarks and museums, and whooping with excitement as they saw the red telephone boxes, British policemen and so on. They took walks in Regent’s Park, a stunning experience as autumn was just setting in, with all the beauty that entails.
They played two nights at Camden Town’s famous Jazz Café and were thrilled by the acclaim they received from the audiences in the crowded venue on Parkway, one of the district’s hippest streets. London was proving to be a special place for them. Apl even commented that he felt like ‘one of the fucking Beatles out there’. With UK radio stations playing their music, crowds cheering them in Camden, and the band’s merchandising arm doing a healthy trade, London felt very much like a second home to Will. It was in the English capital that he rebuilt his confidence, following the disappointment of the debut album.
Back home in LA, they began work on the follow-up album in the autumn of 1999. With Will at the centre of everything, the band spent four months recording the album that would be called Bridging the Gap. Most of the work took place at Paramount Studios, with around fifty songs they had written, mostly on the road, since they had wrapped work on their debut. During the recording, the evidence of Will’s successful networking on the road was clear for all to see. A succession of big-name artists collaborated, some of them longer-term friends or contacts of Will, but many of them names he had signed up during the Smokin’ Grooves tour.
Among the names to collaborate were De La Soul, Wyclef Jean, Macy Gray, Mos Def and DJ Premier. The last also worked on the production of the overall album. Some of the ‘collaborations’ were actually performed remotely, with the external act sending their contribution electronically to the main studio. However, Will did work in shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to DJ Premier. The day he and his bandmates stepped into his legendary D&D Studios in Manhattan was a proud and electrifying one for all the visitors. As far as they were concerned, they were standing in one of music’s most hallowed environments, alongside their genre’s finest producer.
Not everyone they approached to be involved with the album consented. For instance, Paul McCartney refused to allow them to sample the Beatles track, ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’. While some critics would snipe that, in signing up De La Soul and other acts as collaborators, the Black Eyed Peas were merely trying to hang on to the coattails of bigger names, the variety of sounds and rich influences that came with them was what mattered to most listeners to the final product. Once the band had selected the final cut of tracks for the album, it was ready for release in the autumn of 2000.
Technology and fate, though, would intervene in the run-up to the September release, when several tracks from the album were leaked online. While at the time this was a frustrating development for the band, and an almost devastating one in terms of sales, it would prompt Will, in particular, to grasp the opportunities that the internet and other technological developments offered.
The rude awakening began when, several months ahead of the album’s release, Will suddenly heard some of the tracks being played by a DJ at a party. Around the same time, Will’s friend Dante Santiago also heard a track being played – at a shoe store in downtown Los Angeles. When the band investigated how this could have happened, they were pointed towards the online music-sharing site, Napster. There, they found that the entire album had been leaked and was being shared for free by members. At this stage, the sharing of music online was in its infancy. Many acts were finding themselves caught out in this way.
A crisis meeting was called at the band’s headquarters in Los Angeles. They huddled round a conference-call telephone connected to the record-label management. In his book, Taboo noted that Will was the most shaken up by the development. ‘[He] was really bent out of shape because we were not in control of our music, and he, more than any of us, hates being out of control.’ The band’s suspicion that they were, for now at least, essentially powerless in the face of the Napster phenomenon, hit them hard. Will, though, became consumed by an urge to grasp all the opportunities that were available in the blossoming world of technology. Within years, he would be on top of the world of the internet. By the time he became a judge on the UK television show The Voice, he would be so synonymous with the internet that his tweeting would become a topic of national debate.
More immediately, though, the actual release of Bridging the Gap became surrounded by disappointment. When work on the album had been completed, Will was convinced they had something very special on their hands. There would be no grand unveiling, though, merely a commercial confirmation of a release that had already taken place. Far from exceeding the disappointing sales of Behind the Front, Bridging the Gap actually sold less. Still, the album received a glowing tribute from Rolling Stone’s reviewer, who commented that whereas Behind the Front ‘was a little too slickly produced’, Bridging the Gap is ‘a more organic-feeling representation of their considerable skills and vision. Uncluttered but muscular production, deft samples and smart rhymes all ensure that the album’s power increases with repeated listenings.’
Furthermore, Bridging reached higher in the charts than its predecessor, peaking at number sixty-seven in America. That could not lift the mood, though, as the album sold only 250,000 copies initially. Given that it had been downloaded illegally nearly four million times, one can see the impact that the Napster leak had on the album’s commercial performance. True, not all of those downloaders would have paid money for the album had that been the only way of obtaining it, but a significant proportion surely would have.
Vocalist Kim Hill, though, believes the low sales figures were unrelated to the leak. ‘I doubt, very strongly, that the record sales were jeopardized by Napster,’ she said. She added that the problem was the band’s image: ‘Three boys with sneakers and argyle socks, and a girl that actually had clothes on’. Whatever the case, the Napster leak had shaken Will. In the future, iTunes and other legitimate websites would make online music purchasing a less ‘wild west’ affair, but that was no comfort at the time. To make matters worse, this would not be the last that Will and his band would hear from online leakage.
*
Will, who had dreamed of such success and worked so hard with clear ambitions in mind, was not complaining about the sudden upturn in their fortunes. While celebrating their success, he set to work thinking about how to build on it in the future. Part of that future would be further forays into solo territory. He had released his first full-length solo album, Lost Change, in November 2001. Due to various factors, including the 11 September attacks and – as we shall see – the rising focus on the Black Eyed Peas, the album failed to make a huge impact on the public psyche. Instead, it rather got lost, and many admirers of Will’s music were not at first even aware of its existence. However, it makes for a rich and enjoyable experience that, with the benefit of hindsight, gave signposts to Will’s future.
In one of the few reviews, the website AllMusic described it as: ‘A sophisticated and musically enthralling endeavour that still manages to be accessible’, concluding that ‘Lost Change does an admirable job of implementing a host of different styles, without losing the listener in the process.’
In contrast to his hugely commercial approach to Black Eyed Peas releases, Will was genuinely unfazed by the poor sales of his solo debut. ‘It wasn’t really supposed to [sell a lot],’ he told Rime magazine. Instead, he added, he wanted it to make an impact on a handful of influential music industry figures. ‘The only people I really cared about listening to it and liking it was the Okayplayer community and the Breakestra community. That’s not really a lotta people – it’s just tastemakers, people that care about music integrity. That’s pretty much all I cared about. I got the video played on MTV – shot the video, paid for it myself, and I took it to MTV’s offices and they added it. That was kinda surprising cuz it wasn’t like it was [selling] mad units, and there were a whole bunch of other groups that they weren’t playing.’ Billing it as a ‘soundtrack’, Will was pleased with the outcome of his debut solo venture.
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.
Mulling over the critical response to their latest release, Will, in part, did understand the perspectives of the critics. ‘If I was a journalist and I knew The Black Eyed Peas when they first came out and where they are now, I would write some of the same things too,’ he told The Times. ‘The way things were marketed didn’t honour how it was built. But we weren’t trying to make hits when we made Elephunk. You think I would have called the CIA terrorists [as he did in ‘Where is the Love?’] right around the time America went to Iraq if I was trying to make a record to get played on the radio?’
Meanwhile, he wondered whether the post-September 11 era might herald changes in the hip-hop industry. ‘Everything affects hip-hop,’ he told The Onion. ‘The question is, how does it affect the money that corporations are going to invest to put out different kinds of hip-hop? Hip-hop may offer negative feedback on the world’s problems, but that’s just the hip-hop that’s being promoted now. There are hip-hop groups in different sectors and different communities that are doing positive shit, but corporations and companies don’t want to spend the money on them that it would take to get them out there.’
Will hoped that the ‘positive shit’ might get more airtime and investment. Not that his focus on positivity and unity was blinkered. He realized that his vision was as vulnerable to cash-in and distortion as any. ‘The only thing that I’m afraid of is that if we get too big, the labels are going to be like, “Get a fucking Indian guy, and a black guy, and a fucking Pakistani, and make them dance!” That’s the only thing that I’m afraid of.’
A renewed wave of accusations that the band had sold out rolled in. ‘All that “sell-out” stuff comes from the same people who held us close to their hearts for our first two records,’ Will responded in an interview with Faze magazine. ‘And they call it “sell-out” for what reason? Because we have a white girl in our group now? I don’t think that just because one day you do a jazzy record and then you do a funk record means you sold out. It just means you like music and you’re trying to dabble in every ray of colour in the music world.’
In 2002, the sell-out allegations had reached their peak when the band featured on an advertisement for the soft drink giant, Dr Pepper. For Will, their involvement in the project was a true ‘eureka’ moment. It was also something that he easily resolved in his own mind. ‘I realized I made more money doing a thirty-second piece of music than two hours worth of music,’ he said. He also insisted that the band retained control over all the creative aspects of the project. To him, this meant there was nothing wrong with their getting involved, whatever the snipers might say. ‘If you are in control of the video, which we were, if you are in control of the clothes, the song, which we were … what’s not to like? And the people are getting the music for free anyway … so who cares?’ Will believes that even performing something as ostensibly authentic as a live concert puts his band at the epicentre of a storm of commercial activity – including the sponsorship of the venue, the petrol bought as a result of the thousands of fans driving to the concert and so on.
*
The second single from the album was called ‘Shut Up’, a catchy song about the break-up of a relationship, and the song that had brought Fergie to the party. It reached number one in fifteen countries. In 2010, funk star George Clinton took legal action against the band, claiming they had used a sample from his 1970s song ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’ without his permission. It was a testing moment for Will when news of the suit first reached him. (The case would be settled in 2012. Although the terms were not disclosed, in a court filing, mediator Gail Killefer said the settlement ‘fully’ resolved the dispute.)
So hectic had been the response to Elephunk, that for the band members it sometimes felt as if they had gone from relative obscurity to international acclaim overnight.
Will, meanwhile, had been hard at work on his second solo album. Entitled Must B 21, it is a seventeen-track release that was described by RapReviews.com as ‘an exercise in hip-hop in its purest most unadulterated form, packed into a highly concentrated dose’. The same reviewer urged people to buy the album not just to enjoy its music, but also to support Will’s solo career and the fortunes of the label, Barely Breaking Even, through which he was releasing the material. Lest the critic appear to be asking people to buy it on only a charitable basis, he concluded: ‘It deserves to go gold, because it’s that damn good.’
Will hired an impressive selection of fellow artists to appear on the album, including KRS-One, MC Lyte, Planet Asia and Phife from A Tribe Called Quest. Their contributions took the album to a higher plane than Will’s debut solo effort. His track ‘Go!’ was featured on the Xbox computer game soundtrack for NBA Live 2005.
Will was about to take a break from the solo wing of his output: Must B 21 ensured he did so from a position of some strength. When he returned, it would be in a more fully solo sense, with the mass of collaborating guests consigned to the past.
First, though, he had to hold on tight as his already soaring band rocketed ever higher. The Black Eyed Peas were proving to be an unstoppable force. No wonder a growing number of other famous artists were so keen to join the fun.