When he is interviewed by the press, Will often chooses to break off from the traditional interrogative path to read the interviewer – and therefore his or her eventual readers – text messages he has exchanged with his mother, Debra. In April 2012, he did just this when he was quizzed by Radio Times magazine. His rendition began with a message his mother had sent him about her involvement in his charity:
‘Hey Willi, I want to let you know that I feel ten feet tall right now. I want to be a part of all that. I want to be involved in all these projects. I want to be part of your plan, I want to soar with you. You are the fuse that’s needed to set the bombs off. It’s about to explode baby boy.’
‘That’s cool, Mom,’ Will had replied,
‘That’s why I put you on board. Yay.’
Debra then wrote: ‘Thank you so very much. My heart feels like it will burst, I love you so very much, not for what you give me or what you’ve done, but for who you are. A son with a very, very big heart.’
The exchange concluded with Will writing: ‘Of course, Mom. You built my heart.’
The key figure in Will’s life, Debra is also now a pivotal part of one of his charities, the i.am.home Fund, which was set up to help those in jeopardy of losing their homes due to the economic crisis in America. Asked by The New York Times how the charity would operate, Will gave a simple description of its activity, adding that in setting it up he was ensuring he was true to the message of the campaign video he had created for Barack Obama in 2008. ‘I say: “Let me pay for that house. It’s yours. You don’t got to pay me back.” It’s that simple. Why am I doing it? Because I said, “Yes We Can.”’
His other foundations work in the fields of education and employment. The i.am.angel Foundation, for instance, was launched in 2009. Speaking about the charity, Will told StarCam: ‘The world doesn’t need another musician, they need another Bill Gates’. A man who combines those two contributions would be extraordinary – and, in the future, Will might just be that man. The opening aim of the charity was ‘the idea of providing assistance to needy students wanting to attend college through a program entitled i.am.scholarship.’ That scholarship program has grown and grown since. ‘I know my purpose is to continue to inspire young people because it’s just going to keep inspiring me back,’ Will said. ‘I want to do my part. I want to invest in America’s future and I want to send you to college. i.am here to let you know that you can be anything you want to be. You are the future of the world.’
As well as devoting his time, energy and name to his foundations, he has also put his money where his mouth is – since 2010, he has donated a figure estimated to be in excess of £1million to them. He is passionate about his charity work and the opportunities it brings to those who sorely lack them. He told one interviewer that his primary reason for joining The Voice was the hope that the renewed fame it would bring him might offer him further ‘leverage’ in the charitable sphere. ‘It’s like the beginning of my philanthropic career,’ he said.
He is also partnering with Coca-Cola on an interesting recycling initiative, which, with his characteristic flair for attention-grabbing word play, he has called Ekocycle (the first part of the word, ‘Ekoc’, is, of course, ‘Coke’ spelled backwards). The mission is to encourage large corporations to stop churning out waste. ‘I’m like, “What if I can take their by-products and make new products?’ he explained to ES magazine. ‘What if I can take their bottles and turn them into jackets and glasses, and I could make a base cloth out of their aluminium to make bicycles and chairs and computers and phones?’
Later, he explained an even grander vision: to put Ekocycle alongside the stature of Google and Twitter in terms of vocabulary. ‘The key is to “become a verb”,’ he said, in an interview with the Financial Times. ‘Google became a verb. Twitter became a verb. How does Coke become a verb? Ekocycle – and you redefine the word recycle.’ It is a big ambition, yet experience has shown that betting against Will achieving his dreams is a risky move.
How, many have wondered, does he manage to keep succeeding in his endeavours? Be it his music career, his business or charity, for Will, it all keeps coming back to one thing: activity. He feels that many people have lost sight of how much more valuable it is to play a good game, rather than merely talk one. In these days of online social networks, on which many people simply brag and exaggerate their achievements, lots of people have lost their way. ‘People have got it all mixed up,’ he said. ‘Supporting is actually doing. Let’s change the word “supporting” and use the word “doing”. What are you doing to help America and Obama? Donating money to the campaign? Or going into communities and changing people’s lives?’ In a more concise encapsulation of his guiding philosophy, he said: ‘If you ain’t doing something you’re doing nothing’.
One day, Will could publish an engrossing book of motivational wisdom. In the meantime, he stays true to his guiding philosophy and keeps on doing something. In 2012, off the back of his success on The Voice and his shoulder-rubbing with the British monarchy, Will teamed his charity up with The Prince’s Trust. ‘As a judge on The Voice, the people of the UK have welcomed me into their sitting rooms week after week and I feel very much at home here,’ he said. ‘Working with The Prince’s Trust, I am joining the mission to help transform the lives of disadvantaged young people living in underprivileged neighbourhoods in the UK.’
In donating to the Trust, his thinking was that its work carries with it the potential to transform an entire neighbourhood. He used as examples the founders of Facebook and Twitter. ‘If one Mark Zuckerberg comes from Brixton, then Brixton is changed forever’, he told ES magazine. ‘If one Jack Dorsey comes from East London, then East London is changed forever’.
When he met Prince Charles, the morning after the Diamond Jubilee flotilla, it was an unlikely meeting in more than one sense. Charles, though, left Will impressed. The Prince had just found out that his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been hospitalized with a bladder infection. ‘So it was heavy,’ Will said. ‘He spoke very passionately about inner cities and philanthropy, and I got into the car afterwards and I thought: “That guy is something else” – because he had just found out about his father but he still kept the meeting. That guy is awesome.’
With the aforementioned i.am.home arm of the charity, we can return to the start of Will’s story. All too often, people who have achieved vast riches through their fame make the proud boast that they have never forgotten where they came from. Sometimes, these claims are little more than vanity – a declaration of self-interested lip service to the communities they left behind. In Will’s case, the sentiment is far more sincere. ‘The reason I started i.am.home is because I come from poverty,’ he said. ‘I survived and came out of it because you guys support my music. My one day dream was to have a house, buy a house for my mom and take care of family.’
As we have seen, he fulfilled that dream, and enjoyed one of the proudest moments of his life as he did so. For the never-satisfied, ever active Will, that proud moment only awakened in him a desire to do more of the same. ‘Now that I’ve achieved that goal I can’t forget what it was like – living on the verge. Helping out families in need is a personal venture. Something I feel I need to do.’ The word ‘need’ underlines so much of his existence: it is a need, more than a desire, that drives so much of Will’s ferocious, frenetic lifestyle. His engine is oft powered involuntarily.
The rewards of his resultant stature keep on coming. Not all are rewards of richness or fame, some are just the places his status can take him to, the experiences it brings to him. In the spring of 2012, he revealed that NASA had approached him to write the first song to played on the planet Mars. ‘I don’t think I can talk about it, but there is a rocket going to Mars,’ he told Graham Norton on his show. ‘It lands in August and when in lands it will send back a signal to earth and that signal will be the song.’
This project with NASA is to help inspire kids to get involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. ‘My mission is to inspire the youth to care about education.’ This out-of-this-world project would take Will’s quest to inspire to a whole new dimension. He could hardly wait for it to happen.
As for his activity on planet Earth, Will remains as restless as ever. In July 2012, he passed another milestone when he enjoyed his first UK number one as a solo artist. Thanks in part to his successful appearance on The Voice, and the accompanying stature it gave him in the UK, his single ‘This is Love’ hit the top of the British singles chart. For Will, this was a moment of substantial pride. He felt he had proved some of his doubters wrong. ‘I’ve had number ones before with The Black Eyed Peas, but to me this one means so much, because I know people thought I can only be successful in The Black Eyed Peas. They were wrong,’ he said.
He had collaborated with Eva Simons on the track, and spoke with enormous passion about her talent. ‘There are a lot of girls that are pretty and that can sing a little bit,’ he said. ‘And they are usually connected to some powerful dude that gets them a whole bunch of songs that some unknown people did in the bedroom.’ Somewhat uncomfortably, many might feel this description would apply to Cheryl Cole. It is unlikely Will would agree with that, but there is no doubting how much Simons had energized him. ‘So whenever I switch gears musically or change directions, it’s because of the adrenaline and the influence of being around the world and dealing with different people like Eva,’ he said.
He continued work on his next solo album, #willpower, which he hoped to fashion into a complex work, replete with a number of different styles. ‘There’s classical s**t, like just me and a guitar and an orchestra or me with just an orchestra and a kid’s choir,’ he said. ‘There’s some ghetto, ugly, dirty stuff. And then there’s dance stuff, global world stuff and, like, avant garde, left-of-centre, for-art’s-sake music that has nothing to do with getting played on the radio. I’m just art-ing out. It’s pretty diverse.’
Originally, the album’s title had been Black Einstein. Fergie had first announced the original name on Hollyscoop.com. ‘I believe Will is coming out with a solo album, I’ve heard it, it’s called Black Einstein, and it’s amazing,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting for him to come out with this for so long, ’cause I want it. He won’t give it to me. I want it for the gym. He’s so amazing. Such a genius lyricist and I’m really excited for his project.’
Work on the album took place predominantly in Los Angeles, London and Paris. Will was deliberately taking his time on it. ‘I didn’t want to force this album,’ he told Boombox. His fear that self-indulgence might lead to him losing his grasp on reality was clear. ‘A lot of times an artist can over-think things. You get to the point that you are so wrapped up in your music that you feel like you can just put buffalo knuckle sound effects on a track. It’s like, “Yo, you seriously making buffalo knuckle noises on a beat and you think that’s hot?”’ Instead, he hooked-up with some of the cream of the music scene: ‘I worked with LMFAO. I got songs with Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, Britney Spears and a few other people,’ he said.
Whether on his solo material or on other artists’ own albums, Will is often to be found in the recording studio. In September 2012, he worked in the studio with former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger. She tweeted a photograph of them at work, with the message: ‘Me and @iamwill in the studio … making la la la la la’s in LA.’ Will loved it. ‘I made this song with Nicole Scherzinger that you would never expect,’ he said. ‘This classic piece of music that I did with Nicole, it’s beautiful. That girl sings like I’ve never heard anybody sing like that in pop culture.’
One day as they worked, an earthquake shook Los Angeles. Will quipped on Twitter: ‘There was a #Earthquake in l.a just 1min ago ... If it wasn’t ... it was the beat I’m making in the studio for @NicoleScherzy... #califault. [sic].’
He has also recently worked with Rita Ora, who offered an interesting insight into his style of work after he produced her song ‘Fall in Love’. ‘will.i.am is incredible,’ she told Digital Spy. ‘He’s like a genius and he works so fast. I don’t know how his brain is so like ... He can do so many things at once and does it the best as well. He doesn’t half-heartedly do anything. We did “Fall in Love” in a day and night and then we went out and had a drink.’
He has also worked with the young prince of pop himself, Justin Bieber. Will has described the Canadian sensation as his ‘little brother’. ‘I like him because he’s going to be around for a long time,’ he told MTV News. ‘And he’s really talented … [He is] very talented, beyond what people probably think he’s capable of. I’ve worked with him and [seen] how talented he is.’ There were certainly no ‘cool’ points to be had in making this sort of statement, but Will preferred to tell it as he saw it. He continued: ‘In the industry, especially as it’s changing, you’re going to [need] some type of real talent. Maybe people can’t see [it], right now, but ten, fifteen years from now, he’ll still be around.’
Speaking of longevity, another of the artists Will worked with on #willpower is one of the record industry’s longest-lasting icons: Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones frontman appears on one of the album’s singles, ‘T.H.E. (The Hardest Ever)’. Will was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which he secured Jagger’s involvement, particularly following the rather starry, distant way the Stones had behaved when the Black Eyed Peas toured with them. Rather than having to embark on a lengthy, quid pro quo negotiation via gate-keepers, due to a relationship he had built with Jagger since The Black Eyed Peas opened for the Rolling Stones in 2007, Will was simply able to call Jagger directly to ask him if he was interested in guest-appearing on the song.
The two had struck up an immediate rapport backstage. ‘Mick and I got along really well,’ he told the Mirror. ‘He took my number and wherever he was in the world he would text me to hang out. “Yo, Will, I’m in Brazil. Are you here?” or “I’m in LA, where are you at?” Eventually, we hung out in 2008 at a technology conference in New York. You wouldn’t believe we have similar friends that are tech enthusiasts. We have so much in common. And of course he showed me his famous strut at the bar.’
So, when Will contacted Jagger afresh to enquire about a collaboration, he got an affirmative response. ‘Come down,’ Jagger told him, ‘I want to hear the song.’ Once the old rocker heard it, he agreed to join Will in the studio the very next day to record his part. Will’s long-term producer and friend Jimmy Iovine could hardly believe his luck when he got the chance to produce a song featuring Jagger. He put the scale of his excitement into words for Will when he said, ‘When I was younger I wanted to be Mick Jagger – what A Tribe Called Quest is to you, that was Mick for me.’
Will believes in striking while the iron is hot, and life has sometimes cruelly shown this to be a sensible approach. The year 2012 began with the unexpected death of another icon with whom Will had worked. Whitney Houston died in Los Angeles at the age of forty-eight. When Will heard of her death, he posted his immediate feelings on Twitter. ‘I’m so sad, Whitney Houston was so kind, sweet, wonderful, amazing, talented and a true gift to the world’, he tweeted. He added later: ‘#iwillalwaysloveyou’.
Later still, when Will remembered working with the soul star, his memories included the omnipresent figure of his mother, Debra. ‘When I was working with Whitney Houston she reminded me of my mom, just how graceful and polite she was,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I told Whitney this and she said: “Let me see the proof of that, you should bring her down!” I called up and said: “Ma, get your butt down to my house this minute! Whitney Houston wants to see you so she can see your personality!” She loved Whitney.’
It was a testing start to what was proving a typically industrious year for Will.
Meanwhile, there were other challenges to be negotiated. He and his two male bandmates filed a lawsuit against their former financial adviser, Sean Larkin, accusing him of costing them over $3 million (£1.8 million). (Fergie has her own separate financial manager and therefore was uninvolved in this suit.) Their suit claimed that Sean M. Larkin ‘falsely represented ... on numerous occasions that he was taking care of everything and that they had nothing to worry about’, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Larkin had, several months previously, admitted in a deposition that he had ‘got in over my head with the amount of clients I had’.
Will had another problem when his car was stolen as he attended the launch party for his own solo album. He had been photographed alongside the car as he arrived at the bash at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, but when he left at 2 a.m. it was nowhere to be seen. ‘My car was stolen ... what the f**k,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘Where is my f**king car ...??? This isn’t funny anymore. I’m going to be optimistic and pray that my car is returned and safe. #givemebackmycar this joke is getting old ...’
His use of the word ‘joke’ to describe what had happened was precise: Will believed that there was a good chance the car’s disappearance was more of a prank than a crime. For that reason, he stated on Twitter, he did not intend immediately to contact the police about the disappearance of his custom-made DeLorean. ‘I’m not going to the police ... spread the word via tweets in case I’m getting punk’d’, he wrote. ‘I don’t want to waste tax dollars on pranks #wheresmycar’.
He later returned to Twitter, to write: ‘I’m going to be optimistic and pray that my car is returned and is safe’, adding that he believed the punishment for its disappearance should be ‘hard and swift’. Two months earlier the car had been impounded by police after it was found to be unregistered.
Prior to the car disappearance, the biggest story at Will’s party had been the arrival of a scantily clad Lindsay Lohan. The controversial, much-derided socialite announced that she wanted to work with Will. How he took that news is unknown. However, he was thrilled when he discovered his car had been found by businessman Ryan Friedlinghaus. Will tweeted: ‘my car has been found ... #bestnewsever thank you so much ryan ...’ However, on the car being returned to him, Will quickly discovered that some of its contents were missing. He hired private detectives to probe the mystery.
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His enigmatic personal life continued to draw much speculation. In April, he was rumoured to be dating the former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell. When she joined him at the Rose Club in London, where he was performing a short solo set, tongues were set wagging. ‘It definitely seemed like they were on a date,’ the ubiquitous, unnamed ‘eye-witness’ told the Sun. ‘They were both really giggly with each other and were laughing all night. They arrived separately and left again at different times.’ Within weeks, Halliwell was revealed to be dating not Will but another celebrity – kooky comedian Russell Brand.
At the time of writing, Will’s preferences remain mysterious. On the rare occasions that he speaks about his sex life, he tends to masterfully balance each revelation with a further smoke-screen, forever leaving the world guessing. ‘I’m not a gold digger, I’m a boob digger,’ he told the Sun in 2010. ‘I like boobs. But I was always the homie, the friend, rather than the lover. I’d have a crush on a girl and she’d say, “I don’t know, Will, I see you as my brother”.’
In a rare candid moment, he told ES magazine what romance was like for him. He said that, for him, it is ‘just deep’. He added: ‘Then I like… [huge pause] then I get deep. Like, almost spiritual. Like spiritual and science. The marriage of the two. For me, love is like … that’s why it’s hard. I like talking about deep shit. Just lying in bed, snuggle-wuggles, conversation. I like to communicate, conversate, dive into freakin’ theories.’
He entered more comfortable territory when, in early August 2012, he drove to NASA mission control to watch the Curiosity Rover land on Mars. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, he watched with childlike wonderment as the rover touched down in the early hours of the morning. He was there to listen as his song, ‘Reach for the Stars’, was the first piece of music ever to be broadcast back to Earth from Mars. He shared his excitement with his Twitter following. ‘I’m here @ #jpl ... I am proud to care and have passion for #stem ... watching humanity at its finest ...’ he wrote. The song was beamed 300 million miles back to Earth, so it could be heard at the JPL, where NASA staff danced and cheered as the accomplishment was confirmed.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said: ‘will.i.am has provided the first song on our playlist of Mars exploration.’
‘It seems surreal,’ said Will. Wearing a grey suit as he spoke to a student audience, he added: ‘I didn’t want to do a song that was done on a computer. I wanted to show human collaboration and have an orchestra there and something that would be timeless, and translated in different cultures, not have like a hip-hop beat or a dance beat. A lot of times ... people in my field aren’t supposed to try to execute something classical, or orchestral, so I wanted to break that stigma.’
This attention to detail was extraordinary. Even when he was breaking the boundary of having the first song played from Mars, Will was ensuring that he broke musical boundaries while doing so. Including in the recording a forty-piece orchestra, complete with French horns, he had handed the song a cinematic, iconic flavour. There was widespread respect for Will in the wake of his achievement. Only the Register and MSN, it seemed, had an issue with the broadcast, the former describing it as: ‘A depressing day for space and technology’, while MSN mocked the song’s lyrics, and sneered: ‘We can’t help thinking there are better songs to have introduced music to the Red Planet with’.
Just hours after he had celebrated his Mars moment, Will was brought crashing back to earth when he crashed his Cadillac into a parked car in Los Angeles. One way or another, the summer of 2012 was not proving to be a happy one in automotive terms. Following what he described as ‘a long day and night’ in the recording studio with Cheryl Cole, at 3.30 a.m., with Cheryl in the passenger seat beside him, Will accidentally smashed his £100,000 car into a parked vehicle. Eyewitnesses said that his airbag opened and struck him in the face. Though the contact gave him a nosebleed, it certainly saved him from a potentially worse fate.
Cole’s passenger airbag failed to work, and she was reportedly thrown face first into the car’s plush dashboard. She, too, was left with a nosebleed and bruising. Photographs of her clutching her face, with blood pouring from her nose were quickly snapped by fast-moving photographers. Police were called to the scene and the pair went to Cedars Sinai hospital. Will emerged later wearing a neck brace.
As is his custom, Will used Twitter to speak to the world about the incident. ‘Car accidents are not dope,’ he tweeted. ‘I’m glad I’m OK’. In a follow-up tweet, he wrote: ‘We’re fine. Cheryl Cole [and I] were coming back from the studio but she and I are fine ... just a little wiplash [sic]’.
Will’s manager, Polo Molina, then also logged on to Twitter: ‘Just spoke to @iamwill, everything is OK. He and Cheryl Cole are both fine. It was a minor fender bender after a long day/night in the studio’.
Cole completed the online reassurance-fest, writing: ‘Don’t worry me and @iamwill are fine, promise’. Cole quickly made light of the incident, telling Capital Breakfast co-presenter Lisa Snowdon that it was Will’s loquaciousness that was to blame for what occurred. ‘He’s a bad talker. He was talking the face off us,’ she said. ‘He was talking about NASA and Mars and his song.’ Cole, who had to wear a black sling around her arm, also jokingly dubbed herself a ‘one-arm bandit’ on Twitter.
Looking ahead to 2013, as well as more cinematic dabbling – having also voiced a character in the animated 2011 film Rio – Will planned to learn more about technology, by signing up for a computer programming course. ‘Next year I am going to school to take a computer science course,’ he told the Mirror. ‘When I am fifty-seven I still want to be relevant in popular culture and the way to be relevant within popular culture in the future is writing code. Code writers, they are my idols. Songwriters are cool – I can write songs, too – and bloggers are cool, but code writers? Those are the coolest in the world. When I was seventeen I had a dream and all the dreams I have had since seventeen I have done them beyond what I thought I was ever going to do. So now I want to go back to school and learn how to write code so I can participate in this whole new era that we are in. Writing songs is dope but writing code is better.’
Just twelve years earlier, Will had almost torn his hair out with frustration when the Black Eyed Peas album Bridging the Gap was leaked on Napster. Then, the world of technology seemed a dark, mysterious villain for a while. Now, he saw the virtual world just the same way he saw the ‘real’ world: as a playground, alive with opportunities for creativity, fun and profit.
The man who was so caught out by the emergence of Napster, has become one of the industry’s most sharpest observers of the drastic changes that emerging technology is causing for the industry. He has even been appointed ‘director of creative innovation’ at technology giant Intel.
‘There are no more dreamers,’ Will told the Financial Times. ‘I am dreaming for Intel, to rethink what a computer is going to be.’ Since those dark days when he felt powerless as The Black Eyed Peas tracks were leaked ahead of release, he has grasped the nettle of technology and is now as in control of its seemingly relentless forces as it is possible to be. ‘Technology is so big right now,’ he told Boombox. ‘It’s that advanced, man. You can set your own studio up with a microphone that you bought from Best Buy. You can record your vocals on to your laptop and put a little compression on it because everybody is listening to music now on their phones and computers. Nobody listens to music on big systems anymore like back in the Thriller days.’
The latter trend is key: with large, bass-heavy speakers now becoming a thing of the past in many homes, musicians have to create music that works on the sometimes weak and tinny speakers of smartphones, pods, pads and computers. Yet for dance acts, the music also has to sound good on the huge speakers of nightclubs. Furthermore, as soon as the industry gets its collective head around one development, along comes another to change the rules once again. It is an industry in astonishing flux. Will is one of the figures who have some sense of what is happening; do not bet against him.
Although he has ruled himself out of a future in politics – he has said he believes he would quickly be assassinated were he to become a proper politician – Will seems likely to step back into that sphere at some stage. In the Spring of 2012, he was approached by David Axelrod, communications director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, to see if he could conjure up a sequel to the 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ video to help Obama’s campaign. Although Will tried, he was unable to come up with a concept that he felt was worthy of consideration on the same scale as his viral 2008 video.
He eschewed an immediate encore more out of a sense of high standards than an overall unwillingness. ‘Obama has done a great deal as President up to this point and I don’t care about any backlash,’ he told the Sun. ‘I don’t follow waves or trends or emotions. If I did I would never have supported Obama in the first place. Being President is not a two-year fix. It’s got to be an eight-year ride and I’m in there with him. It took us eight years under Bush to get us in this mess. At least give the dude eight years to get us out of it. Give the guy a chance. I saw him at The White House a few months ago and he was finding it tough. We need to get behind him as a country.’
He said that Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney was making a key mistake in the 2012 election battle by allowing his supporters to push the wrong button. ‘People say Romney ran businesses and that means he should be president,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘America isn’t a business. America needs to be like a parent – what’s good for our kids, where are they going to school, how can you guide them? Imagine if your parent was Enron and raised you like that,’ he laughed. ‘You don’t want that dad.’
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It is his restlessness that continues to define Will. He has offered up a possible answer as to why he cannot seem to sit still: he suffers from tinnitus. This condition leaves sufferers with a regular ‘ringing’ sound in one or both of their ears. There is no external source for the sound, which sometimes varies from a ringing one to one better described as a buzzing, roaring, hissing or even whistling. Sometimes sufferers experience the sound more or less constantly, others experience only sporadic episodes.
Will has suffered badly from it, to the extent that he said: ‘I don’t know what silence sounds like any more. Music is the only thing which eases my pain.’ This, he concludes, is one of the biggest drivers of his phenomenal work rate. ‘I can’t be still. Work calms me down. I can’t be quiet as that’s when I notice the ringing in my ears. There’s always a beep there every day, all day. Like now. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve had this but it’s gradually got worse.’
Even during interviews with the press, journalists have noticed how Will sometimes presses a finger into one of his ears. His statement that work calms him down is revelatory. This reversal of the more usual human experience – that it is leisure, not work, that is relaxing – explains to a large extent why he so enjoys professional activity. It should not, as we have seen throughout these pages, be taken as a definitive explanation, though.
Will’s ambition and his sharp focus on the commercial potential of life is not universally admired. Some music-industry figures of generations past have wondered what happened to putting artistry ahead of commerce. The spectre of the tortured artist, willing to disappear from the public eye for years at a time, rather than working and promoting relentlessly, is now a rare one. The twenty-first-century celebrity is often a stranger to idleness, unlike many of their twentieth-century equivalents.
Of this generation’s headline acts, perhaps only Adele operates in the old-fashioned style. Almost all the other big names seem to work at a more frantic rate. This is beginning to draw criticism from the old guard, who feel that today’s stars have their priorities wrong. Damon Albarn of Blur has taken personal aim at Will to this end. ‘I mean, will.i.am was a miserable old sod,’ he told XFM radio. ‘Wearing his own stuff – what is that all about? Never wearing anything other than this quasi-Star Trek, slightly rubbery bondage kind of stuff. Is there never a day when he wears an old T-shirt?’
Will is, as he likes to put it himself, too busy turning his own dreams into reality to let the criticism trouble him. He never gets used to the trappings of his fame, and the boyish side of him never wants to. More often than not, his every task excites him, however many times he has done it before. His nerves might never entirely lift. ‘It’s like I’ve never been on stage before,’ he told the Daily Star. ‘I’ve played to a million people in Brazil at the World Cup and at the Super Bowl. You’d think I have nerves of steel, but I feel brand-new again.’
He has also admitted: ‘It’s amazing all the love I’m getting. I was talking to apl ... and saying it feels like 2002 again for me. 2002 was when “Where is the Love?” was about to kick off. In 2012, it’s a different level.’
As well as performing and producing, he will also continue to manage and mentor other artists, including Cheryl Cole. He claims to have a long-term plan in place for her. ‘The Cheryl that we know now is different from the one we’re going to know ten years from now,’ he has vowed. Should his words come true, this could make for a fascinating turn of events.
The wheels of Will’s breathless, creative and ambition-driven life continue to turn. Where will they take him next? The sense of urgency that has driven him for so long continues unabated. ‘I’m too, like, right now right now right now right now right now,’ he said of how he operates. ‘Impatient is not the right word. It’s angst. Let’s go. Right now.’
We return to his hard-knock childhood growing up in the ghetto: an experience that continues to inform and motivate him, but something he is at pains to never glamorize. ‘I come from the projects, but I chose to go this route,’ he said of his career. ‘I don’t wanna remember the s*** I saw, I don’t wanna talk about my friends that got shot: I wanna do music that makes me happy. Dark music gives me anxiety. I get scared! That’s why Black Eyed Peas’ s*** is happy, because I can get inside it and feel comfortable. I can escape from the world and go and live in the music.’ The man who is will.i.am in 2012 is scarcely different from the boy who was Will growing up in the 1970s and 80s: both love to dream and to escape.
Away from work, what could Will’s personal life look like in the future? Might he finally take his foot off the gas of his many professional endeavours and let a truly special someone into his life one day? ‘Working hard and looking to the future is what will.i.am is all about,’ said Will, the third-person vernacular he chose to hide behind proving unable to mask the sincerity of his statement. Even when he admits to personal ambitions, there is a grander mission underpinning them. ‘Soon I want to settle down and have lots of girl babies, because I don’t want to add to the destruction of the planet,’ he told the Guardian in 2008. ‘It’s a man’s world, and I think it’s gonna be a female that changes it all.’
It is not hard to understand which female in Will’s life gave him such a quasi-feminist perspective on the human race.