A critical re-evaluation of the Black Eyed Peas because why the hell not
MEDIA: The entirety of the Black Eyed Peas discography, including will.i.am and Fergie’s solo albums
EVENT: “Stunt Blogging” has returned
The Black Eyed Peas were the scourge of mid-2000s-to-early-2010s pop radio, a group in constant evolution, searching for the next hot sound to re-propel it to the top of the charts. There was Fergie, the breakout-star-slash-showbiz-ringer; the two guys who weren’t will.i.am, and will.i.am, who produced all the music and was clearly the one in charge.
The weird thing about will.i.am is that the guy is musically talented, just like straight-up. The guy had a hand in some of the best songs of the 2000s — The Game’s “Compton,” Justin Timberlake’s “Damn Girl,” John Legend’s “Ordinary People,” and Estelle’s “American Boy” each inculcate a musical universe in miniature and have nothing in common except for the fact that will.i.am produced them. He was like this diet superproducer you’d call if Timbaland/Dr. Dre/The Neptunes were out of your budget, and he was your go-to guy for Wyclef-lite if Clef was too busy doing sketchy stuff involving his charities to pick up the phone. The guy could give you any sound you wanted, from G-Funk to jazz to New Wave to electro and beyond.
And that, ultimately, has always been will.i.am’s problem. He’s got enough chops to bring pretty much any sound in his brain to life, but he is a man who has a lot of bad ideas. I will never forget watching 2008 election coverage in a dorm room in Chapel Hill and seeing will.i.am come on CNN as a hologram. “I’m being beamed to you like it’s Star Wars and stuff,” he told a credulous-acting Anderson Cooper, despite the fact that both parties knew that that hologram was fake as hell. This moment is so burned into my mind that I forgot he also made “Yes We Can,” which was a huge pro-Obama anthem! He has made forays into smartwatches, machine learning, Internet of Things, iPhone camera attachments, 3D printing, overpriced iPhone cases, smart clothes, and probably a billion other things. I hear he is currently working on a “cool” version of AI.
All of this is to say that will.i.am, and the Black Eyed Peas in general, are sort of a punchline these days. Which makes it all the more remarkable that will.i.am still has a lot of credibility in certain hip-hop circles — something that Donwill, the rapper and producer who makes up one-half of Tanya Morgan, reminded me of when he came on my podcast, Nersey, recently. People forget, but will.i.am was on Ruthless Records! The guy was a teenager ghostwriting for Eazy-E! He’s a featured guest on “Merry Motherfuckin’ Christmas,” the second-best Christmas rap song of all time (after “Player’s Ball”)! These are facts, and they cannot be reversed.
As a result of that conversation with Donwill, my brain told me that I needed to listen to every single Black Eyed Peas album, plus all of the group’s related solo albums, in order, because that is a thing I have never done before, and write about it. I am no hero, simply a blogger, attempting to do blogs on a website where it costs a dollar to read the posts. To quote will.i.am himself: Let’s get it started.
Grassroots (Atban Klann, 1994)
Before the Black Eyed Peas were the Black Eyed Peas, they were Atban Klann, a teenage backpack-rap group in Los Angeles who were signed to a post-N.W.A. Ruthless Records. I’m mainly including this one because it gives me an excuse to quote something that my friend Torii MacAdams wrote for me at VICE back in the day, ostensibly about the making of “Merry Mothafuckin’ Christmas,” but mainly about how Ruthless was “one of the strangest rap labels ever.” He first begins by setting the scene: N.W.A. has broken up, and Ruthless’s “up next” guy, the D.O.C., has had his larynx crushed in a car accident and is no longer physically capable of rapping. Take it away, Torii:
Eazy-E didn’t respond to the loss of his label's talent by trying to sign the next N.W.A. Instead, he responded by signing the next everything.
He and his infamously duplicitous manager/Ruthless co-runner Jerry Heller's stable of artists was almost comically diverse. It included Chicano rappers Brownside (whose member Klever recently made headlines for brandishing a gun in the vague direction of a cop on Instagram) and Kid Frost. There were the DJ Quik associates Penthouse Players Clique, a ménage à trois of female rap groups (Hoes with Attitude A.K.A. H.W.A., Gangsta Bitch Mentality, and one literally called Menajahtwa), and, absurdly, a long-haired flautist named Jimmy Z (read more about his Ruthless adventures here). Eazy-E, impressed by an impromptu backstage performance, signed a group of fast-rapping Clevelanders then known as B.O.N.E. Enterprise, and then renamed them Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Also under the Ruthless banner were Blood of Abraham, proud Jews who released “Niggaz and Jewz,” featuring Eazy-E and will.i.am (then Will 1 X). Will.i.am, along with fellow future Black Eyed Pea apl.de.ap, made up part of Eazy's Native Tongues-esque signees, the Atban Klann.
Anyways, Atban Klann never successfully released a record commercially, but their album Grassroots is kind of amazing?
A quick tangent: in 2010, the rapper Serengeti created a group called The Grimm Teachaz, which put out an album called There’s a Situation on the Homefront. The record is great and also extremely high-concept — it purports to be a lost album from the early 90s that was shelved by Jive due to the Teachaz getting into a beef with Shaq, and functions as a loving parody of the Fu-Schnickenz/Das EFX era, replete with murky funk, diggity-dack rhyme schemes, and an irrational hatred of Shaquille O’Neal. Atban Klann’s Grassroots is the real version of The Grimm Teachaz’s There’s a Situation on the Homefront, minus the Shaq disses. Fascinating time capsule, and this is way more than I will have to say about most of these albums.
Behind the Front (1998)
People know that the Black Eyed Peas were like a wannabe Roots at first, right? Like, their entire schtick was that they were a real hip-hop group who played with a live band. The problem with this iteration of the Peas, though, was that The Roots had virtuosic players and also Black Thought. The Black Eyed Peas, meanwhile, had will.i.am as their lead rapper, and also will.i.am playing most of the instruments. The single, "Head Bobs," has a beat that kind of sounds like the title track from GZA’s Liquid Swords.
“Duet,” from Atban Klann’s Grassroots, shows up on this record as well, with the original guests swapped out for an early verse from Redfoo of LMFAO. In closing, please enjoy the following screenshot from Redfoo of LMFAO’s Wikipedia page:
Bridging the Gap (2000)
This is the Black Eyed Peas doing the late 90s/early 2000s West Coast underground rap thing where they got a budget and tried to get some crossover hits (but in a conscious way). Given that this record came half a decade before Dilated Peoples’s Neighborhood Watch, maybe the Black Eyed Peas were ahead of their time?
As for the actual music: “Go go” is not a song that features D.C. gogo music, which would have been interesting and cool and what the will.i.am of the 2000s would have done. Instead, “Go go” is a fake Busta Rhymes song. There are a lot of early Black Eyed Peas songs that are fake Busta Rhymes songs. “Go Go” is followed by a rap song titled “Rap Song,” which features Wyclef Jean. I wonder if will.i.am somehow knew that he would go on to be Wyclef’s non-union Mexican equivalent. This record is more “fun” than Behind the Front, which I managed to listen to in its entirety without remembering a single musical detail.
Lost Change (will.i.am solo; 2001)
Ughhhh, I listened to this record right as I was starting this super-dumb project and forgot to take any notes on it and I have no desire to listen to it again. I remember listening to it and feeling like it was a little too refined to be truly aligned with the West Coast underground/leftfield scene, but way too jazzy and self-important to be “fun.” However, the beats were highly technically competent and if I’d been a Hollywood producer or something I would have absolutely hired will.i.am to score my movie off the strength of his work here. Put it on while you’re playing Elden Ring and need to concentrate on beating that one really tough boss.
Elephunk (2003)
This album is will.i.am discovering Timbaland discovering marching bands and country music. This album is also, unfortunately, will.i.am discovering the word “retarded” and deciding to make a song called “Let’s Get Ret*rded,” which became a massive hit. When I was a freshman in high school, “Let’s Get It Started” was everywhere, and I remember there being a rumor that the CD version of the song was titled “Let’s Get Ret*rded.” My peers were not lying.
On this record, will.i.am does impressions of Busta Rhymes (once again) and Beenie Man. Fergie, who’d just joined the group, is forced to sing the phrase, “We keep it stinky,” and use a fake patois on multiple tracks. I wonder if this was the Black Eyed Peas’s version of when Metallica buried Jason Newsted’s bass parts in the …And Justice for All mix because they resented having to get a new bassist after Cliff Burton died.
More songs stuff: “Fly Away” is kinda post-punk; “Anxiety (Feat. Papa Roach)” is a fascinating time capsule of the waning days of rap-rock, “Third Eye” is a reggae song about staying woke. Versions of the album on streaming services have swapped out “Let’s Get Reta*rded” for “Let’s Get It Started,” but they forgot to bleep out will.i.am using the r-word on literally the first verse of the first song.
Must B 21 (will.i.am solo; 2003)
Leftover beats from the Elephunk sessions, apparently. He starts off strong here by recruiting KRS-One, Phife Dawg, and Planet Asia for verses, and I unironically say I would have loved a whole album of those three rapping over post-sellout will.i.am beats. There’s also a fun fake Dirty South song on here called “I’m Ready (Y’all Ain’t Ready for This).” I don’t really want to talk about the rest of the songs on this record, and I don’t think that will.i.am does either.
Monkey Business (2005)
This is the “Fergie is about to be a big star” album, and so there’s a lot of Fergie on here. It actually might be my second-favorite Black Eyed Peas album, just because they took the same maximal, throw-it-all-at-the-wall approach that Kanye did on Late Registration but made a bunch of goofy pop songs, plus had Q-Tip and Talib Kweli show up to the party for some reason.
Fergie is forced to do fake patois here with less frequency than she did on the previous record, but she ends up pulling it out on a track that features Sting. Maybe it’s fine because Sting and will.i.am do it on the song too.
“My Humps” remains as insipid as it once did, but elsewhere this is just anodyne pop-rap with guitars. There’s also the extremely mid-2000s song “Gone Going,” which samples Jack Johnson and is wayyyyyyyyy better than it has any right to be. Honestly the same could be said about basically everything on this record.
The Dutchess (Fergie solo, 2006)
This might actually be will.i.am’s masterpiece? You probably remember “Glamorous” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “London Bridge” which is basically “My Humps, Part 2” except it rocks,” but the album cuts are amazing too. “Clumsy” is a torch song that mashes Little Richard together with bleep-bloop; “All That I Got” sounds like a lost 90s R&B ballad, down to the way Fergie’s vocals are mixed; “Voodoo Doll” is Fergie’s obligatory fake patois song but this time it’s fine; “Velvet” is pure circa-2002 Rodney Jenkins. Fergie switches between rapping and singing and nails basically everything. You should absolutely listen to this thing if you never have. In a more just world, we’d put this thing in the same category as FutureSex/LoveSounds, a genre-transcending masterpiece that can only manifest in the pop idiom.
Fergie made a second solo album, Double Dutchess, which I’m not going to write about because I ran out of time.
Songs About Girls (will.i.am solo, 2007)
will.i.am is wearing a trilby hat on the cover of this record, which leads me to believe that all the songs on this thing began their life as beats that didn’t make the final cut for Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, on which Mr. i.am produced the levitation-inducing “Damn Girl.” “Got It From My Mama” is basically “My Humps, Part 3” except it sucks again. This album also has the song that turned into Estelle’s “American Boy.” I’d tentatively recommend a listen?
The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies) (2009)
“Here we go / here we go / satellite radio” — will.i.am, “Boom Boom Pow”
I hate that this is true but we’re all friends here. I was a super huge fan of Common’s Universal Mind Control record from 2008. It was all electro. This album is like if that album internalized the fact that Kanye sampled Daft Punk once and made that its entire identity. In other words it fucking rips and sounds way better today than any of the other BEP records, though The Dutchess is a close second. The E.N.D. threw everything people knew about the Black Eyed Peas out the window, then threw itself out of a different window straight into a pool of mollywater in Ibiza.
According to the Wikipedia page for the record, will.i.am told Marie Claire that the record is “dedicated to all the party people out there in the world that want to go out and party.” And indeed, the word “party” is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, past participle, onomatopoeia, and more to the point a driving ethos. They got David Guetta to produce “I Gotta Feeling,” a song that you know even if you’ve never heard it. “Imma Be” has a fantastic fake Polow da Don and a fun line from Fergie where she refers to her hair as “hairs.” A bunch of the songs are just Daft Punk type beats with some rapping/singing over them.
And then there’s “Now Generation,” a song that’s truly on some other other other other other shit. It comes on the heels of “Showdown,” which has a kinda DP-but-make-it-a-live-band thing going on and ends with a spoken-word outro where a computerized voice asks the question, “What would happen…. if people…. stopped……… spending,,,,,,,,,, money????” (More or less.) And then “Now Generation” hits, and will.i.am proceeds to kick the following verse:
I want money
I want it, want it, want it
Fast internet, stay connected in a jet
Wi-Fi, podcast, blastin' out an SMS
Text me, and I'll text you back, check me on the iChat
I'm all about that HTTP, you're a PC, I'm a Mac, I want it
MySpace and yo' space, Facebook is a new place
Dip divin', socializin', I'll be out in cyber space
Google is my professor, Wikipedia checker
Checkin' my account, loggin' in and loggin' out
Baby, I want it (Now)
There may have been some vague intention on will.i.am’s part for this verse to be satire, but we live in a society, and in this society, will.i.am is the guy who unironically loves all technology. Also, keep in mind that all of these raps are happening over a beat that sounds a LOT like “Jack and Diane.” Every once in a while, something happens on a major label pop-rap album that’s just so out there that you simply must admit that somebody was in the studio absolutely fuckin cooking. And in the case of the heartland Americana Black Eyed Peas song featuring an inventory of things you could do on a smartphone in 2009, that person was will.i.am.
The deluxe edition of this album has an entire record’s worth of bonus tracks in which the Peas run their old material through the bleep-bloop filter. I can’t recommend it to anyone who is not a Black Eyed Peas completist, and in 2024, I might be the only person who that label could even remotely apply.
The Beginning (2010)
What do you do when you completely switch your style up and make a hit album? You turn around and pump out another one in the exact same style, of course. I’ve got to admit that despite how much I think The E.N.D. whips ass, I couldn’t make it all the way through this one. All the songs I actually listened to felt like they were mashups of two different classic electronic/dance songs with new lyrics. God I’m so fucking glad that apl.de.ap and Taboo, the two other people in the Black Eyed Peas whose names I’m only now getting around to mentioning, never released solo albums.
Masters of the Sun, Vol. 1 (2018)
At some point after The Beginning, Fergie left the group because there is more to life than being in the Black Eyed Peas. By the mid-2010s, her erstwhile band’s stock had never been lower. EDM was out; luddism was in. will.i.am making “Yes We Can” had ever-so-slightly contributed to the normalization of pop culture people doing politics stuff, which has been a net negative for society and if you squinted your eyes maybe somehow slightly led to Trump. They were a rap-singing band with no singer, no band, and no juice. There was only one thing the Black Eyed Peas could do: create a graphic novel called Masters of the Sun and, drop an album that was the soundtrack to said graphic novel, and have that album be real hip-hop. So, uh, that’s what they did.
The first song on this thing is literally called “Back 2 Hip-Hop” and features Nas. The second-best song on the record features Phife Dawg and Posdnuos, and the best song finds will.i.am once again rapping about conspiracy theories, both because that’s what one does on a real hip-hop album and also because that’s just a thing will.i.am likes to do. It’s, like, fine, but there are a half-dozen other pop-rappers-returning-to-rappin-ass-rappin albums I’d rather listen to, each of which does not feature the artist sampling the most obvious songs humanly possible. It’s genuinely interesting, though, that each rapper in the group shows way more technical skill and acumen for snappy punchlines than they did when Black Eyed Peas were an actual underground rap group. Really makes you think.
This album also features vocals Nicole Scherzinger, who apparently was approached to be in the group before Fergie was, but turned them down through her husband at the time (Nick Exum of 311). I love factoids like this.
The Black Eyed Peas have put out two more records since Masters of the Sun, Vol 1, and will.i.am did another solo album at some point in the 2010s, but I’m not going to consider them part of the “official” Black Eyed Peas canon as determined by me, both because they’re too recent to be funny to write about and also simply because I don’t want to. Besides, it’s kind of poetic to imagine an arc of the Black Eyed Peas’ career in which they emerged as a goofy real hip-hop group, became massive stars who were completely disconnected from their roots, and then returned to where they came for their swan song.
