Will.i.am: Songs About Girls : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

If your only encounters with rapper-producer Will.i.am come care of JumboTrons or drunk girls screeching "My Humps," it's easy to forget that beneath the cotton-candy hip-hop of the Black Eyed Peas lies one of the most meticulous minds in the production game. Will's third solo album is devoted to women, but he stretches the conceit in imaginative directions: For every ode to ass (the singsongy bumper "The Donque Song"), there's a melancholic track about a couple drifting (the gently crooned "Invisible") or one that's about a different kind of girl, like "S.O.S. (Mother Nature)," an urgent rant about how "the planet's gonna die because of bullshit politics." Though Snoop Dogg makes a cameo and Will breaks into more than a few nimble rhymes, Songs About Girls isn't a hip-hop record, but a pop&B album of mellow head-nodders that veer between chilled-out soul and lite-electro funk. And then, just to make sure this one doesn't go the way of Will's first two solo albums, there's the single "I Got It From My Mama," the thinking man's "My Humps."