The Black Eyed Peas: The Science of Global Pop Domination
“On to the next, on to the next, on to the next,” he chants, as he segues from Basement Jaxx’s 2001 “Where’s Your Head At” into the opening of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and into Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” whose chorus he merges into that of the 2009 hit “Shots” by the electro group LMFAO, whose MCs Redfoo and Sky Blu he has known since high school and whose father and grandfather, respectively, is Motown founder Berry Gordy. “If you’re a DJ at the top of your game, you got 80,000 people in the middle of Los Angeles in the hood,” says Will. “Eighty thousand cats. No Rihannas, no fuckin’ Beyoncés. DJs.”
The Whole Song Should Be a Chorus
As a songwriter, Will.i.am ascribes to Moore’s Law, the software principle whereby increasingly smaller devices hold increasingly more information. “Right now, every chorus is getting shorter and shorter,” he says. “Soon we’ll be listening to blips. Nowadays, the more complex things sound, when you break them down, all the veils and sheets are just disguises.” On the other hand, an apparently simple song, like “Boom Boom Pow,” is actually downright avant-garde. “It has one note,” says Will.i.am. “It says ‘boom’ 168 times. The structure has three beats in one song. It’s not lyrics — it’s audio patterns, structure, architecture. Lots of people say, ‘Black Eyed Peas shit is simple,’ and I’ll be like, ‘No, fool, it’s the most complex shit you even could fathom, that’s the reason it works everywhere around the planet.'”
Will.i.am can apply this kind of thinking to any tune. So how would he rewrite the national anthem? He suggests a simple approach. “There wouldn’t be no verse and chorus,” he says. “The whole song should be a chorus. It should be about a minute and have highs and lows able to be sung by males and females in all keys.” The mix to shoot for, he says, is “We Are the World,” for its ingenious simplicity, and the Dolly Par-ton-penned Whitney Houston hit “I Will Always Love You,” which ruled the charts for 14 weeks — a feat matched by the Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” The new anthem, says Will, “should tell our stories, say we’ve done bail things, that we’ve suffered and grown, and we care about the future. The Whitney Houston song has all that — humility and passion and pain and joy and love all at the same time. You take those two approaches and marry them — that’s power. That’s how America should talk to the world.”
Go Straight to Joy
In the cold reality of the marketplace, networking, promotion and synergy do a fine job of making the mediocre popular every day. The rarer successes, those that truly win hearts and minds, work an alchemy even Will.i.am hasn’t quite wired, one he discusses without mentioning brands, audio patterns or 151’Ms. “What is the easiest emotion to act?” he asks. “Anger. What is the hardest? Joy. That’s ’cause joy is complex. It’s somber, sad, happy, heartbroken, hopeful — it’s all these emotions in one. What you hear in ‘I Gotta Feeling’? To me, that’s joy. You’re in pain, but tonight’s going to be a good night. You can’t feel happy when you’ve been pissed off the whole week. You have to go straight to joy.”
He thinks back to an insight he got from Bono. “Bono said, ‘Our music gets to people closer than you ever can be: You’re in their ears, they put us in their head.’ That changed my whole view on things. Someone consciously put you this close to their brain. That’s serious.”
Within two weeks of that conversation, Will was back at his home in Los Angeles. It was a year after he hail stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial next to the new president, a moment during which his mind raced with thoughts about his childhood, his hour-and-a-half bus ride to school, his grandmother. “I was thinking of her watching the inauguration of a black man as president with her grandson onstage — all those thoughts running through me,” he says. “I was up there and I was like, ‘Why me?'”
And within an hour he wrote “I Gotta Feeling,” a song that nails ever)’ single note of a state-of-the-art, multi-user, good-time delivery system — although its intended use, its reason for existence, may be just as significant to its success.
“Nobody asked me to write ‘I Gotta Feeling,'” says Will.i.am. “It just came.”