When will.i.am, apl.de.ap and Taboo were joined by Ferguson in 2003, the Black Eyed Peas went from experimental to exponential. As Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2009, "Ever since the group’s three core members transformed themselves from a middling conscious-rap outfit into the platinum hip-pop juggernaut of 2003’s breakout Elephunk, featuring lithesome onetime child star Stacy ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, their energy has appeared to be virtually unsinkable." And it was true. This is the story of a group who enjoyed not one, but two rebirths. The group had truly created an anthem for the digital age. By March 2011, the song had become the first record in digital history to sell over seven million downloads. All it asks its audience to do is to go out and have a good time, which in 2009 was a much-needed diversionary tactic, as the world teetered into a new recession and the first signs appeared that the amazing new dawn offered by the Barack Obama presidency wasn’t going to be as great as all that. And then it builds, and builds and builds, until the song explodes in a jump-inducing frenzy. Over an insistent computerized riff, will.i.am encourages people to party, with a simple hunch that the evening ahead will be an absolute stormer. And ‘I Gotta Feeling’, a call-to-action celebration anthem, seemed to top all of its predecessors in that well-trodden genre. Their image was now what really struck a chord – the four group members had become strange cartoon images of themselves, with outlandishly futuristic clothes and matching headgear. As they occupied the top two positions in the US Billboard Hot 100 with this and their preceding single, the extraordinarily minimalist ‘Boom Boom Pow’, ‘I Gotta Feeling’ became the first digital download to sell a million copies in the UK, and demonstrated that the group had gained a whole new generation of fans who had no idea that the Black Eyed Peas had been recording for over a decade. They had now created, with French DJ David Guetta, a potent brand of mainstream party house. For many, it was the final detachment from their East LA hip-hop roots, and the ultimate adoption into the widest possible mainstream they were no longer, as they had been so extensively on their earliest recordings, quoting their references. When the Black Eyed Peas – the strangely monikered, multi-racial rappers, dancers and vocalists, will.i.am, apl.de.ap, Taboo and Fergie – started making computerized, beat-laden, simplistic post-hop with ‘I Gotta Feeling’ in 2009, the group who’d been together since the mid-nineties, became something else entirely. Then we have a white girl, a guy from the Philippines and a Mexican rapper who was raised in a Chinese part of town.Įvery generation gets the music it deserves. I’m a black guy who grew up in a Mexican neighbourhood. We are more like a mad, worldwide science project than a band. The people that come to our shows and buy our records don’t seem to mind. This band is like musical hip-hop, like theatre, in a sense.
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