We’re not playing that. It’s a club song. It’s like when I get around my mom, all my cuss words are deleted from my vocabulary. Automatically, they just leave. Super Bowl, yes, the words are not going to exist in my vocabulary.
I trust you’re not planning a “wardrobe malfunction,” to borrow the euphemism for Justin Timberlake’s assault on Janet Jackson’s clothing at the game in 2004.
That wasn’ta malfunction.
What would you call it?
A male function.
You’re known for your political advocacy and helped propel President Obama into the White House with your “Yes We Can” music video. The general consensus seems to be that the Obama hope movement has failed to deliver.
I don’t want to hope anymore. I don’t thinkwe should hope anymore. We hoped enough. Now we have to do. We all have to do now.
Do you feel disappointed in President Obama?
I don’t feel disappointed. I feel like, Argggh! Speak louder! I feel like, Do something! I feel like jumping in.
The Black Eyed Peas’ latest album, “The Beginning,” sheds the political sermonizingof its predecessor, “The E.N.D.,” in favorof a let’s-party hedonism. How would you describe its sound?
It’s electro. Electro is today’s disco — making electronic musicnot for the sake of selling it but for sharingit and touring around the world D.J.-ing.
A friend of mine says that nightlife represents the greatest waste of human energy inthe history of mankind.
Your friend probably doesn’t go to clubs. Right now in the world, clubbing is needed. It’s a time when people want to rub shoulders against people theydon’t know and share, even if the sharing is expressing your like over a beat.
O.K., but clubbing seems to invite a lot of drinking and drug use.
So do restaurants. I could go to a restaurant and get drunk. I could go to a restaurant and eat all the wrong food and get freaking diabetes and high cholesterol.
Do you think rap music glamorizes guns?
Justas much as Hollywood action films do. They glamorize more, because there’s dialogue, there’s emotion to it. There are visuals. Actors went to holding-gun school to learn how tohold an AK-47 right. They glorify guns more than any hip-hop song, because the song just says, “Shoot ’em up, bang, bang.”
So write a song about gun control instead.
Butis gun control the solution? Here’s the problem: Profiteers haunt America, and for everything we try to control, someone’s going to profit from it, more than you control it.
You grew up in the projects of East Los Angeles, and reportedly never met your dad.
I wasraised by my mother and my uncles — my Uncle Donnie, my Uncle Rendal Fay, my Uncle Lynn, my Uncle Roger. Those are my mother’s brothers. Not the Smothers Brothers.
You have since bought your mom a house in the valley and started a foundation to keep families from losing their houses. How does that work?
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.”
How did you arrive at the name Will.i.am?
I liked playing with words. I noticed that my name was a sentence, meaning one with will, who is strong-willed. And so I called my mom and said, “Hey, Mom, do you mind if I call myself Will.i.am?” She was like: “Whaaa? You’re crazy.” She was cool with it.
Your name sounds like Sam-I-Am, from Dr. Seuss.
And I eat green eggs and ham! If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss. I like “emerge” and “see.”
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