![]() ![]() Eazy signed me to Ruthless to be a ghostwriter.” But Eazy also had plans for Tribal Nation. Dre had left Eazy, and Ice Cube left Eazy, so he had no one else in the camp to ghostwrite. In 2011, will.i.am told Vibe that Eazy-E wanted him to play a very specific role: “Dr. (Eazy-E’s highest-charting Hot 100 solo hit, 1995’s “Foe Tha Love Of $,” peaked at #41.) He was impressed enough to sign them to his Ruthless label. The early ’90s were wild.) One night, Tribal Nation performed at Balistyx, and gangsta rap legend Eazy-E caught their live show. (He also released an album with the same title a year later. In 1991, David Faustino, the kid who played Bud Bundy on Married… With Children, opened up a rap club night called Balistyx. Adams became known as Will 1X, and Lindo, for reasons that I will never understand, took the name apl.de.ap. They joined up with a couple of other friends and formed a dance crew called Tribal Nation. In the late ’80s, Will Adams and Allan Lindo would go hit LA clubs and battle-rap other kids. In eighth grade, he met the Filipino-born Allan Pineda Lindo. (When Will was born, the Doobie Brothers’ “ Black Water” was the #1 song in America.) As a kid, Will went to raves and rap club nights. His father wasn’t around, but his uncle Lynn Cain played for the Atlanta Falcons. William Adams Jr., the man who would become will.i.am, grew up in the Estrada Courts housing projects in LA’s predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood. ![]() “Boom Boom Pow” was the culmination of a long, long journey. Maybe the Black Eyed Peas simply got a feeling. Sometimes, things simply don’t make rational sense. But I can’t tell you how “Boom Boom Pow,” a song with no real structure or chorus or lyrical point, held the top of the Hot 100 for three months straight. I can tell you that will.i.am went to raves as a kid, that he knew the history of intersection moments between rap and dance music. I can tell you how the Black Eyed Peas built a shameless brand over the decade, how the unexpected pop stardom of group member Fergie benefitted the rest of the Peas. I can tell you how the 2008 economic collapse left millions of young Americans in desperate financial straits and about how those young Americans turned to shiny, frictionless European club sounds for consolation - how that sensationalistic inebriation-soundtrack shit hit the zeitgeist. ![]() I can point out the currents that led to that moment. It seemed strange in the moment, and it seems even stranger in retrospect. Somehow, though, they rose up to absolutely dominate the pop charts, both in America and around the world, for half of the 2009 calendar year. They’d been fluffy alt-rap also-rans and even-fluffier pop-rap punchlines. When the Black Eyed Peas reached #1 for the first time, the group had been around for many years. When it comes to the Black Eyed Peas, though, I have no idea. I write this column because it’s fun to trace the social and musical threads that brought all these songs to the top of the mountain. I’m reviewing these songs - talking about if I think they’re any good or not - but the song’s story is usually a whole lot more interesting than whatever my opinion might be. How did this song cut through the noise and, however briefly, become the most popular single in America? That’s what I’m always trying to figure out. How did this happen? If this column has a point - debatable - then it’s that question. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music. Not only for me but for my family.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. For a show to do some creative editing and in a way just ruin my first chance, it was awful. It really confirmed that, "Oh my gosh, they portrayed me to be a different character than I am." I was completely agonized and heartbroken because I worked so hard for this dream and this opportunity. They called me all of the names in the book from terrible and fame hungry to the B-word. When my audition aired, what confirmed my fears was going onto YouTube and seeing the comments after my audition, they were just absolutely horrible. When I saw the audition I knew that they left out such important things like my family, journey, being a premature baby and giving a shout out to San Antonio, all of these things. That’s not what my goal was my goal was to be in the competition because of my love for music. I felt that they edited me to look shallow and ditzy and that I was in the competition for wrong reasons, for fame or to have an empire. ![]()
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