When file-sharing torpedoed album sales, and the music industry started panicking, Will.i.am was exploring other sources of revenue and taking a relentlessly commercial and ultimately highly successful approach to the music business. Right from the start, they had a clear strategy, ignoring the gangsta rap ghetto, and concentrating on college campuses "until every single college kid" knew them, and then they got a record deal. Born William James Adams to a single mother in a poor community in east Los Angeles, he began his music career at high school and later formed the Black Eyed Peas. He's unusual by pretty much anyone's standards. "It's just so unusual for a rapper!" she said.īut then, Will.i.am is not just unusual for a rapper.
But then we've returned the favour: the Black Eyed Peas were successful here before anywhere else, and Scream & Shout took a week to go to the top of the US singles charts, and just 24 hours here.) He went on the Graham Norton Show shortly after the Prince's Trust donation was announced and found himself next to the actress, Miriam Margolyes, who looked astonished.
(He likes Britain, he says, and has slightly adopted us, it seems. And donated £500,000 of his own money to the Prince's Trust to help develop young people's skills in Brixton and east London, with the focus on technology. On top of which, he played the Queen's jubilee, and carried the Olympic torch (tweeting as he went). (He said he'd used an orchestra because he didn't feel "sending a computer beat to Mars" was "the right thing to do".)Īnd that's just this year. He's become a technology evangelist, a speaker at the most prestigious gatherings of the world's elite – the Clinton Global Initiative, Google events – he's developed and launched his own range of iPhone accessories, he has his own charitable foundations paying for kids to go through college and bailing out people's mortgages, and this August he became the first musician to broadcast a piece of music on Mars: Nasa's Curiosity rover beamed a song that he'd written especially for the occasion, Reach for the Stars, back to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Music has been the launch pad for Will.i.am's success, but it's now just one strand of his burgeoning empire. Now I'm a little older, all I think about is technology and consumer electronic products. When I was 12, 13, 14 all I wanted to do was music. But I'm just so much more excited about technology. And even though this week his latest collaboration, Scream & Shout, with Britney Spears, went straight to number one on iTunes in both the US and in the UK, the music industry is actually the least of his concerns. He's also one of the most sought-after producers in the music industry and one of its shrewdest business brains. He might have the trappings of a rap star, an entourage that includes a film crew which is following his every move, and a slightly scary way of facing you down if he doesn't like the question, but that's only a small part of it. It's his favourite subject and it gets him hopping up and down in his seat and gesticulating and asking rhetorical questions and putting on a range of different voices (he's a truly excellent mimic, doing Michael Jackson as a sort of ghetto Barbara Cartland, though at one point he does me and I'm a ghetto Princess Margaret).īut then if you thought that Will.i.am was some rapper who was a judge on a talent show (BBC1's The Voice) with a rich and evocative line in contemporary slang ("I like her, she's dope!" "That's fresh!" etc), you'd be right but slightly missing the point. Especially when he's talking about his vision of the future, when we'll be listening to music through our clothes: "We won't have headphones! There'll be smart fabrics which affect your nerve endings!" Or more or less anything to do with technology. Which is not to say that, at times, he doesn't come across like an overactive toddler who's been on the orange squash. H ow smart is Will.i.am? Pretty damned smart, I'd say.