will.i.am Tells Apple Music About Challenging Himself Beyond the Black Eyed Peas, Making a Bilingual Album, What To Expect in The Future, and More…

will.i.am joins Zane Lowe on Apple Music to run through his ‘At Home With’ playlist. He tells Apple Music about the inspiration behind the Black Eyed Peas latest album Translation, exploring personal goals prior to reuniting with the group, how success distorts reality, being dropped from their label, early shows on punk rock tours, why women are the strongest people on earth, hitching a ride to Glastonbury on Sting’s helicopter, and more.

Video embed and key quotes below — feel free to use and credit Zane Lowe on Apple Music. Listen to the conversation in full today (7/1) at 10:00a PST at apple.co/zane. Check out all of the artist-curated ‘At Home With’ playlists on Apple Music HERE.

Link – https://apple.co/_williamAHW

Embed – <iframe src=”https://embed.itunes.apple.com/us/embedded-player/idsa.49e24000-bb55-11ea-bf4a-b04926836c05” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen scrolling=”no”></iframe>

We played the Super Bowl, the World Cup, got freaking seven Grammys, and playing stadiums like, “Yo, we had our run. We did it the biggest. What?” You can’t be like, “Oh, we had a run.”

I like challenges. I like doing things to push myself. Once you’ve lifted 1000 pounds, you’re like, “Okay, what am I going to try to lift, 2000 pounds? If I lift 2000 pounds, it’s got to change my body shape and I like my body shape. I don’t want to go any further. What’s the point of lifting 2000 pounds? You don’t get an award for lifting 2000 pounds. The award is 1000 pounds.” You can’t take care of your family any more than you’re taking care of your family because your mom doesn’t want that other luxury of life. She wants the life she’s cool. If I say, “Yo mom, I’m going to buy you the biggest mansion in the world,” she’s like, “No, Willie, this one’s perfect.” I come from the projects, what else is there to do other than use your money to go build other things?

And then once I did that, I realized that it took me a while to realize I was missing something, and the thing that I was missing was the spark and the spark was the relationship I had with music. Music is my wife and my wife is open for me to do other things but I cannot cheat on my wife with my attention.

So it was in 2012 everybody went their family routes and space because we were touring all 2011. So 2013, I did Willpower. In ’13, I’m like, “Yo, Tab, how come you’re not coming by the studio anymore? Yo, bro, should I take it personal? Why aren’t you coming around?” He was like, “I’m just trying to figure my solo out.” I was like, “Yo, I figured my solo out amongst everybody.” He was like, “Yeah, but Will, we don’t always got to be in each other’s space.” I was like, “Yo, we’re brothers, bro.” I took it personal that he didn’t want to fucking come around.

So then in 2014, I get a call and he’s like, “Yo, Will, I got some bad news.” I’m like, “What’s up.” He was like, “I got diagnosed with cancer.” I’m like, “Tab, stop f*cking around, bro.” He’s like, “I’m dead ass.” I was like, “Are you serious?” I immediately hung up the phone and called Dr. David Agus. Dr. David Agus is the doctor who kept Steve Jobs alive as long as he stood alive and helped Lance Armstrong beat his testicular cancer. So I’ve known Dr. David Agus for a while, connected Tab with Dr. David Agus, and he beat testicular cancer. By 2015, we’re like, “All right, let’s make a record. Let’s get back to music.” And then the hovering question was, “Are we going to do it as a trio or a quartet? Let’s call Ferg.”

Ferg’s like, “I want to focus on just being a mom and being here for Axel.” We were like, “Okay, we respect that. But what are the fans going to think? Should we wait for you? Or should we keep it moving? Because if we wait for you, how long do we wait? It’s already been four plus years.”

Makes you think, yeah, makes you think you’re the center of the world because you have people that are … I hate bag carriers. Don’t carry my bags, you’re going to distort my perspective. I can carry my own bag. I hate shoelace-ifers. Like, yo, unless my back is hurting, I’m tying my own shoes. As a matter of fact, I wear balenciagas, I don’t tie shoes. Success f*cks people up like that, and when Where’s the Love? part two happened, we thought, Angela thought, everybody thought, “Yo, this is going to be everywhere.” It wasn’t. Wasn’t.

So I was like, okay, it’s a new world. Before we flex, Let’s do an underground jazz hip-hop record. Interscope wanted us, they wanted Black Eyed Peas, the I Got A Feeling Black Eyed Peas. They wanted the Where Is the Love?, they didn’t even want the Where Is the Love Black Eyed Peas, they wanted Let’s Get It Started, Don’t Lie, My Humps, Boom-Boom-Pow-

Yeah. They wanted I Got a Feeling, Boom-Boom-Pow, that stuff. I was like, “You know, we’re a trio again and I can’t just jump into that. I got to test the waters first,” because as soon as we do that and it doesn’t work, it’s done. So let’s do what the original fans have always been waiting for, patiently. Some of them forgot. If we can make them remember and they’re excited, however many of them are, let’s make a record for that.

Yeah, so we did Masters of the Sun and was like, yo, it was meant to be what it was. And then we dropped off of Interscope. They dropped us 2019.

The humbling part was like, yo, let’s go to Billboard Latin Awards and just go hunt, let’s go freaking network, I want to do a Latin album. I knew it in my gut, let’s do an album dedicated to the world that accepted the Black Eyed Peas. Our success, Black Eyed Peas, we couldn’t play the Dodger Stadium or Rose Bowl, we played Stadium Azteca in Mexico. We couldn’t play freaking Dallas Cowboys Stadium, we played the Brazilian stadium in São Paolo and Rio de Janiero.

We were playing stadiums in Central and South America, in Spain and France. That’s where our success was at. Yo, let’s dedicate this record to our Latin audience and do a whole half, a half-album, at least 50% in Spanish. I’m born and raised in east L.A., I have a school teaching kids computer science, robotics, sending kids to Dartmouth and Brown and UCLA and Stanford. The majority of my students are Mexicano, because that’s the neighborhood I come from. Let’s do a freaking Latin album. So we did.

To go to the Latin Billboard Awards and you’re trying to network with J. Balvin, and the head of Universal Latin’s there and he knows you got dropped, that’s an embarrassing thing

So it’s about, I got to make hits, because any minute now, Balvin’s going to know we don’t have a label, and why would he work with the Black Eyed Peas when there’s no label at that level to really amplify the hit? Then a friend of ours is like, “Yo, will, Sylvia Rhone and Zeke are working on Bad Boys 3 soundtrack, and they need Latin-urban sh*t and I told them that you’re working on that.” I was like, “All right, bring them by the studio.”

Oh, yeah. We took a helicopter from Sting’s house. I remember Sting invited us to his castle right next to Stonehenge, and Seth, our manager was like, “Yo, Will, Sting wants to have dinner with you guys.” I was like, Sting? Get out of here. I love The Police.” So we drove to his house and we were late to the show. He was like, “Why don’t you take my helicopter?” I was like- So we helicopter into Glastonbury, and it was the same time that Paul McCartney was- He’d just went on. He headlined and we went on and then Paul McCartney was going on, so we went to see his show from the side. So he let us go on the side. And as we were going on, somebody tied his shoe. I was like, “Somebody tied his shoe? He can’t tie his own shoe?” No, turns out he had a bad back, so he needed the shoe tier.

To me, Tab, and Ap, our live shows became that because they threw us in the pit with Suicidal Tendencies in 1999. They threw us in the pit with freaking Brougham, Pennywise. We had to go on tour with Pennywise. Yeah. Yo, we had to go on tour with Metallica at the Big Day Out. We got to go on tour with freaking Black Eyed Peas, The Darkness, and Coldplay, and freaking Mars Volta. Right? It’s like we had to learn how to perform like that.

This was all pre-Fergie. By touring in punk rock tours, we had to bring energy. So when Fergie got inserted into the Black Eyed Peas, she had the forget all that Wild Orchid pop stuff. Fergie in the Peas, she had a – She had to change her energy. She couldn’t do Wild Orchid sh*t. Fergie’s from Wild Orchid. And props to Fergie, because she came with- Brought it because she had … There was no choice but to. She was forced to just do all the things that … all the things that Wild Orchid did not allow her to do, she could do that on stage with the Peas. But to our architectural credit, all those songs were made before we met Fergie. All those songs were made, and we had our recipe of how we made music.

She was like, “Name a black producer, songwriter, performer, that competes in pop across genres.” I never even thought of that. That was Sylvia Rhone that brought that to me. I was like, “Holy shit.” She’s like, “Most black producers produce and compete in urban. in urban only.”

… and focusing on that genre, on an international level. On an international level, what black artist has top 40 songs that play in Russia, that play in Slovakia, that play in Czech Republic, that play in China, in Japan, that play in Indonesia, and Vietnam, and Taiwan, and play in freaking Philippines, and Laos, and Cambodia, that play in freaking Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, that play in Chile, and Belize, and Panama, and Colombia, and Cuba, and Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, that play in freaking Zambia, and Nigeria. Right? Name a black producer that does that.

I needed that massage so bad and that stretching to make me realize like, yo, what the f*ck. This is where you need to focus. Yo, bro. RITMO is bigger streaming than I Got a Feeling, and I Got a Feeling is a big f*cking record. RITMO’s bigger. Bigger than Where is the Love. We’re having our success now.

So I go in and see Lucien, and he was like, “Let’s face it, Will. You’ve checked out of music a long time ago. Technology took your attention away from you. Let’s be honest.” He was like, “You’re chasing the entrepreneurial dream now. The musician side of you, that’s not your focus. Let’s be real.” I was like, “You know what? You’re right.” So they didn’t take it from me. In reality, they just echoed what my actions were.

Yeah. So to answer your question, before you couldn’t work on music in the daytime. The studio opened at 7:00, so you didn’t interrupt the developers. Now, the developer, they just have to live with music, because music is the center of the building.

So I’ll paint two sides. There’s two paths to revolution and I like to look at the word, “Revolution,” and ignore the, “R,” and just say, “Evolution.” And music can help us evolve. You could go in reverse and then go forward, or you could just go forward from an optimistic point of view by bringing people together on the same frequency. If you start a revolution and no one’s on the same frequency, and the opposing forces are tactically savvy where they can manipulate the voices to cause us into a point of no return type of revolution and persuade, because you can’t trust the information coming from these platforms. The only place you can trust is the streaming platforms. They haven’t figured out a way to manipulate the voices of the songwriters and they’re intent on how they bring people together. Google is manipulatable. Facebook is highly manipulatable. Twitter’s manipulatable… Every single platform is manipulatable except for the streaming platforms right now.

Bob Marley, if he was alive today, there’s no algorithm that changed the fucking lyrics, that changed the sentiment of what he said. There’s no fake song. There’s fake news. There’s no fake song. Yes, there’s fake music. But the fucking lyric that Travis Scott intended is the lyric. There’s no algorithm yet to change that. There’s no fake version of the song yet. That is liberating. That is freaking pretty awesome. So how do you guide people? How do you inspire people? It’s about inspiration right now. It’s about love. It’s about unity. That’s the revolution. And I know that sounds like kumbaya, like huggy, huggy. No, that’s real because it could get ugly real fast. And you don’t know if the ugly was intended and persuade micro-targeting, where they’re five, 10 steps ahead of you and they’re leading you to go down that path.

You can’t trust this sh*t, bro. You can’t trust the post and the tweets. You can’t trust any of that. The only thing you can trust is f*cking music. That’s why I choose optimism, joy and that love. That’s the reason why it’s poppy and uplifting, because that’s the only thing you could trust right now. The true intent of the human heart.

Yeah. Just knowing me, I got to be there 100%, knowing what’s coming around the corner. The world’s crazy in 2030.

Because for the past five years, I’ve been a part of the World Economic Forum’s AI council, and although some awesome things are going to come, we’re seeing the beginnings of what the world is going to be now. It really is a whole new era. It’s a whole new decade the fourth industrial revolution kicking off right now. And we’re seeing it. We’re seeing division, social distancing, poor leadership, physical jobs, questioned digital jobs going through the roof. We’re going to see the second wave of COVID. It has nothing to do about the virus, just companies doing mass layoffs because they’ve realized that they don’t need everybody at the office. Big office buildings, we don’t need that. We made our money this quarter. Insights. They’re calling this the great awakening where companies have woken up. And it’s never going to be the way it was. And that means teachers are grading in ways that they’ve never graded. So how do you know that the people that graduated this year were actually because it was great practice or if it was just like, “Oh, we never done this before. You get an A.” So this graduating class, we’re going to remember this class. We’re going to remember this forever. And the question marks of what jobs will be there tomorrow and we know there’s going to be mass job loss just from COVID, and we know there’s going to be mass job loss just from the autonomous world that we’re walking into. Is that me? That’s me, bro.

We know there’s going to be mass job loss from the autonomous world, the AI world, the robotic world. That’s in this next 10 years. So if I have a kid next year, by 2029 that kid is eight, that world is totally different, bro. And I got to be there 100%, because you can’t wing this next one. The world is upside down. It’s starting to tip now. We’re seeing it, we’re feeling it tip. We’re watching it, we’re in the middle of the tip. And so knowing that and knowing that you got to design tomorrow job creators, you got to design tomorrow contributors and problem solvers. So I want to design my kids to be problem solvers and that’s going to require 100% of me. My mom designed me, not an accident. It just wasn’t by chance. My mom, I wrote Happy Father’s Day for my mom because I don’t have a dad.

My mom’s my dad, and my Happy Mother’s Day to my mom was, my mom is a designer. My mom is a planetary scientist. My mom is a computer scientist. My mom is a developer. My mom sent me to the best school possible and got me out of the hood so I can see what the world has to offer. Leaving my ghetto to go to school in Brentwood is like going to a different planet to educate, right? So that’s why my mom is a planetary scientist. My mom didn’t allow me to hang out in the streets growing up. She didn’t want the hood to influence me. That’s like changing an operating system of a Samsung phone to be an iPhone. My mom put iOS on my Android device. My mom developed me to know that anything is possible. My mom developed me to know that I am the author of my dreams and I have the ability to make my dreams reality. My mom instilled code into my brain to override the conditions of society that tells a black man they cannot achieve anything.

And my mom did all this developing without a man to help her. Men are important. But from my perspective, I’m happy I didn’t have a father growing up. My mom is all that I needed. Women are truly the strongest people on earth and that is why this male-dominated world is terrified of a strong woman. The world is the way it is because of egotistical men. I truly believe the world would be a much better place if a woman were in control. Happy Father’s Day mama, which is a crazy sentence. Happy Father’s Day, mom.

Because when you’re a black man in America or a man in America raised by a mom, what do you do for Father’s Day? Who do you say Happy Father’s Day to? Do you ignore the fact that your mom also wears the pants in the house and fathered you? A father does not mean busted nut.So seeing that from my mom and that 100% attention to design me and 100% love to develop me, 100% nurturing to protect me, I got to do that for my child. And I can’t be like, “Hey babe, I’m almost finished with this beat.” I don’t want to do that as a parent. When I’m a parent, I want to be what my mom was. That’s 100%. That’s the reason why it’s always hard for me to answer that question.

Suggested Articles: