by Danny White
Will.i.am
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2012
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-003-2 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-004-9 in trade paperback format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-019-3 in EPub format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-020-9 in Mobipocket format
Designed and typeset by Design 23, London
www.mombooks.com
Contents
Foreword
1 Reaching New Heights
2 Building a Band
3 Technology and Fate
4 Collaboration
5 The E.N.D. and the Beginning
6 The Cole Factor
7 The Voice and Beyond
8 Heart and Soul
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Will’s single ‘Reach for the Stars’ is, on its surface, about space travel. With its grand, orchestral opening it has an iconic, Hollywood feel from the start. It was chosen to become the first song to be played on Mars, its cleverly named ‘universal premiere’ taking place in August 2012. The song’s significance in Will’s story goes beyond that though – its lyrics almost reflect the mission statement that has guided his life. He has always refused to accept that the sky is the limit, and the personal universe he operates within has always been a vast arena.
Whatever he has achieved in his life, he has responded to each achievement by aiming ever higher. Even his clothing range, deliberately evocative of an intergalactic superhero, fits with the song’s science-fiction atmosphere. His life story to date also tallies with the title of the song in another sense: a ravenous and successful networker, Will has reached for many stars for collaboration and discovered – to his delight – that many were only too happy to meet his grasp.
And the public, it seems, is no less attracted to him. Why does he enchant us so?
The answer can be found, in part, in the way he runs against the grain of twenty-first-century celebrity culture. In an age in which people can become famous with precious little talent or justification, Will’s abilities shine. Although still in his thirties, in addition to his role as frontman of the planet-conquering supergroup The Black Eyed Peas, he has proven himself to be a fine solo artist; a distinguished and in-demand producer; a manager; actor; designer; businessman and philanthropist. He is also a popular reality-television coach, thanks to his memorable presence on the first series of BBC One’s primetime Saturday night TV show The Voice.
He has approached all of his endeavours with only the highest success in mind. In his autobiography, Fallin’ Up, his Black Eyed Peas bandmate, Taboo, summed-up Will’s approach to life well, ‘He never walked on the playing field to be a participant, he walked on with a desire to be the greatest. Number one. Unrivalled. That was the pressure he exerted on himself. Always.’ If he has not deserved his fame through all these channels of activity, it is hard to see how he ever will. He has earned a substantial personal fortune. The scale of it is disputed but it is generally believed to be not far either side of £50 million.
There is more to his appeal than all that, though. Will’s admirers love his relentless positivity, particularly as he has come to their attention during such uncertain and unsettling times. Since the turn of the century, the threat of terror, renewed global tensions, environmental turmoil and the economic downturn have left the public keen for messages of hope and encouragement. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Will played such a large part in the 2008 election campaign for Barack Obama. The Democrat leader’s slogans of positivity and hope chimed deep within Will’s own psyche. Will also forms a refreshing, some might say old-fashioned contrast to the tendency of many modern celebrities to ‘overshare’ their personal peccadilloes and dramas to an almost grotesque degree. Will’s mysterious private life intrigues us – all the more so due to the enthusiasm with which many of his contemporaries air their every dirty garment in public. Indeed, even his catchy stage name of ‘will.i.am’ serves as a veil between the real Will and the public: removing that veil is difficult yet rewarding.
In the pages ahead we will explore the differences between will.i.am and William James Adams Jr, and where one begins and the other ends. Until now, his private life has mostly been an enigma, and that suits him just fine. He is a stranger to scandal in large part because he rarely allows himself enough spare time to get into any scrapes. Pressed by a newspaper journalist over why he did not – as far as the public is concerned – have a girlfriend, Will said: ‘I’m too busy turning my dreams into reality.’ It was a slightly self-aggrandizing reply, an evasive one even, but it was no less truthful for that. In common with a growing number of twenty-first-century celebrities, Will has built a life for himself into which a significant other would find it hard to fit. Work and creativity always come first.
Indeed, while it is a comparison that neither man may enjoy after they fell out over the role of Will’s client Cheryl Cole in the American series of The X Factor, Will’s personal life can be understood to a large extent by comparing it with that of Simon Cowell. Both men are tireless workaholics who are so busy and industrious that they have little time to fully mourn their lack of a consistent ‘significant other’. A more influential similarity between the men is one that makes their chances of settling down in the future unlikely: both are beautifully hopeless mummy’s boys. Will can scarcely complete an interview with the media without praising his mother, Debra. When he wants to praise someone, he does so by comparing them with Debra. He values her advice even as he approaches his forties. He might never meet a woman who he will admire more than his mother; a large part of him does not want to.
Like all true eccentrics, he seems blissfully unaware of what an eccentric he is. The kookiness of his dress, lifestyle and language all come naturally to him. It is little surprise that longstanding Anglophile Will is fast becoming an honorary Englishman: indeed he is like a rapping, African-American twist on the classic, eccentric English gentleman. Boy, can he talk: he has been described as ‘a quote monster’. A loquacious, fast-talking and fast-thinking man, he never knowingly under talks. Annabel Rivkin, who interviewed him for ES magazine, recalled how his ‘verbal floodgates fly open and all of a sudden he’s on a manifesto-centric roll, holding forth, twitchy, lyrical, cheeky. It’s over-stimulating stuff.’ Another writer described an encounter with him as ‘frazzling’, and ‘mildly exhausting’.
Sometimes, though, he is more concise. Asked which phrase he uses too often, Will quickly identified his favourite one. Keen viewers of The Voice, who noted with growing amusement how often he used the slang term ‘dope’ (meaning good; great), will be surprised that he does not consider that his most over-used saying. Instead, the words Will just cannot stop using are: ‘That’s crazy.’ Perhaps when he does use that phrase, he is reflecting not just on the moment, but on his whole life story.
1 Reaching New Heights
In 2006, the Black Eyed Peas were visiting an impoverished neighbourhood in Soweto, South Africa, when the band became surrounded by kids. Liftin
g the arm of a fourteen-year-old boy, Will told the excitable ensemble, ‘He is fourteen. When I was fourteen, I started a group that became the Black Eyed Peas. I, too, came from a poor background. But I have made it – and so can you!’
His positive energy and powers of inspiration have been noted, lauded and enjoyed by many. Will believes he inherited them from the person who inspires him more than anyone: his mother, Debra. ‘She’s supermom and also my best friend,’ he told the Sun. ‘I love her. You should see the text messages she sends me.’ One such message read, ‘No matter how successful you are, we are still struggling,’ Will described messages such as that from his mother as ‘like an ego smack – great reminders of where you are from and where you are in the world. Mom made me think anything was possible.’ The struggle that his mother alludes to is real, and Will’s positivity cannot conceal the challenges he has been through from the start of his life.
People often ask him which nationality he is. His answer is very simple: ‘I’m an American.’ For him, the commonplace description ‘African American’ is not an option. ‘When you ask the black guy in Brazil what nationality he is, he doesn’t say, “African Brazilian”,’ reasoned Will in O magazine. ‘He says, “Brazilian”. Someone doesn’t say, “I’m African English”. They’re English.’ Will knows his ancestors came from Africa but he does not know from which part of the continent they hail, so he prefers to consider himself simply American, ‘the way jazz and blues are American music. The way peach cobbler is an American dessert.’ His choices of imagery reflect a kooky dimension to his love of America – and indeed to much of his life. Will is not acting when he comes across this way: he is an authentic eccentric.
He was born on 15 March 1975, and that year, the world he was born into was twisting to a soundtrack dominated by Bruce Springstreen’s ‘Born in the USA’, Jaws, The Godfather Part II and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were the big movies of the year, and Muhammad Ali was in his ascendancy in the boxing ring. It was also a significant year in terms of American foreign policy: the Vietnam War came to an end and the US pulled out of Cambodia. President Gerald Ford was in the White House.
His date of birth makes Will a Pisces. He is a keen believer in many spiritual and esoteric trends, and astrology is one of them. As he knows, among the many positive traits associated with Pisceans are adaptability, devotion and imagination. Whether or not one shares his belief in astrology, it is clear that Will has displayed each of these characteristics. Compassion is another virtue with which Pisceans are linked. As we shall see, Will has also shown plenty of that. Less positive characteristics Pisceans are said to portray include over-sensitiveness, indecision and laziness. But even Will’s fiercest critics would struggle to build a case that the restless, workaholic Will is in any way lazy, even emotionally. Indeed, his sensitive nature is clear, and is perhaps the price that he pays for such a creative and imaginative mind.
He was born and raised in east Los Angeles, in a district called Boyle Heights. The impoverished, rough neighbourhood in which he grew up created hardships for Will, but it would also provide rich inspiration for his future creative work in the Black Eyed Peas and beyond. For instance, the fact his was the only black family in the area continues to resonate with Will to this day. How could that band ever have convincingly rocked the ‘misfit’ image, had its pivotal member not grown up as an outsider himself?
The project he lived in was called Estrada Court. Will, who has never met his father, was raised by his mother, Debra, in a large family. Debra has four biological children and ultimately adopted another four kids. ‘I have two brothers and a sister, and Mom adopted two other girls when they were infants; then she just recently adopted two other boys, who are six and seven,’ he told the Guardian. Will’s father, a maintenance worker called William Sr, had left the family between Will’s conception and birth. Before Will himself could escape the Estrada Court Housing Project physically, he did his best to do so emotionally. We all love to dream as children. Will still does: ‘You get to mould your reality. If I didn’t mould my reality then I’d still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare.’
He had plenty to escape from: not just the material poverty but also the emotional issues that arise in single-parent households. Reports have found that children in single-parent families are five times more likely to develop emotional problems than those living with both parents. They are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved. Will’s essentially good behaviour as a child is therefore all the more to be admired.
Also present in the family house were other members of the clan, as Elizabeth Gutierrez, a childhood friend of Will, explained to the Mirror. Pointing at the house the family lived in, she said: ‘Will lived there with his grandmother Sarah, mother, Debra, his two uncles, an aunt and some siblings. They were the only black family here – everyone else is Mexican. They didn’t have much money, no one around here does. But they were really nice.’ Indeed, for Will, his strong, and ‘really nice’ family helped keep him happy despite their humble surroundings. The love simply transcended any tests that were thrown at them. ‘For me, with my mum and my family and my upbringing … it was heaven,’ he told the Guardian. ‘It was wonderful, because of my family.’ Also weighing-in to his upbringing were four uncles: ‘my Uncle Donnie, my Uncle Rendal Fay, my Uncle Lynn, my Uncle Roger. Those are my mother’s brothers. Not the Smothers Brothers.’
We all fantasize both about magical futures and also parallel presents. For Will, the need to imagine other worlds was especially keen, as his reality was tough and stark. In some interviews, he has been far less romantic about his childhood than he was in the chat with the Guardian mentioned above. It was a rough neighbourhood: ‘There were a lot of gangs. A lot of my friends are dead, were in prison, on drugs or were selling drugs.’
To this day, Will feels relief that he did not meet such a fate himself. How he did so is little mystery to him, as he simply followed one of the two respectable paths he felt were open to him. ‘You either joined the gang or you did arts or sports,’ he continued. ‘My attire got me through, though. The louder you dressed, it became obvious that you were not in a gang.’ As we shall see, the legacy of this ‘hard-knock’ childhood showed up in other ways when he began to make his fortune later in life. It would make it hard for him to understand the intricacies of his finances. ‘When you are from the ghetto there is no financial literacy,’ he said.
Nowadays, Will spends a lot of his time in England, where he found a parallel neighbourhood that reminded him of Boyle Heights. Surprisingly, this was not in an inner-city region of London, Manchester or another metropolis. Instead, he found England’s equivalent of Boyle Heights in Somerset of all places. Will ran through the area during his mile with the Olympic torch in 2012. ‘There’s one area, it’s like a village of houses and it looked like the neighbourhood I came from in Boyle Heights, where the neighbours looked after the neighbours, and it looked like a real community and that reminded me of the community I come from,’ he said afterwards, to the amusement of some in both Britain and America. Despite the picture of neighbourly co-operation Will paints, the harsher realities of his life remained hard to ignore.
At the same time as he was enduring those realities, his future Black Eyed Peas bandmates were also experiencing hardships of their own. Indeed, the childhoods of the band would shape the bond they would later form. Will’s bandmate, Taboo, for instance, has estimated that ‘sixty per cent’ of the ‘hood’ in which he grew up were gangsters. He recalls going to sleep to a soundtrack of violent ‘bedlam’ in the parking lot, and has also written of the ever-present smell of cannabis that he describes as ‘this scent of childhood’. As Will had done, Taboo watched his mother work ‘her ass off’ to provide for the family. Will is in no sense angry or bitter as a result of the challenges of his childhood. ‘I’m pretty blessed to be able to share all those experiences, from living around
Mexicans to going to church with all black people,’ Will told the Phoenix New Times. ‘I don’t look at it as, “Wow, I’m the only one – fuck you.” I look at it as, “Wow, I’m blessed to be able to relate”.’ The reader who appreciates such examples of people turning a challenge or setback into a positive will find much to enjoy in the pages and chapters ahead.
*
The first school Will attended was an hour’s bus ride away from the family home. It was called Paul Revere Junior School, named after the famous American patriot, and it provided the building blocks for the education of a future American star. He enjoyed reading, particularly the series produced by one of children’s fiction’s most enduring authors. ‘I liked Dr Seuss,’ he told The New York Times. Even as young as nine years of age, Will was not only falling in love with music, nor was he only dreaming of a future career in the music industry – he was actively working towards making that goal come true. In fact, as far as Will was concerned, it was not a dream or a goal, but an inevitability. He was going to succeed. To that end, he experimented in his room, recording himself singing and rapping over backing tracks. As well as honing his vocal skills, he was also trying to learn how music production worked.
One track he ‘produced’ as a kid was of him rapping over the Bob Dylan track ‘Forever Young’. (Later in life he would follow the same path for a Pepsi promotion.) He also practised dance moves, honing the various skills he knew he would need to succeed. So it was early in life, then, that Will’s hyperactivity surfaced. Indeed, he was diagnosed – formally or informally, we do not know which – with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ‘Yeah, when I was a kid, they said I had ADD, or whatever,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘They said I was hyper. ADHD? AHHD? Whatever. That’s cool. Actually, I’ve made it work for the best for me. And my mom encouraged me in everything I did.’