Will.i.am (20 page)

As is his custom, Will used Twitter to speak to the world about the incident. ‘Car accidents are not dope,’ he tweeted. ‘I’m glad I’m OK’. In a follow-up
tweet, he wrote: ‘We’re fine. Cheryl Cole [and I] were coming back from the studio but she and I are fine ... just a little wiplash [sic]’.

Will’s manager, Polo Molina, then also logged on to Twitter: ‘Just spoke to @iamwill, everything is OK. He and Cheryl Cole are both fine. It was a minor fender
bender after a long day/night in the studio’.

Cole completed the online reassurance-fest, writing: ‘Don’t worry me and @iamwill are fine, promise’. Cole quickly made light of the incident, telling Capital Breakfast
co-presenter Lisa Snowdon that it was Will’s loquaciousness that was to blame for what occurred. ‘He’s a bad talker. He was talking the face off us,’ she said. ‘He was
talking about NASA and Mars and his song.’ Cole, who had to wear a black sling around her arm, also jokingly dubbed herself a ‘one-arm bandit’ on Twitter.

Looking ahead to 2013, as well as more cinematic dabbling – having also voiced a character in the animated 2011 film
Rio
– Will planned to learn more about technology, by
signing up for a computer programming course. ‘Next year I am going to school to take a computer science course,’ he told the
Mirror
. ‘When I am fifty-seven I still want
to be relevant in popular culture and the way to be relevant within popular culture in the future is writing code. Code writers, they are my idols. Songwriters are cool – I can write songs,
too – and bloggers are cool, but code writers? Those are the coolest in the world. When I was seventeen I had a dream and all the dreams I have had
since seventeen I have
done them beyond what I thought I was ever going to do. So now I want to go back to school and learn how to write code so I can participate in this whole new era that we are in. Writing songs is
dope but writing code is better.’

Just twelve years earlier, Will had almost torn his hair out with frustration when the Black Eyed Peas album
Bridging the Gap
was leaked on Napster. Then, the world of technology seemed
a dark, mysterious villain for a while. Now, he saw the virtual world just the same way he saw the ‘real’ world: as a playground, alive with opportunities for creativity, fun and
profit.

The man who was so caught out by the emergence of Napster, has become one of the industry’s most sharpest observers of the drastic changes that emerging technology is causing for the
industry. He has even been appointed ‘director of creative innovation’ at technology giant Intel.

‘There are no more dreamers,’ Will told the
Financial Times
. ‘I am dreaming for Intel, to rethink what a computer is going to be.’ Since those dark days when he
felt powerless as The Black Eyed Peas tracks were leaked ahead of release, he has grasped the nettle of technology and is now as in control of its seemingly relentless forces as it is possible to
be. ‘Technology is so big right now,’ he told
Boombox
. ‘It’s that advanced, man. You can set your own studio up with a
microphone that you
bought from Best Buy. You can record your vocals on to your laptop and put a little compression on it because everybody is listening to music now on their phones and computers. Nobody listens to
music on big systems anymore like back in the
Thriller
days.’

The latter trend is key: with large, bass-heavy speakers now becoming a thing of the past in many homes, musicians have to create music that works on the sometimes weak and tinny speakers of
smartphones, pods, pads and computers. Yet for dance acts, the music also has to sound good on the huge speakers of nightclubs. Furthermore, as soon as the industry gets its collective head around
one development, along comes another to change the rules once again. It is an industry in astonishing flux. Will is one of the figures who have some sense of what is happening; do not bet against
him.

Although he has ruled himself out of a future in politics – he has said he believes he would quickly be assassinated were he to become a proper politician – Will seems likely to step
back into that sphere at some stage. In the Spring of 2012, he was approached by David Axelrod, communications director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, to see if he could conjure
up a sequel to the 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ video to help Obama’s campaign. Although Will tried, he was unable to come up with a concept that he felt was worthy of consideration on the
same scale as his viral 2008 video.

He eschewed an immediate encore more out of a sense of high standards than an overall unwillingness. ‘Obama has done a great deal as President up to this point and I
don’t care about any backlash,’ he told the
Sun
. ‘I don’t follow waves or trends or emotions. If I did I would never have supported Obama in the first place. Being
President is not a two-year fix. It’s got to be an eight-year ride and I’m in there with him. It took us eight years under Bush to get us in this mess. At least give the dude eight
years to get us out of it. Give the guy a chance. I saw him at The White House a few months ago and he was finding it tough. We need to get behind him as a country.’

He said that Obama’s 2012 election opponent Mitt Romney was making a key mistake in the 2012 election battle by allowing his supporters to push the wrong button. ‘People say Romney
ran businesses and that means he should be president,’ he told the
Financial Times
. ‘America isn’t a business. America needs to be like a parent – what’s good
for our kids, where are they going to school, how can you guide them? Imagine if your parent was Enron and raised you like that,’ he laughed. ‘You don’t want that dad.’

It is his restlessness that continues to define Will. He has offered up a possible answer as to why he cannot seem to sit still: he suffers from tinnitus.
This condition leaves sufferers with a regular ‘ringing’ sound in one or both of their ears. There is no external source for the sound, which sometimes varies from a ringing one to one
better described as a buzzing, roaring, hissing or even whistling. Sometimes sufferers experience the sound more or less constantly, others experience only sporadic episodes.

Will has suffered badly from it, to the extent that he said: ‘I don’t know what silence sounds like any more. Music is the only thing which eases my pain.’ This, he concludes,
is one of the biggest drivers of his phenomenal work rate. ‘I can’t be still. Work calms me down. I can’t be quiet as that’s when I notice the ringing in my ears.
There’s always a beep there every day, all day. Like now. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve had this but it’s gradually got worse.’

Even during interviews with the press, journalists have noticed how Will sometimes presses a finger into one of his ears. His statement that work calms him down is revelatory. This reversal of
the more usual human experience – that it is leisure, not work, that is relaxing – explains to a large extent why he so enjoys professional activity. It should not, as we have seen
throughout these pages, be taken as a definitive explanation, though.

Will’s ambition and his sharp focus on the commercial potential of life is not universally admired. Some music-industry figures of generations past have wondered what
happened to putting artistry ahead of commerce. The spectre of the tortured artist, willing to disappear from the public eye for years at a time, rather than working and promoting relentlessly, is
now a rare one. The twenty-first-century celebrity is often a stranger to idleness, unlike many of their twentieth-century equivalents.

Of this generation’s headline acts, perhaps only Adele operates in the old-fashioned style. Almost all the other big names seem to work at a more frantic rate. This is beginning to draw
criticism from the old guard, who feel that today’s stars have their priorities wrong. Damon Albarn of Blur has taken personal aim at Will to this end. ‘I mean, will.i.am was a
miserable old sod,’ he told XFM radio. ‘Wearing his own stuff – what is that all about? Never wearing anything other than this quasi-
Star Trek
, slightly rubbery bondage
kind of stuff. Is there never a day when he wears an old T-shirt?’

Will is, as he likes to put it himself, too busy turning his own dreams into reality to let the criticism trouble him. He never gets used to the trappings of his fame, and the boyish side of him
never wants to. More often than not, his every task excites him, however many times he has done
it before. His nerves might never entirely lift. ‘It’s like
I’ve never been on stage before,’ he told the
Daily Star
. ‘I’ve played to a million people in Brazil at the World Cup and at the Super Bowl. You’d think I
have nerves of steel, but I feel brand-new again.’

He has also admitted: ‘It’s amazing all the love I’m getting. I was talking to apl ... and saying it feels like 2002 again for me. 2002 was when “Where is the
Love?” was about to kick off. In 2012, it’s a different level.’

As well as performing and producing, he will also continue to manage and mentor other artists, including Cheryl Cole. He claims to have a long-term plan in place for her. ‘The Cheryl that
we know now is different from the one we’re going to know ten years from now,’ he has vowed. Should his words come true, this could make for a fascinating turn of events.

The wheels of Will’s breathless, creative and ambition-driven life continue to turn. Where will they take him next? The sense of urgency that has driven him for so long continues unabated.
‘I’m too, like, right now right now right now right now right now,’ he said of how he operates. ‘Impatient is not the right word. It’s angst. Let’s go. Right
now.’

We return to his hard-knock childhood growing up in the ghetto: an experience that continues to inform and motivate him, but something he is at pains to never
glamorize.
‘I come from the projects, but I chose to go this route,’ he said of his career. ‘I don’t wanna remember the s*** I saw, I don’t wanna talk about my friends that got
shot: I wanna do music that makes me happy. Dark music gives me anxiety. I get scared! That’s why Black Eyed Peas’ s*** is happy, because I can get inside it and feel comfortable. I can
escape from the world and go and live in the music.’ The man who is will.i.am in 2012 is scarcely different from the boy who was Will growing up in the 1970s and 80s: both love to dream and
to escape.

Away from work, what could Will’s personal life look like in the future? Might he finally take his foot off the gas of his many professional endeavours and let a truly special someone into
his life one day? ‘Working hard and looking to the future is what will.i.am is all about,’ said Will, the third-person vernacular he chose to hide behind proving unable to mask the
sincerity of his statement. Even when he admits to personal ambitions, there is a grander mission underpinning them. ‘Soon I want to settle down and have lots of girl babies, because I
don’t want to add to the destruction of the planet,’ he told the
Guardian
in 2008. ‘It’s a man’s world, and I think it’s gonna be a female that changes
it all.’

It is not hard to understand which female in Will’s life gave him such a quasi-feminist perspective on the human race.

Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell
,

Tom Bower, Faber & Faber, 2012

Fallin’ Up: My Story
, Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas with

Steve Dennis, Touchstone 2011