Before Fergie came on board, Black Eyed Peas were an earnest, politically aware hip-hop group, complete with a song called “Positivity.” (Even their breakthrough hit, 2003’s “Where Is the Love?,” still bore traces of those origins, slipping a line about “terrorists here livin’ in the USA, the big CIA” onto pop radio.) With his group deep into a post-Fergie era, Will.i.am recently returned to topical music via the song “East L.A.,” teaming up with fellow Black Eyed Pea Taboo for a pointed celebration of a community under siege by ICE. “I’m a Black-xicano, so this is for La Raza,” Will raps on the song, which prominently prominently samples Santana’s 1999 hit “Maria Maria.”
“It’s response music,” says Will, who was raised in a relatively rare Black household in that predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood — he has said that he spoke with a “thick Mexican accent” as a teenager. “It ain’t like we’re in the studio, like, ‘Yo, ‘Where Is the Love’ was massive, bro, let’s make another one.’ We’re responding to what we feel out in the world.”
“It was important for us as Eastsiders,” adds Taboo, “to be able to give a love letter to our childhood and to all the people that Will to this day has advocated for.”
Wyclef Jean, who co-wrote and produced “Maria Maria,” texted Will his blessing for the single and its video, which was filmed in part at an anti-ICE protest in front of Los Angeles City Hall. “He knows firsthand what we’re talking about,” Will says. “‘Cause the group he is coming from is called the Fugees. He knows what it’s like to migrate.” (His sentiments also echo the original B-side to “Maria Maria”: a 1999 Santana song called “Migra,” with lyrics that describe immigration officers with “hate in your eyes.”)
Will was particularly outraged by the case of George Retes, a U.S. military veteran and citizen who was wrongly detained during an immigration sweep. “Protecting our borders is a must,” Will says. “But then there’s the way that we’re going about it … just sloppy, careless, and sprinkled with hate. No civilized nation should mandate a practice where masked men and women go out and look for anybody that looks Latin and throw them in unmarked cars.”
He’s equally impassioned about the plight of undocumented residents. “They work two to three jobs,” he says. “Why not celebrate them and make them freaking citizens?”
Meanwhile, Will.i.am, an early advocate of AI music who is an investor in the AI music generator Udio, says he was unfazed by the recent backlash to Timbaland’s promotion of an AI “artist” made via a competing A.I. company, Suno. He points out that Black Eyed Peas recently introduced an AI “member” of their group named Vida, to little notice. “Did we get backlash for that? No, we didn’t,” he says. “Why? Because we’ve already messed with it. It wasn’t intrusive. It’s an extension of us. We dabbled with it in the past. And more importantly, we didn’t use it to criticize human work.”
Still, he has broader concerns about generative AI, citing potential job losses— and the prospect of AI so sophisticated it doesn’t even need human prompting to start creating music. “We’re not full AI yet,” he says. “So save the crying to make sure that the regulations and governance protects us, because in a couple of blinks, you don’t need to prompt a machine. It’s not time to cry yet.”
