6.12.10

The Black Eyed Peas Hurt My Soul

With their inevitable hulking sales monster The Beginning hitting shelves on November 30th, the Black Eyed Peas once again positioned themselves to be winners in the numbers game known as first-week sales. The pop stars' last record (last year's The E.N.D.) sold amazingly well and unleashed a pair of singles that annoyed anyone with good taste for the better part of the rest of the year: "I Gotta Feeling" and "Boom Boom Pow" (not to be confused, of course, with "Bang Bang Boom"). The subsequent two singles ("Imma Be" and "Rock That Body") thankfully didn't put as big of a dent into popular culture, but their Transformers-aping videos were once again pandering to the collective unconscious of the record-buying buying public, and also made me cry due to the clips' budget, but that's more of a strange aside.

At this point, I do not know anyone who willingly listens to "I Gotta Feeling". The song has been so played out that to acknowledge its existence is to conjure up the demons of hollowed-out popular music that it is a part of. Even radio DJs make fun of it when it shows up on the playlist.

I DJed a wedding this spring and all of the drunken attendants kept demanding that I play I Gotta Feeling/"That song with the Jew words"/"L'CHAIM TIME IS NOW" (did I neglect to mention it was a Jewish wedding?) and a certain other overplayed song over and over again, and I happily obliged because hey, it's their dime, but the very disposability of the music involved left me feeling dirty, and my mouth tasting like I'd had too much whiskey the night before. I also just wanted an excuse to play more Ace Of Base and less Black Eyed Peas... Which might be a problem onto itself.

Now, onto The Beginning. The first question that one may ask me would be, "if you hate them so much, why put yourself through it?" The simple answer to that is that you have to know your enemy. I'd much rather shit-talk something I know instead of backtalking something I know almost nothing about. In this manner I am prepared and can say with a sense of certainty that this record is all-around dirty pool.

All of the tracks contain some aspect of popular music from the last four decades, but re-tooled and utilized in a plastic, crass effort to get the listener to enjoy by osmosis. The opening track "The Time (Dirty Bit)" (which re-interprets the chorus of 1987's "(I've Had) The Time of My Life"), is a Big Bass-cum-dubstep-lite track that samples heavily from the Dirty Dancing track.

Now, sampling and re-interpolations are nothing new, that much is true. But it's all a question of intent - why is the work being used? In certain cases its very obscurity ensures that a new generation may enjoy a song that first missed the limelight. In other times the borrower grabs the track and re-engineers it to fit a new context. A lot of Gregg Gillis' work focuses on this recontextualization, a marriage of old and new, of genre-fucking so intriguing that its recombined genre's power cannot be denied. In this case, though, the group has decided to grab the vocal line in an effort to win over a larger crowd segment, a grab designed to

The next track "Light Up The Night", which has a prominent, sped-up sample of Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It", will.i.am
is treating pop music as a practice in scientific exactitude. What elements will win the masses over? How much "creative" re-interpretation does this constitute versus robotic recall meant to trigger nostalgic memories inside of a listener's brain?

Now, detractors will come at me and say "isn't that the point of popular music? To create a commodity to feed the masses, something to turn your brain off to?" And to that I say: Sure, but this is eons beyond turning aural pleasure into dollars in pockets. This is worse than software that can measure hit potential - BEP maestro will.i.am flipped the script and broke the code on the software in order to make this music. Crass commercial aspirations don't come close to suggesting what's going on with this music, this calculated attempt at winning the buying public over... And it's working.

People by and large do not like to be confronted with the challenge of having to think. That's why popular music IS popular - its simple themes and recurring motifs soothe the listener. That's why bands like Between The Buried And Me and Fugazi will never see monster sales - a large portion of the listening audience doesn't feel like they should be forced to learn while listening, or at the very least forced to ponder certain things. We don't want to be told things, we want to dance and mouth the words that comfort us like a giant blanket, but even then certain sets of lyrics could

Whereas the Black Eyed Peas were aiming for hope with The E.N.D. and using language in a manner that elicited positive sentiments beyond dance instructions, they now inhabit a space so utterly hollow and devoid of meaning that to acknowledge its existence is to realize that art as commerce is alive and well... and thriving. The ying and yang in-between The Beginning and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is stark - West builds his art in such a manner that it transcends commerce, it frees itself of the shackles of calculated hits. Songs generally clock in at 5+ minutes and over nimble wordplay and interesting sonic treats. MBDTF is constructed as a multi-layered journey that demands repeated listens with many nuances and cleverly-constructed bits, although I could do without the Chris Rock-led interlude towards the end of the album.

With that in mind, though, the inevitable is true - the Black Eyed Peas will sell a lot... But in truth, the group sold out a long time ago. Good on them for hitting a worldwide stage with sonic hooks and little substance. And hey, if Rolling Stone calls them "the saviours of rock" (even though I was convinced most rock music needed a guitar-like instrument, ugh), then we should all fall in line too, right?


...Right?

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