Steven Shehori Interviews will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas [Excerpt]

• SS: The new album tries to have it both ways a bit: you like to be positive and carry a social message, but then you'll pull back with some flat-out party tracks. Does straddling that line help define you guys as a band?
• W: Yeah. If it was only "Yes We Can, Yes We Can, Yes We Can," the youth would stop relating. So you have to balance things, or how are you going to connect? That's what separates us from politicians, because a lot of them can't relate to young people.
• SS: Which kinda sounds like the message you put out when you campaigned for Obama back in 2008. Telling urban communities they don't have to be suit-wearing lobbyists to get involved in the political process.
• W: Yeah, we're confronted by a process designed that way on purpose. To be exclusionary. Which is the reason why a lot of people in urban areas aren't connected to politics.
• SS: The election seems like ages ago, now. Are you still finding ways to be socially and politically involved?
• W: I'll continue to be involved for sure. I have sympathy for Obama. People turned to him to clean things up, and a few months later he's blamed for things being messed up in the first place.
• SS: The climate's more reactionary, it seems.
• W: I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, but so be it. Say for example, what if the Gulf oil spill was a terrorist attack? You know what would have happened? We would have gone to war with somebody.
• SS: So when tragic events aren't directly tied to national security concerns, you feel there's less of a response?
• W: We've spent trillions of dollars to find people in caves, and by doing that we're sending America's youth into caves, metaphorically. Because they don't have jobs in those caves. They don't have education in those caves. We're doing this in the name of preventing terrorism, while the youth of America is terrorized every single day on the education front because it's not equipped to compete with the youth of other countries. Think about that. Homeland Security? I thought securing the homeland involved securing education first.

Source: The Huffington Post

26 November Permalink