Will.i.am by Danny White Page A

well as the aforementioned Brown and Sting, it had guest appearances from other stars, including Justin
Timberlake. Then, of course, there was the Fergie factor. On
Elephunk
, she had been a debuting oddity; now she was a mainstay of the band and therefore her contribution was keenly
anticipated. With
Elephunk
, having been received so well both critically and commercially, the band risked the sort of critical backlash that so often hovers over bands who have enjoyed
the favour of the reviewers.
    The critics were harsh in some quarters. A regular theme the critics noted was that this fourth studio album signified a drop in form from the band’s previous effort,
Elephunk
.
PopMatters, for instance, sniffed: ‘If ... you’re in the market for dance music, although admittedly excellently produced,but which can’t sustain any
substantial intellectual investment, then
Monkey Business
should be right up your alley.’
Entertainment Weekly
was scarcely kinder, ranking the album ‘a bland
meringue: a succession of cotton candy raps about chicks, partying, and partying with chicks, broken up by choruses destined to evaporate outside a shindig’s perimeter’. It even ranked
the Brown collaboration as ‘trite’ and lacking ‘much innovation’.
    Rolling Stone
, meanwhile, awarded the album three stars out of five, concluding: ‘
Monkey Business
is just as bright if not quite as fun as
Elephunk
’. The
BBC attacked the album’s lyrics, contending that their ‘flimsiness ... may let the album down for traditional Black Eyed Peas fans who’ve been following the group since the days
of 1998’s
Behind the Front
’. The
Guardian
felt that ‘the choruses are just as catchy as those on 2003’s
Elephunk
,’ but added that ‘the
lyrical inspiration has evaporated’, before truly putting the boot in with the conclusion that: ‘Only James Brown comes out of the wreckage of ideas and ideals with any
dignity’.
    Despite these harsh verdicts, the album was a commercial success: it has, at the time of writing, sold over eleven million copies worldwide. It reached the top of the album charts in eight
countries, including Canada and France, and has gone triple platinum in the United States.
    The album’s first single, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’,was also a hit in America: it reached number three on the US Hot 100, and won them a Grammy for
Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. It was a number one in Australia, a number three in the UK and a number five in Canada. The second single from the album was ‘Don’t Lie’,
which reached number fourteen in the US Hot 100, and hit number six in both the UK and Australia.
    The album’s third single, however, proved to be a more contentious affair. ‘My Humps’, with its bawdy lyrics, hit number three in America. However, it was not to
everyone’s taste. John Bush of AllMusic called it ‘one of the most embarrassing rap performances of the new millennium’, which must have hurt Will, if he became aware of it.
Readers of the Global Gathering website named it the dance track with ‘the most ridiculous’ lyrics of all time.
Rolling Stone
placed it at number one on its Twenty Most
Annoying Songs chart. Kelefa Sanneh, writing for
The New York Times
, declared that the single is ‘most likely to live in infamy’, deliberately invoking a description of the
Pearl Harbor disaster of World War II. While another critic damned it as ‘so monumentally vacuous, slapped together and tossed-off that it truly tests the definition of
“song”’.
    Elsewhere, it was compared to Kelis’s catchy 2003 hit single ‘Milkshake’. Harsh words, yet Will himself would later dip a toe into the chorus of disapproval and distancehimself from the track. ‘It wasn’t lyrical miracles,’ he told the
Daily Record
in 2011. ‘It got to the point where we didn’t want to play
it no more. But the beat was rocking.’
    As they toured the album, Will was struck by a stampede of