Will.i.am (18 page)

Recognition of his place in the hearts of an increasingly mainstream audience came when he was invited to appear on BBC One’s primetime chat show
The Graham Norton Show
. Alongside
him was the actress Miriam Margolyes, and some of her remarks to Will during the broadcast took the programme to the front pages of the newspapers.

At one point, turning to Will, Margolyes said:
‘Unfortunately, I don’t know many black people. We don’t get to meet across the colour line much except in
show business and that’s what’s so nice.’ Will, in common with much of the audience, was rather flabbergasted by what Margolyes had said. At first, he seemed unable to work out to
what extent she was joking – if at all. His normally loquacious manner was nowhere to be seen.

Their fellow guest on the couch, the actor and comedian Greg Davies, tried to cut through the awkward atmosphere with the quip: ‘It’s exotic’. While host Norton also tried to
lighten the mood, saying: ‘It’s lovely, Miriam, you’re right.’

When Margoyles learned that Will had made a major donation to the Prince’s Trust and of his other charitable works, she continued to make the atmosphere awkward. On learning he had donated
nearly half a million pounds to the charity, she told Will: ‘You’re fabulous! How unexpected that a rapper would do this. I don’t have a very positive attitude towards rappers. I
don’t really know any, you’re the first one I’ve actually talked to.’

Again, for a moment, Will could hardly believe his ears, but he recovered his poise long enough to say: ‘I’m the first rapper and black guy you’ve kicked it with!’ The
audience was loving the exchange and continued to do so as Will humorously taught Margolyes the meaning of the phrases: ‘home boys’ and ‘old school’. It was a conversation
that made
the front pages of some of the following morning’s press.

Will’s new stature in Britain was symbolically reaffirmed when he was invited to play a significant part in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. It was to be a night in which
Will’s role sparked considerable debate among viewers. Wearing a military-style outfit of red, white and blue, he certainly looked the part for the occasion. He was one of the first
performers onstage at the London concert, performing his band’s hit ‘I Gotta Feeling’ with his fellow
Voice
coach Jessie J. Some newspapers claimed that he had used
Auto-Tune for his performance. He made a second appearance onstage to accompany soul legend Stevie Wonder in his rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. It was a strange turn for the evening to
take. It was not The Queen’s birthday that was being celebrated, after all. Also, as Will first reappeared on the stage in response to Wonder’s beckoning, some wondered what he could
add to the performance.

The answer was not much of worth. Will looked uncomfortable as he stood next to Stevie Wonder. He sang some weak backing vocals on the chorus, and added a few spontaneous ad lib comments such as
‘Happy birthday, your highness’, ‘Put your hands up, y’all’ and ‘Yo’. As the song ended, and Wonder’s band launched quickly into the next track,
‘Superstition’, Will left with no acclaim, awkwardly shuffling off the stage as the show went on without him.

Twitter, that increasingly valued barometer of public opinion, delivered a largely unimpressed verdict. One typical tweet read, ‘So at what point in man’s aural
evolution did we resort to needing will.i.am to shout “yo” over Stevie Wonder?’

There was little comfort for Will in the knowledge that the evening’s other much-criticized act was his very own client, Cheryl Cole. Her half of the duet with event organizer Gary Barlow
on Lady Antebellum’s ‘Need You Now’, left many unmoved.

It was Cole herself who, feeding the media’s ongoing love of stories involving Will tweeting in inappropriate situations, claimed he had been set to Tweet while alongside the Queen
onstage. ‘I actually had to warn him as we walked on to the stage,’ Cole told Graham Norton later. ‘He had the phone at the ready. I’m not joking, I had to say to him,
“Put that phone away right now before I kill you”.’

Will had happily tweeted photographs of himself at the event, including one of him alongside Prince William, the prince positively towering over Will in the photograph. ‘I just realized
I’m the shorter “will.i.am” #diamondjubilee’, Will wrote on the accompanying tweet. He also posed alongside a group of royal guardsmen, commenting that he was now
‘brit.i.am’.

He also got himself snapped alongside Robbie Williams,
Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney and Annie Lennox. As protocol dictated, Will was not to have a side-by-side photo
of himself with the Queen, though he was officially snapped shaking her hand backstage. ‘I love the queen’, he Tweeted later. ‘She’s super dope. She reminds me of my mum. I
mean, my mum and no money and the Queen is obviously loaded, but just their strength and perseverance.’ His admiration for Debra is never far from Will’s mind, her presence never far
from his existence and work.

W
hen he is interviewed by the press, Will often chooses to break off from the traditional interrogative path to read the interviewer – and
therefore his or her eventual readers – text messages he has exchanged with his mother, Debra. In April 2012, he did just this when he was quizzed by
Radio Times
magazine. His
rendition began with a message his mother had sent him about her involvement in his charity:

The key figure in Will’s life, Debra is also now a pivotal part of one of his charities, the i.am.home Fund, which was set up to help those in jeopardy of losing their homes due to the
economic crisis in America. Asked by
The New York Times
how the charity would operate, Will gave a simple description of its activity, adding that in setting it up he was ensuring he was
true to the message of the campaign video he had created for Barack Obama in 2008. ‘I say: “Let me pay for that house. It’s yours. You don’t got to pay me back.”
It’s that simple. Why am I doing it? Because I said, “Yes We Can.”’

His other foundations work in the fields of education and employment. The i.am.angel Foundation, for instance, was launched in 2009. Speaking about the charity, Will told StarCam: ‘The
world doesn’t need another musician, they
need another Bill Gates’. A man who combines those two contributions would be extraordinary – and, in the future,
Will might just be that man. The opening aim of the charity was ‘the idea of providing assistance to needy students wanting to attend college through a program entitled
i.am.scholarship.’ That scholarship program has grown and grown since. ‘I know my purpose is to continue to inspire young people because it’s just going to keep inspiring me
back,’ Will said. ‘I want to do my part. I want to invest in America’s future and I want to send you to college. i.am here to let you know that you can be anything you want to be.
You are the future of the world.’

As well as devoting his time, energy and name to his foundations, he has also put his money where his mouth is – since 2010, he has donated a figure estimated to be in excess of
£1million to them. He is passionate about his charity work and the opportunities it brings to those who sorely lack them. He told one interviewer that his primary reason for joining
The
Voice
was the hope that the renewed fame it would bring him might offer him further ‘leverage’ in the charitable sphere. ‘It’s like the beginning of my philanthropic
career,’ he said.

He is also partnering with Coca-Cola on an interesting recycling initiative, which, with his characteristic flair for attention-grabbing word play, he has called Ekocycle (the
first part of the word, ‘Ekoc’, is, of course, ‘Coke’ spelled backwards). The mission is to encourage large corporations to stop churning out waste.
‘I’m like, “What if I can take their by-products and make new products?’ he explained to
ES
magazine. ‘What if I can take their bottles and turn them into
jackets and glasses, and I could make a base cloth out of their aluminium to make bicycles and chairs and computers and phones?’

Later, he explained an even grander vision: to put Ekocycle alongside the stature of Google and Twitter in terms of vocabulary. ‘The key is to “become a verb”,’ he said,
in an interview with the
Financial Times
. ‘Google became a verb. Twitter became a verb. How does Coke become a verb? Ekocycle – and you redefine the word recycle.’ It is
a big ambition, yet experience has shown that betting against Will achieving his dreams is a risky move.

How, many have wondered, does he manage to keep succeeding in his endeavours? Be it his music career, his business or charity, for Will, it all keeps coming back to one thing: activity. He feels
that many people have lost sight of how much more valuable it is to play a good game, rather than merely talk one. In these days of online social networks, on which many people simply brag and
exaggerate their achievements, lots of people have lost their way. ‘People have got it all mixed up,’ he said. ‘Supporting
is actually doing. Let’s
change the word “supporting” and use the word “doing”. What are you doing to help America and Obama? Donating money to the campaign? Or going into communities and changing
people’s lives?’ In a more concise encapsulation of his guiding philosophy, he said: ‘If you ain’t doing something you’re doing nothing’.

One day, Will could publish an engrossing book of motivational wisdom. In the meantime, he stays true to his guiding philosophy and keeps on doing something. In 2012, off the back of his success
on
The Voice
and his shoulder-rubbing with the British monarchy, Will teamed his charity up with The Prince’s Trust. ‘As a judge on
The Voice
, the people of the UK
have welcomed me into their sitting rooms week after week and I feel very much at home here,’ he said. ‘Working with The Prince’s Trust, I am joining the mission to help transform
the lives of disadvantaged young people living in underprivileged neighbourhoods in the UK.’

In donating to the Trust, his thinking was that its work carries with it the potential to transform an entire neighbourhood. He used as examples the founders of Facebook and Twitter. ‘If
one Mark Zuckerberg comes from Brixton, then Brixton is changed forever’, he told
ES
magazine. ‘If one Jack Dorsey comes from East London, then East London is changed
forever’.

When he met Prince Charles, the morning after the
Diamond Jubilee flotilla, it was an unlikely meeting in more than one sense. Charles, though, left Will impressed. The
Prince had just found out that his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been hospitalized with a bladder infection. ‘So it was heavy,’ Will said. ‘He spoke very passionately about
inner cities and philanthropy, and I got into the car afterwards and I thought: “That guy is something else” – because he had just found out about his father but he still kept the
meeting. That guy is awesome.’

With the aforementioned i.am.home arm of the charity, we can return to the start of Will’s story. All too often, people who have achieved vast riches through their fame make the proud
boast that they have never forgotten where they came from. Sometimes, these claims are little more than vanity – a declaration of self-interested lip service to the communities they left
behind. In Will’s case, the sentiment is far more sincere. ‘The reason I started i.am.home is because I come from poverty,’ he said. ‘I survived and came out of it because
you guys support my music. My one day dream was to have a house, buy a house for my mom and take care of family.’

As we have seen, he fulfilled that dream, and enjoyed one of the proudest moments of his life as he did so. For the never-satisfied, ever active Will, that proud moment only awakened in him a
desire to do more of the same.
‘Now that I’ve achieved that goal I can’t forget what it was like – living on the verge. Helping out families in need is
a personal venture. Something I feel I need to do.’ The word ‘need’ underlines so much of his existence: it is a need, more than a desire, that drives so much of Will’s
ferocious, frenetic lifestyle. His engine is oft powered involuntarily.

The rewards of his resultant stature keep on coming. Not all are rewards of richness or fame, some are just the places his status can take him to, the experiences it brings to him. In the spring
of 2012, he revealed that NASA had approached him to write the first song to played on the planet Mars. ‘I don’t think I can talk about it, but there is a rocket going to Mars,’
he told Graham Norton on his show. ‘It lands in August and when in lands it will send back a signal to earth and that signal will be the song.’

This project with NASA is to help inspire kids to get involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. ‘My mission is to inspire the youth to care about education.’ This
out-of-this-world project would take Will’s quest to inspire to a whole new dimension. He could hardly wait for it to happen.

As for his activity on planet Earth, Will remains as restless as ever. In July 2012, he passed another milestone when he enjoyed his first UK number one as a solo artist. Thanks in part to his
successful appearance on
The Voice
, and the
accompanying stature it gave him in the UK, his single ‘This is Love’ hit the top of the British singles chart.
For Will, this was a moment of substantial pride. He felt he had proved some of his doubters wrong. ‘I’ve had number ones before with The Black Eyed Peas, but to me this one means so
much, because I know people thought I can only be successful in The Black Eyed Peas. They were wrong,’ he said.