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By Melinda Newman
Special to MSN Music
Black Eyed Peas co-founder will.i.am may be the closest thing we have to a modern-day
renaissance man in terms of co-mingling art and technology to enlighten and
entertain.
Never was that clearer than last year when he created "Yes We Can," a
multi-artist video set to a Barack Obama speech. The piece, which was created in
three days and featured Scarlett Johansson and John Legend, ended up the most effective viral marketing
piece of the Obama campaign in reaching the youth vote. No less than Al Gore
told will.i.am that "Yes We Can" was an election changer.
Watch "Yes We Can"
MSN Music talked to will.i.am at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, where the Grammy nominee for producer of the year was plugging his
still-developing social networking application Dipdive. (On the site, he humorously parodies his
CNN hologram election-night appearance with a new hologram telling him it's time
to move on past the election and songs like "Yes We Can" and the celebratory
"It's a New Day.")
Watch "It's a New Day"
On this day, his mind was on technology -- one gets the feeling it's never
far from it -- but he was also reflecting on the pending inauguration.
MSN Music: What impact do you feel "Yes We Can" ultimately had on the
election?
will.i.am: For those that were on the fence between Obama
and Hillary [Clinton], it made you look at Obama differently. It brought an
emotion out. For people that were skeptical and had been bombarded by
yesterday's America -- the ill practices, the prejudices, the racism -- it kind
of put you in a weird place when you watched [the primaries] from traditional
media values: An African-American up against a female. But that's not a soap
opera and it isn't a television show, this isn't a movie, it was real.
When I turned [Obama's] speech into a song, [for] those people that chose to
pass it around, it talked to your heart and opened your eyes to finishing and
completing the concept of America because up until Obama's victory America was
just an idea that you could come from nothing and be something. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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