THE BLACK EYED PEAS ft JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE – "Where Is The Love?"

Spot on analysis. I liked this a lot, as it stood out from most pop at that time as a rare engagement with the Iraq War. As you say, rueful rather than confident in its tone.

Lots of people put their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away… Many of us were on that march and while it failed, it was important to have demonstrated opposition. Polls in Feb/Mar showed well over 50% in favour initially, but as you imply, this was much reduced by the autumn…

It’s worth noting that the transition was already arguably complete during Elephunk – an album that actually ends on this song, and which also included two separate singles that needed lyrical changes for radio beyond expletive deletion. One of them was a title change, even (“Let’s Get Retarded” into “Let’s Get It Started” – a change that recontextualised its let’s-get-it-on call from sex to sport, although its stadium-rocking use was utterly eclipsed by their second 2009 bunny). The other (“Hey Mama”) had the line “and then we drop bombs like we in the Middle East,” and when it became a single – which was after this – the radio edit completely reworked that line. Between that and a song called “Crash and Burn” reaching the top of the charts as “You Said No” on the other side of a space shuttle disaster, 2003 really was a vintage year for changing songs for brand management reasons.

It’s interesting to talk about how Iraq’s peaceful protest got utterly absorbed, turned out to be utterly meaningless; obviously not the last time that’s happened. Iraq was my own jumping-off point from teenage Toryism, but I’m pretty sure it had little to do with this song and a lot to do with the sixth form Marxists who bought the Morning Star into the common room at the exact time when it felt like they made the big calls absolutely right when everyone else didn’t. The final domino topple was probably one LiveJournal blogger I followed absolutely destroying the idea I had that Dubya’s re-election happened for “the right reasons” of “family values” by showing how much those “family values” were rooted in homophobia. (This, I should note, was before I recognised my own queerness; even mid-00s LiveJournal never pointed me towards discussion of asexuality, although if it had it’d almost certainly have taken me towards someone I’d meet in person and befriend anyway.) By 2005, in my appendix year of schooling for awkward reasons of subject changes and delaying tactics on university entrance, I’d run in a school mock election as the Green candidate (and win!); four years earlier at a different school with a different mock election approach, I’d led a proto-UKIP “Meridian Party” and I’d recently disowned S Club 7 because one of their members got busted for cannabis.

The teenagers who saw the Iraq war protests fail were the young adults who’ve led the charges for Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. A great deal of it seems to have involved absorbing the hard-headed, take-no-prisoners, insult-your-enemies approach of the right-wingers who created the environment that generation resented. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say the way that was a product of the more peaceful approach not getting results. It’s impossible to read the new radicalisation of centrist Europhiles post-2016 as anything else. The febrile political environment of 2020 is the product not just of right-wing nationalism winning controversial votes, but many of those on the wrong end of those votes deciding – rightly or wrongly – that they needed beating at their own game.

All of this background makes “Where Is The Love?” seem weirdly quaint now, even as its voices are still familiar through broader 21st-century inescapability. The reliance on adorable strings and vocal hooks to sell a political narrative is arguably Stevie Wonder territory, for a start, and it’s already been seven-plus years at this point since “Pastime Paradise” got completely (and excellently) recontextualised in thumping, high-impact fashion. But while this has some thumping rap jabs, it’s definitely rooted in an older style of protest song, and swaddled in enough likable non-aggression that it might work better as song than protest.

In fact, this song has as many weeks at number one than all of their imperial-phase number ones combined, and was the only one with consecutive weeks on top. Their three 2009 bunnies were two non-consecutive two-weekers plus a third one-weeker, and they have a 2010 one-weeker as well.

Yet if they’re going to be remembered for one song it’s the second of their 2009 bunnies and it’s not even close.

For what it’s worth my memories of Elephunk will forever be my brother copying it onto his first-gen Xbox and it playing as a result as we drove around San Francisco playing Midtown Madness 2. Driving chaotically around the city most stereotypically synonymous with “peace and love” and anti-conservatism somehow seems an appropriate memory to tie to that album.

This is also something of a (smaller) milestone no. 1 for me, in that it is CD1 Track 1 on the first proper Now album I ever owned. I’d already had the triple-disc Now Decades anniversary compilation in the summer, one of many defining retrospective comps in my early years, so when Now 56 came along (I still remember seeing the ad in November-time and asking for it for Christmas) I was ready to make dedication for the series proper. And so I did, and within five years I turned into one of those dang Now geeks with every edition ever in at least one format.

But to stop that tangent short I don’t have a whole lot to say about Where Is the Love. A damn fine song from a patchy group for me – killer lead singles from albums whose single campaigns then faltered thereafter became their thing where I was concerned, but Shut Up and Lets Get It Started are some of the sounds of 2004’s communal Easter and youth club, respectively, just as Where Is the Love makes me think of Christmas presents in 2003 wrapped impossibly tight in the worst, most resilient paper ever.

The last time I heard this was only a few days ago when I walked into the toilets at uni and immediately heard “and the KKK” on the radio that plays for no apparent reason besides a complex-sharing agreement. They turned an angry song into background music for taking a slash

And so the Iraq War’s “Ghost Town” moment – a song plainly against the conflict, at number one for six weeks while the post-war situation tilted from optimism into insurgency and the rationale for the war dissolved in plain sight – was barely noticed.

Quoting this at length because it strikes me as such a weird judgment. In what sense was it “barely noticed”? If I was making the case for the significance of this song, I might say that a song plainly against the conflict was at number one for six weeks just as the post-war situation tilted from optimism into insurgency and the rationale for the war dissolved in plain sight. It wasn’t a protest against a possible war but against one that was already happening – as such it couldn’t have been more timely. It didn’t stop anything happening, admittedly, but – Band Aid apart – what number one single does? (Did “Killing in the name” lead to a rise in levels of conscientious objection? Was it meant to?)

(My own position on this single before I go on: I was 40-something, generally depoliticised by New Labour and parenthood but had demonstrated against the war, liked this song a lot, loved seeing an anti-war song on TOTP week after week, had no idea Justin Timberlake was on it, heartily dislike literally everything BEP have done since & vaguely resent them for stealing a living from the anti-war movement of 2003.)

There’s a scene in Britannia Hospital where peaceful demonstrators are confronted by tooled-up riot police, clearly meaning business. One of the demonstrators, a hippyish teenage girl, goes up to the line of police, looks one in the eye and offers him a flower. He clubs her to the ground. Lindsay Anderson clearly thought this was hilarious as well as grim – what else was going to happen? – and there’s no denying that “peaceful protest achieves nothing, gets stomped” is a story that repeats again and again, and it’s a learning experience every time. But it is a learning experience – it teaches the people involved what they’re up against and how seriously the state takes protest; even the obvious negative lesson of “don’t do that again” can be reinterpreted as “do something different next time”. And, as Shiny Dave @3 says, these things – even these failures or defeats – can have long-lasting effects. Jeff Nuttall, quoted in Jonathon Green’s Days in the Life:

There was the sense that the Aldermaston march had failed. One would have thought that if thousands and thousands of people get up and demand an answer of Parliament they would be forced to come out and give them an answer – but of course it wasn’t fucking well true. So one had what was later called “creative alienation”: you didn’t want to have any truck with established society. So what one did was to enter into a whole new philosophy of subverting the culture: “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.”

What’s more – and this (finally!) is the key point – you have to have the initial well-intentioned attempt to change things peacefully, even if the naivety is maintained with gritted teeth. “Peace and love” will (still) mobilise a lot more people than “overthrow the system”, even if the latter is actually the only way to achieve the former. It’s not so much putting the work in as putting the good intentions in – reminding the world (and yourself) that it’s the scruffy rebels who want to stop the killing and the forces of order who want to keep it going. Even if only virtually (never heard it on a demo), this song did a lot to put the good intentions in, and I still love it for that. It’s a 9 from me.

OTOH, this does mean that I look on BEP’s subsequent career pretty much as if Zack de la Rocha had become the face of L’Oreal. Swings and roundabouts.

#9 I think the point about the supposed Ghost Town moment barely being noticed is as Tom says, the idea of smuggling ‘subversive’ ideas into catch pop songs, is a bit of a dead end. Either people don’t notice, or do notice and either don’t care or agree/disagree according to choice – no one had their minds changed by this record and no government trembled. (That’s not at all to say that pop doesn’t change wider social attitudes or create individual epiphanies, but the ways in which it works are much more complex and very much subject to the laws of unintended consequences – cue the cliché about the sound of Dylan’s voice being a far more radical force than any words he sang, or Iain McDonald on the line between sixties individualism and Thatcherites).

Similarly, the difference between this and Ghost Town is that Ghost Town wasn’t a protest song about the Brixton riots, or even directly about Thatcher. It was just some people who had noticed that things in their home town had got really shit and expressed how it made them feel – the Ghost Town moment was that lots of the public realised that, actually, they felt the exactly same way. (At least, that’s genuinely my memory of how it felt as a cultural moment for a seven year old in the Midlands – how much of that memory has been implanted in my mind by the forty subsequent years of myth-spinning about the moment is an open question).

In any case, “the CIA are a bit dodgy and the people promoting this war have ulterior motives” is hardly a radical sentiment – it was the simply the boilerplate no-further-thinking-required view to have about the situation for any young person in the West wasn’t it? (Accepting that the news didn’t reach as far as Jameela Jamil’s school in Highgate).

Anyway, I do quite like WITL – Justin’s singing is nice and I’m certainly prepared to give a song aesthetic points for being a bit political, even if I don’t think the points can generally be cashed in the real world.

And a political song that achieved anything? Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday did! But it had a single defined that actually could be achieved and from a pop point of view, when you could be making windy universalist statements instead, where’s the fun in that?

For a record that spent so long at number one I’m strangely neutral on it, neither particularly liking or disliking it. I did prefer White Flag which I see as a truly great song by an otherwise dull and overrated artist.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Justin Timberlake wasn’t actually credited on the single, even though it might have been his involvement that drove it to the top; he’d begun his solo career with a trio of runners up and had also just fallen short as a member of NSYNC. Ironically he held off more than one other perennial chart runners up as a result; we’ll again very narrowly avoid meeting the Darkness at the end of this year and Rachel Stevens have another near miss having been involved in a number two hat trick (as well as a few chart toppers) during her S Club 7 days. And speaking of The Darkness; it’s been 17 years now since their commercial peak and I’m still not sure whether they were supposed to be a parody or not.

The most obvious comparison for the transition (from all-male* critically accepted genre act to mixed-gender million selling pop act), for me, would be the Human League. I like Travelogue and Bridging The Gap plenty (we named a club night in Cardiff after the latter!), but I think I like Dare and Elephunk rather a lot more. And I think this is excellent.

*(I know this is an oversimplification of the first two BEP albums and what Kim and Sierra brought, but… yeah).

I had found BEP utterly unremarkable and largely interesting in their backpacker incarnation. If I’d had to guess whether they or, to pick one of their contemporaries at random, People Under The Stairs were going to make a shock breakthrough, I would have been stumped. I’m sure the clues were there, but nothing about them made me pay enough attention.

The Fugees – surprisingly only mentioned once in these comments so far, I think – were the forerunners here. I think there’s a retrospective tendency to go, ‘Oh, they had Lauryn Hill, the big time was bound to come’, but Blunted On Reality did zero business (I bought it in a second-hand shop not long after it had come out – it had been flogged by either a journalist or Sony employee). There was, that suggested, a path from chin-stroking hip hop to pop-r&b fame, if you could add the right kind of tunefulness.

I quite liked Where Is The Love? when it came out, although I was way too cynical by that point in time to believe it would be of any use to the world, any more than I thought that marching against the war (which I did) would have any effect.

I do admit that this was pretty fantastic, even if the chord progression is just the same as everything else. Still you can’t keep a good record down. One of my favourite 2003 Number Ones here… just wait until Christmas ’03. A solid 10 out of 10, up there with Evanescence.

No comment on the song as protest art, but here’s something Vonnegut said:

“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

To be honest, I found it hard to pay attention to the lyrics.

I associate the BEP with the late 00s trend I call “rap, but not”. Songs where there’s rapping, but it’s used as filler. Such songs are all about the huge chorus hook (usually either performed by another artist, or sampled from another song), with the rapped verses blandly marking time until the chorus comes back.

I’m not just talking about obvious crap like Flo Rida and Pitbull. In 2010-13, Eminem had two huge crossover smashes (one bunnied, the other not), and both times it felt like Rihanna was hauling him to the top of the charts in her handbag. And was “Empire State of Mind” huge because Jay Z’s rapping…or because of Alicia Keys?

BEP doesn’t TOTALLY go in that direction here, but they’d prove influential in shaping market expectations for a successful “rap” single in 2010: a Godzilla-sized pop/EDM chorus that tramples over everything the actual rappers are doing.