I’d love to be the guy who tries to argue that “My Humps” is actually good, but no, it’s a 3.) Monkey Business went triple platinum, and it got Fergie to the point where she started looking like a potential solo star. Will.i.am went for an ’80s-electro pastiche while Fergie bleated about her lovely lady lumps, and they made something so aggressively obnoxious that I almost admire it. The witlessly flirty “My Humps” is famous for being one of the most annoying songs ever to become a major hit. (Macy Gray’s highest-charting single, 1999’s “ I Try,” peaked at #5. But BEP were interested in crossing over, and they scored their first Hot 100 hit when their 2001 Macy Gray collab “Request Line” peaked at #63. In the early ’00s, BEP were working with people like De La Soul, Mos Def, and former Number Ones artist Wyclef Jean. The Black Eyed Peas style had never been deep, but it was energetic and vaguely focused on positivity. When Fergie met them, BEP were basically doing a warm, fuzzy version of the underground-adjacent backpack rap that was getting critical acclaim at the time. The Black Eyed Peas have their own twisty-ass history, and we’ll eventually get into that when they appear in this column. Just before she quit Wild Orchid, Fergie met a Los Angeles rap group called the Black Eyed Peas at a radio-station show. The group didn’t try to keep going without her. Fergie was dealing with a pretty serious crystal meth addiction at the time, and she left Wild Orchid in 2001. The group recorded a third album, but RCA shelved it and ultimately dropped the group. Wild Orchid’s second album, 1998’s Oxygen, sold basically nothing. But the group never really got to ride the teen-pop wave. Their diva-house track “Talk To Me” became their biggest hit, peaking at #48. Wild Orchid released their self-titled debut in 1997, and they toured with boy bands like *NSYNC and 98 Degrees. She also landed on just the right song: a silly, horny, sleazy club-rap number with actual funk in its strut and just enough sass to pass. Fergie came along at the exact right moment to take both her group and herself into the pop promised land. In a way, Fergie’s solo career was a brand extension for the Black Eyed Peas, a way for that group to expand its already-formidable sphere of nerf-rap influence. She’d recorded two albums with the Black Eyed Peas, a group that will eventually appear in this column, and she remained a Black Eyed Pea even after going solo. She also had to rap - or sort of rap, anyway.īy the time Fergie Ferg went solo, she was already a known quantity. Somewhere in there, the former child actress and girl-group singer Stacy Ann Ferguson became a straight-up no-joke pop star. After Gwen Stefani and the Neptunes, we got Timbaland strapping rockets to both Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake. Still, it’s pretty striking how quickly the “Hollaback Girl” model took over the pop charts, to the exclusion of the actual Black artists who had been running things for a few years. Musicians borrow sounds and poses and ideas from other musicians all the time, and white pop music that doesn’t at least nod toward Black music tends to be a whole lot less interesting than the stuff that does. In 2006, this course of action became essentially the only way to top the Hot 100. The white singer could dabble in the swagger associated with rap and gain a little bit of cool by association, while the Black producer could move into a whole new zone of crossover-pop visibility. Together, they could make something that nodded toward Black music without actually being Black music. With the “Hollaback Girl” model, a white singer - preferably one who was already famous - could link up with a Black producer who was already a big name in the interlinked worlds of rap and R&B. But then No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani linked up with the Neptunes for a bratty cheerleader-chant earworm, and the game changed.įor the white pop singers of America, “Hollaback Girl” represented a way forward. If someone like Eminem was going to manage a #1 hit, he had to approach Black music with respect and reverence, and he had to make sure his contributions worked at an unquestionably high level. What hath “ Hollaback Girl” wrought? In the first half of the ’00s, when rap and R&B utterly dominated the pop charts, it was virtually impossible for a white artist to top the Hot 100 without winning American Idol. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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