The Black Eyed Peas have gone back to the start, and the results are breathtaking. Most of the world was only vaguely aware of the Los Angeles backpack-rapper credibility the band established with their first two records via “Where is the Love”, their first mainstream hit. After that, a dedication to futuristic and chart-topping party rap hits - "Don't Phunk with My Heart", "Don't Lie", "My Humps", "Pump It", "Boom Boom Pow" and "I Gotta Feeling" - displaced any impression that there was a sociopolitical consciousness in their output. The music that Will.I.Am and Fergie’s solo side careers produced did little to tilt the scale.
In a recent Forbes interview with Steve Baltin, Will.I.Am humbly described the trio’s comeback single Street Livin' (sans Fergie) as “just a couple of nudges reminding what’s important”. When the band shared the track’s poetically gritty music video on Twitter, however, they described its ambitions more accurately: "We have the POWER to make change together. Prison Industrial Complex. Immigration. Gun Violence. Police Brutality. These issues are critical for our families, friends, communities, and world. Stay Woke, Take Action Now. #BEPStreetLivin".
The song begins with a languid jazz sample that builds up into a measured, precise and restrained commentary on the impossibly difficult conditions that characterize street life in Los Angeles. The trio makes striking sense of the chaos at hand, deftly unpacking America’s history of slavery-driven capitalism, institutionalized racism, systematic discrimination and general indifference towards the livelihoods of the poor and disenfranchised:
‘They called us coons, now they call us cons
Street niggas be packing pistols
Terrorists be blasting missiles
Crips and Bloods and retail thugs
CIA planes bring Colombian drugs in
Don't push me 'cause I'm close to hell
The teachers in my neighborhood can hardly spell
And compare to them, prison guards get paid well
Ten years no bail is 4 years at Yale’
Lyrics: Genius
On the song’s chorus, Will.I.Am takes the time to repeat a statistic that encapsulates the shocking racism of America’s modern-day prison-industrial complex with careful indignance: ‘There's more niggas in the prisons than there ever was slaves cotton picking/ There's more niggas that's rotting in the prisons than there ever was slaves cotton picking’. The anger and self-righteousness on the track is there - but fleshed out slowly and stoically. Unlike other recent woke-minded singles (e.g. N.E.R.D’s “Lemon” and “1000”), the band aims for accessibility with a relatively minimal sonic template (subdued brass instruments and an insistent beat). The music video’s conceit - superimposing the band member’s mouths on sepia photographs of sepia images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, prisoners, immigrants, terrorists, protesters, and black men being arrested - is also simple yet highly effective.
The track ultimately amounts to a clinical-yet-empathetic diagnosis of the vicious cycle at hand: ‘Niggas killing niggas like they Ku Klux Klan/ I understand what's a nigga to choose?/ Be the killer or be the dead dude in the news/ I get it, what's a nigga to do?/ No education in the hood got a nigga confused’. There is no solution on offer here, besides the familiar ultimatum of ‘You can get fucked by the system/ Or you can say "fuck the system"’. Taboo, who has Native American ancestry, has been fighting to prevent reservation land from falling into the hands of land developers. What could be more reassuring - and revolutionary - than a musical act who practices what they preach?
