The Black Eyed Peas don’t release “songs” the way that mainstream audiences are used to hearing them. What have they borrowed from live DJ sets?
The Black Eyed Peas are an increasingly big deal for increasingly confusing reasons. The secret to the Peas’ success owes more to DJ culture than auto-tune. It seems like the group peddles in the same electro-junk that pretenders to the throne (cough, 3Oh!3, Kesha. Sigh, “Ke$ha”) have tried to co-opt. To be sure, the Peas didn’t invent the over-produced, auto-tune song. They were, however, one of the first major acts to make the form their M.O.
Indie-kids will loudly cry that Radiohead’s Kid A was the first. Angsty indie-kids will say that Nine Inch Nails beat the whole scene years before the Peas were even a group. Props where they’re due, but the wining formula wasn’t just the ability to tear up, bit crush, or industrialize a sound otherwise Rammstein would have been world-famous. The Peas have taken the ball from T-Pain and fuzed the hip-hop success of auto-tune and heavy beats with the (refreshingly) old school melodies and tones from their own early records.
The E.N.D. marked the re-birth of the Peas into the genre, and arguably the birth of the genre along with it. But as much as autotune seems to dominate that record and their latest, The Beginning (get it? They did it in the wrong order!), their success owes more to DJ’s than T-Pain.
So how did the Peas go from “My Humps” to “Boom Boom Pow”? The Peas went from their vaguely-kitshcy, parody songs to embracing “that 3,000 and 8″ sound. The Peas don’t release “songs” the way that mainstream audiences are used to songs. Namely, the standard intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro format that populates most modern songs across all genres. Much of the songs on The E.N.D. and The Beginning are collections of several songs mixed together the way a DJ would spin a set, beat matching and mixing tempos.
The Peas are basically recording a straight album, remixing it in the studio, and then actually releasing that remixed version instead of the more traditional original. It should be said, I haven’t been to the recording sessions, but a quick listen to hits like “Boom Boom Pow,” “Imma Be Rocking That Body,” and the latest, “The Time (Dirty Bit),” reveal the different cuts, beats, and movements contained in each track. Heck, there are about five individual songs within “Imma Be” alone.
This is different from simply sampling songs, which bands and hip-hop acts have been doing for a long time. For example, check the 2-minute mark of “Boom Boom Pow” to see how the actual song starts to shift while keeping the base beat. How the drums cut to let the filtered/octave-shifted voice drop into a now much-heavier groove. Or listen to ”The TIme (Dirty Bit),” and how it deals with its sample (“Time Of My Life”). Rather than weave the sample through the song, informing the chord structures, the sample follows a DJ’s mentality: recognizable, familiar sample – delayed drum/synth build up at (0:50) – cut sound and a vocal cue (0:59) just before the beat drops into a ripping bass-line seemingly foreign from its source material.
This is not how bands usually treat samples. It is, however, a secret to the Peas’ success. Their hits are accessible to listeners that want to dance because the songs sound club-ready and mainstream at the same time (hey there, David Guetta). The songs are also palatable to DJ’s looking for an easy track to throw on. With the amount of samples and effects applied to the songs, it can make any mediocre DJ look like they’re doing way more with a Peas’ song simply by playing it straight. It’s also a guaranteed head-bopper and fan favorite thanks to the ton of radio play their songs receive.
Whether you actually like these songs, the samples, their treatment, etc. is almost irrelevant to how the Peas are treating their records and hits. The group is cutting edge for a reason that most would consider tangential. Their “future” sounds and post-post-modern (bleh) approach to cutting their own vocals is less interesting than their ability to make mainstream a DJ-mentality to music.
