Like everybody was doing yesterday, I was watching the Super Bowl, loving the commercials (s/o to Em for his Chrysler commercial showing Detroit, it is much needed in this day in America), and eating lots of food. Unlike many of the Super Bowl fanatics, I just could not stand watching Bill O’Reilly given his no-spin zone to Barack Obama because Bill O’Reilly love going after people he know he can control and get away with it (try that with those protesters in Egypt then I will give you some type of credit.), nor did I watch the Super Bowl halftime show with the Black Eyed Peas because I have a disdain for people who sold out on hip-hop. Here is my gripe on “The Black-Eyed Peas.”
Me and my blogger brother in the N.C, Citizen Ojo, was having a nice conversation about this during the Chicago Bears- Seattle Seahawks NFC Divisional Playoff Game. Decades ago, I really thought that the Black-Eyed Peas were going to be the West Coast version of my favorite group “A Tribe Called Quest.” Not because the elements that was similar,(Will.I.Am being the next Q-Tip, Taboo and Apl.de.ap being the next Ali Muhammed and Phife Dog) but because they were different in their own way of race (one black, one Filipino, and one Hispanic). I remember the first album called Behind the Front due to their hit “Joints and Jam” with artist Kim Hill.
It is still to me a bonafide hip-hop classic in many cases. In 2000, they collab with singer Macy Gray on “Request Line”. It was a pretty nice song that it hit 2 on the Rap Single. Yes the same time the Hot Boyz (Juvenile, B.G., Turk, and some lil knucklehead name Lil Wayne) was blazing the whole U.S. The same year Bad Boy was at their peak. So the question to me from 2000 to 2001 what happen.
Well development at Interscope came. Dumped Kim Hill because she wasn’t black enough and got a singer that was not black at all to coincide with the Rainbow Coalition that was already happening. Fergie did so much up and down to this group. She gave them international appeal and killed the once coined “one of the last few rap crew in the game.” What happened is that they became more pop than hip-hop. Sometimes I really think the Black-Eyed Peas played a part of the “Who killed the hip-hop group?” theory. It was a big….and quick decision to either get back into hip-hop or go pop. Well, three double platinum LPs, a song (and parody thanks to Aaron MacGruder) for our nation’s president , and many tour around the world, we see where this group went.
Now I am sitting here thinking three things. “Was it worth it,” “Would I still think of Joints & Jam the same way I think of Imma Be,” “Are they the expanded version of A Tribe Called Quest?”
….Well I don’t know, but I tell you my friends. That playing College Football 2010 on PS3 was worth playing than the halftime show.
--Stay Chiefin My Friends
-SA.
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