Will.i.am, the 48-year-old Los Angeles-born frontman for the group the Black Eyed Peas, has been at the forefront of modern-day hip-hop for years now. His group, which started as an underground collective, later went super pop, collaborating with the likes of Fergie and Justin Timberlake.
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But what does the multi-time Grammy Award-winner have to say about the world outside of his music career? What are his thoughts on subjects such as Philanthropy, gender disparity in tech, and Autotune? For all of the answers, look no further than this list of the best 20 will.i.am quotes below.
[RELATED: The Top 10 Black Eyed Peas Songs]
1. “I’ve got all this stuff in my head at the same time as I’m doing stuff and I don’t know how to stop or slow down.”
2. “I feel my personality is richer than my bank account. So if I meet a girl, maybe first she just likes me because I’m rich. But then she’s gonna get to know me and say, ‘Screw the money.’”
3. “If you really want change, you really want it to be inclusive, where everyone’s included, otherwise you’re just going to have more of the same in the future.”
4. “When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it’s all guys. The girls, they’re being left behind.”
5. “Traveling in Europe made me understand that America has an island mentality: No one exists except us. There’s a whole other world out there, but most Americans—all they know is America, the marketing plan.”
6. “Politics are about preserving relationships at the end of the day, and it has nothing to do with the greater good for humanity. It’s just all about business.”
7. “If you live in a good neighborhood, you drive home and there’s a bank. There’s grocery stores and big houses—but no motels. What that tells you psychologically is you protect your money and buy good things for your family to eat in your nice big house.”
8. “Philanthropy is the thing that I am really excited about, and having success means I can do more.”
9. “I’d like to see Apple and Dell factories be brought to the inner cities; in every project in America, there’s some factory there, and it’s abandoned, and I’d like to see those factories open and bring jobs to America.”
10. “I rescue families who are losing their homes because they have no jobs and they can’t pay the mortgage and the banks are foreclosing on their homes.”
11. “If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others—it’s the same with music.”
12. “When someone is denying what they are, then that’s when things start to spiral down.”
13. “Romantic love is painful.”
14. “I don’t want to hope anymore. I don’t think we should hope anymore. We hoped enough. Now we have to do. We all have to do now.”
15. “I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.”
16. “You can rule ignorance; you can manipulate the illiterate; you can do whatever you want when a people are uneducated, so that goes in line with corrupt business and corrupt politics.”
17. “Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.”
18. “We have no control over the outcome of anything. Like the planet and global warming, we don’t control that. If politicians want a war we don’t control that. Acts of terrorism, we can’t control them.”
19. “What Autotune allows is for people like myself and Kanye West not to depend on the singer. Back in the Fifties, the songwriter was rendered invisible. Now the songwriter is there in the forefront.”
20. “Most of these people who are celebrities now don’t do anything to deserve it, so by that fact alone, I don’t want to be one.”
Photo by Jaime Nogales/ Medios y Media/Getty Images
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