Will.i.am is a refugee from East L.A., said Matthew Garrahan in the Financial Times. Born William Adams Jr., the Black Eyed Peas frontman was raised by his mother in a brutally poor Los Angeles neighborhood rife with crime and drugs. “She knew she had to send me to a better school,” he says. His mom enrolled him in a school that was a 90-minute bus ride away, which meant Will.i.am had to wake at 5 a.m. every day. “Sometimes I would miss breakfast, and when you’re on food stamps and lunch tickets, missing breakfast is not good.” But he gives his mom full credit for keeping him from the temptations that swallowed his friends. “In the ghetto there’s a liquor store, a check-cashing place, and a motel. What that tells you psychologically is: Get a check, cash it. Take a couple of steps. Buy some liquor and get drunk, go home and get kicked out of your house. And here’s a place to sleep along the way.” As soon as his music career took off, he moved his family to a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. “It was either drive-bys or rabbis. I picked the rabbis.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
The ‘ravenous’ demand for Cornish mineralsUnder the Radar Growing need for critical minerals to power tech has intensified ‘appetite’ for lithium, which could be a ‘huge boon’ for local economy
-
Why are election experts taking Trump’s midterm threats seriously?IN THE SPOTLIGHT As the president muses about polling place deployments and a centralized electoral system aimed at one-party control, lawmakers are taking this administration at its word
-
‘Restaurateurs have become millionaires’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
