Will.i.am Read Online Free

of his childhood. His was not an
upbringing in which unimaginative conformity was automatically valued or rewarded. Nor was undue deference: Debra wanted Will to be a leader rather than a follower. This wish showed itself in a
number of ways during his childhood. For instance, rather than encouraging him to join in with the games other kids played, Debra showed him how much more value there was in creating his own games,
so other kids would come and join him.
    It was during the first half of his teenage years that Will began to experiment with making music. ‘[It was] when I was like thirteen, fifteen,’ he said. ‘At thirteen, I
started rhyming. At fifteen, I started making beats.’ Also, at the age of fourteen, he began to learn about how to write his own music. His reasoning was that if you wanted to move to
Germany, you would learn German first. Therefore, if you wanted to move into the music industry, you had to learn music.
    Which was something he was continuing to do. Before he was will.i.am, Will was Will 1X (sometimes spelled as WilloneX). It is not quite such a catchy moniker, but it represents where he was at
this stage in his life. Indeed, according to someone who knew Will at the time, this earlier character was a ‘mini-me’ reflection of the iconic will.i.am celebrity of today.
    One of his childhood friends was Stefan Gordy. The son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, Stefan would go on to achieve musical fame himself later in life, as
‘Redfoo’, one of the members of the band LMFAO. Will first noticed him when he realized, with amusement, that Stefan would arrive at school wearing tennis kit.
    At this stage, Will was using his younger sister’s talking bear to record some rudimentary raps. ‘I used to record on my little sister’s Teddy Ruxpin tapes to make Teddy Ruxpin
rap,’ he told the
Huffington Post
. ‘So I used to put my little demo inside his belly and press play and he used to kick my lyrics in homeroom show-and-tell.’ To take the
recording further, he leveraged his relationship with Stefan. ‘So after homeroom show-and-tell, I gave the tape to Stefan: “Give this to your pops”. And he didn’t give it to
his dad, so he gave it to his brother, Kerry, and then Kerry says, “You’re really talented, this is cool.”’ This was enough for Will to impose renewed hustling pressure on
Stefan. ‘To make a long story short, in the tenth grade I tell Stefan, “Tell your daddy to get you some music equipment so we can record after school”.’
    While studying at a summer school at John Marshall High in Los Feliz, Will first met another boy who would change his life. Allan Pineda Lindo, now better known as apl.de.ap (or simply apl), of
The Black Eyed Peas, quicklystruck up a rapport with Will. Allan was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and black father. His father left home soon after Allan was
born, leaving Allan’s mother to raise seven children on her own. Although he was the youngest of the family, Allan quickly grew an old head on his young shoulders. His family was struggling
to survive and so even as a child he worked on a local farm to bring some much needed extra funds into the household. His grace was rewarded when a television commercial, made by a charity called
the Pearl Buck Foundation, featured his plight on American television. A Californian businessman was so moved by the commercial that he arranged to adopt the fourteen-year-old and bring him to a
new, more comfortable, life in Los Angeles. It was that man, Joe Ben Hudgens – a former roommate of one of Will’s uncles – who set in motion the wheels that would bring Lindo to
Will’s attention.
    So Will began to write songs with apl and they quickly developed an understanding that was so strong that, to outsiders observing their creative interactions, it appeared almost telepathic. This
synergy would make them very rich in the years ahead. For the time being, it provided them with something