The Black Eyed Peas ‘Ring the Alarm’ With Politically-Charged Video [WATCH]
The Black Eyed Peas (Will.I.Am, Apl.De.Ap and Taboo) are back with a song and video that takes aim at the crazy state of the world, "Ring the Alarm pt. 1, pt. 2, pt.3"
"The whole world right now is fuckin bonkers," Will.i.am declares early in the first verse, before saying that they "put us in a cage, got us living like hamsters."
"The internet is the brand new conqueror/So watch out for the motherfuckin' monsters (yikes!)
The trolls are the taunters/Whoever controls the data got the answers/They the ones that got the code to the launcher/And they be having dinner with the Pope and the mobsters/They know the cure for the cancer/Cure for the AIDS and they probably killed the panthers/Put us in a cage got us living like hamsters/Put us in the dark but I got me a lantern," he raps.
"“Where Is the Love?” was written in 2001, and it came out in 2003, and because that means we were just reiterating, fixing, and finally, we got it to a nice point where we loved it," Will.i.am explained in an interview with Complex. We wrote that after like, you know, 9/11. So “Ring the Alarm,” we wrote in 2014, ‘13? It was after all the police shootings and Ferguson and then, you know… figuring out the rhyme and reason to why that happened, so every time there’s a police shooting, it just so happens to be around an area where the funding of education is low. You didn’t see a police shooting of an unarmed black man in Brentwood."
As indicated, the song is basically a three-for-one, with beat breaks signaling each new part of the track, though the urgent messages remains the same. The song dips from drum-heavy boom-bap to swinging jazz by the end of the track.
Will.I.Am says the video is symbolic.
"It’s about being blind from information and being affected and acting emotionally rather than intelligently when in search of facts," he explained. "And then you have the blind protecting the blind when police brutality, so that’s the symbolism of the blind police officers versus the protesters, and just the lack of information on what to do. Like, what’s there to do? I know that we wanna do something, but there isn’t a to-do. There’s no how-to. You see us revolt, but what’s the how-to on the change?"
Take a look at the video above.
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