Wired for Sound, and Everything Else

By JON PARELES
Published: February 25, 2010
Everything gleamed when Black Eyed Peas performed at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night. On shiny metallic stage sets, Will.i.am, Fergie, Taboo and Apl.de.ap wore silvery metallic costumes, flanked by dancers in head-to-toe robot gear or Op-Art bodysuits. Video screens flashed to announce song titles and segments of the show like computer programs booting up. Anything not reflective was likely to light up with LEDs.
 
It was pop’s latest sci-fi spectacle, in a lineage that dates back at least as far as Janet Jackson’s 1990 Rhythm Nation Tour and has lately yielded high-tech tours by Kanye West and Lady Gaga. While one purpose of a tour is to offer fans the physical, human presence of the stars, Black Eyed Peas are unabashed pop cyborgs — and that’s how the fans like them.

Will.i.am, the band’s main producer, does a canny mix-and-match of the ingredients for 21st-century Top 10 hits. He, Taboo and Apl.de.ap bring adequate hip-hop rhymes, along with chorus catchphrases processed through the now-inevitable Auto-Tune. Fergie can sing like a nasal teeny-popper or a power-ballad belter, covering two more bases. Programmed beats set the genre: hip-hop, rock, electro or — particularly on the group’s latest album, “The E.N.D.” (Interscope) — the four-on-the-floor club thump of trance music. And the words are as generic and utilitarian as possible: “Let’s Get It Started,” “Pump It,” “Missing You.” The group’s long string of hits and multi-million-selling albums demonstrate Will.i.am’s skill at reaching the common denominator with a minimum of actual personality.

The members did take solo turns. Will.i.am had two. For one, he free-styled at length, improvising seemingly spontaneous rhymes to incorporate bits of text messages that were supposedly from the audience. In the other, as if proclaiming that only hits matter, he wasted time as a disc jockey, playing Journey, Nirvana and Michael Jackson. Taboo rode a lighted motorcycle suspended over the crowd. Apl.de.ap did back flips. Fergie revisited her 2006 solo album, “The Dutchess” (A&M).

But she was more awkward and actressy trying to look sincere in “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” backed by acoustic guitar, than she was doing a mechanized, choreographed bump-and-grind in songs like “Fergalicious” and Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.” Her costumes bristled, with pointy shoulders, spikes or a skirt that could have been made of antennas. She did manage to hug the rapper Ludacris, sharing the bill, after he joined her in “Glamorous.” Every so often, Black Eyed Peas turned to social commentary, like “Where Is the Love?,” their all-purpose protest, or “Now Generation,” celebrating, and warning about, the immediate gratifications of cyberspace.

But those are afterthoughts to Black Eyed Peas’ more commercial goals. During the set change before “Now Generation,” the green, video-screen-filling, computer-animated face from the album cover of “The E.N.D.” extolled “the energy of the youth” and then asked, “When this powerful youth becomes activated and stimulated and collectively decides not to buy things, what will happen to the economy?” Later, Taboo reminded fans that there was still time to pick up merchandise.

The finale, “I Gotta Feeling” — with its Auto-Tuned vocals and its pneumatic programmed beat — turned into a live credits sequence, still pumping as the dancers finally showed their faces and Black Eyed Peas introduced them and the band members. At least half of the audience streamed toward the exits before it was over. They’d heard the night’s last hit, and the human element was irrelevant.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/arts/music/26peas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss