For starters I think I should point out that this article is not an ill conceived treatment for the third instalment of the ‘Three Men & a Baby’ series. Although to be frank it would be amazing to hear Steve Guttenberg or Tom Selleck deliver classic pimpology like ‘Bitch, before you met me you weren’t nothing but a funky zero’. And who wouldn’t enjoy the spectacle of Ted Danson bedecked in all manner of ostentatious finery, trailing his street walking hos through the drizzle splattered streets of Harlem, advising them to ‘Walk between the rain drops’? (Copyright Iceberg Slim 1967)

Flights of fancy aside, I am of course talking about chart bothering popsters the Black Eyed Peas. But before we get onto them here’s a story I think many people will be able to relate to.

Do you remember having a friend in high school that you were pretty tight with? Long boring Saturday afternoons would be spent in each others company watching bad films, smoking weed, listening to the Ramones and generally killing time together. Then one day your mate gets a girlfriend. Let’s call her Lilith. Lilith appears plain and conservative and normal. She does not like drinking Morrison’s own brand vodka from a sippy cup. She does not enjoy John Carpenter’s Vampires on VHS. She couldn’t care less about The Ramones’ 1980s output. And she certainly doesn’t care about you.

Yet your mate finds her endlessly fascinating and his time is increasingly eaten up by her. He accepts the petty indignities she inflicts upon him on a daily basis. She openly flirts with other guys, stands him up frequently and audibly scoffs at his minor attempts at self expression. Before long he is a withered husk of his former self. A shadow.

Lilith has made him throw out his porn collection, all those years of work down the drain. His nights and weekends are spent driving her to work. He then sits in the car park waiting for her shift to end, joylessly cramming Burger King Double Whoppers into his ashen face and smoking Lambert & Butler cigarettes with the blank expression favoured by aged crones in their pyjamas sat outside hospitals. And even when you do see him, when Lilith is on one of her girl’s nights out where she ‘accidentally’ fucks the door man of your local pub, he is as distracted as an abused animal. He constantly checks his phone for txts and paces the room ceaselessly. Because by this stage it is pretty obvious that Lilith is poison.

Well my friends, the very same thing could well be said as having happened to The Black Eyed Peas.
For old timers like myself who can remember the 1990s with horrifying clarity the ‘Peas were altogether a very different proposition from the cartoonish and ubiquitous shite hawks now soiling the ears and consciousness of the great unwashed. The three original members will.i.am, apl.de.ap and taboo performed interesting, slightly back-packy hip hop backed by a live band. Their first two albums Behind The Front and Bridging The Gap were enjoyable if slightly workmanlike slices of intelligent rap. But then came 2004’s Elephunk and the singing talents of The Black Eyed Peas’ very own Lilith, the one and only Stacy Ferguson aka Fergie. Now, to slag Fergie off would be unfair. Fergie is Fergie, much as Lilith is Lilith. You don’t blame a scorpion for its sting or a shark for its rows of razor sharp teeth. In fact the original all male trio must feel a certain sense of vindication at their new found mainstream success with Fergie onboard, but they must also secretly acknowledge that their music since her arrival has been uniformly bollocks.

One has only to look at the video for The Black Eyed Peas recent single ‘I Gotta Feeling’ to see how far they have fallen. Aside from the sheer clunking desperation of the song itself, a half arsed paean to partying, the video tells a story that a million words could not. One look into the eyes of nominal band leader will.i.am is all that is needed to see that he fully realises he is producing artless dreck, and that he hates himself for it. The other two blokes appear slightly bemused but ultimately contented, like lottery winners or contestants on an ITV Saturday night game show. Fergie meanwhile just looks like a prostitute. Seriously, it’s like the director has walked onto the set of the video, taken one look at her and exclaimed to the wardrobe department, “Proz her up a bit would you for fuck’s sake?!”.

The lyrics to their recent output have been equally excreable. ‘Boom Boom Pow’ is an exercise in fuck-wittery so terrible it naturally went straight to Number One in the charts. Simultaneously aspirational and meaningless bargain basement rhymes like “I’m on that HD Flat, This beat go boom boom bap” manage to go beyond sheer awfulness to actually take on the grim suggestion of some indescribable future horror.

I’m not suggesting we burn their records in the street or consign them to the nether regions of pop history like Gary Glitter, Jonathan King and The Fast Food Rockers but let’s be honest, these jokers are riding high upon a wave of pure dross fuelled by the moronic sensibility of the majority of the worlds population. If your last enjoyable cultural experience was the film ‘Superbad’ and the last book that really blew you away was the work of Dan Brown then my words are essentially anathema. But please see me as a benevolent figure, a harsh but fair stepfather with your best interests at heart. As William Blake said, ‘the cut worm forgives the plough’. With so many artists making exciting, genre bending hip hop right now there’s simply no excuse for listening to this most diabolical quartet. Rant over.