Belts and Wrenches

Here it goes.

Grunt.

Grunt.

Plop!*

The story of Fergie is inextricably interwoven with that of the Black Eyed Peas, so to tell the yarn correctly I'm going to have to take us back to the late 90s, a time of quiet desperation for Kosovars and me.

I'd heard the Peas originally on "The Box," a fuzzy channel-8 music video network we weren't supposed to get. I don't think it came with cable packages, and its provenance never really became clear to me, which makes me think now that maybe it was some un-FCC pirate deal used to raise cash for some cutthroat underground-media types, the same types who now poach YouTube videos for their blogs.

The Box's concept was that Milwaukee-area music fans could tune in and then call The Box to see their favorite music videos. I really started tuning in to "The Box" at the stage in mid-high school when white people such as myself start to understand that maybe they shouldn't be afraid of rap anymore.

The rap-appreciation scene at my school consisted of two kinds of kids; kids that dug The Roots and Wu-Tang clan as kind of a supplement to weed-induced appreciation of Bob Marley, and the kid who sat behind me in homeroom telling completely false stories of how a Honda Civic outran an Impala on 33rd street and the cop let him go because he was so impressed that anyone could bring a Civic up to the speed-limit, let alone beat out Milwaukee's (then) choice ghetto muscle car.

COP: Do you know how fast you were going?
GUY: Yeah! I beat an Impala!
COP: Yeah! I saw that! Normally I'd have to give you a ticket for running two red lights and doing eighty in a twenty-five, but because I've never seen something so funny as a Civic outrunning an Impala, I'm gonna just let you go. Nice job.

[COP and GUY shake hands.]

The guy who told these stories brought a lot of CDs to class, but the only two I remember was a Slick Rick one where he's wearing a diamond-encrusted eye patch, and 8-Ball's Lost, one of many albums of the post-Pac Southern Rap fad of the late-90s. But we're getting off topic, in a way.

Around the same era, Bulworth came out and for some reason Warren Beatty's awktown freestyle didn't seem that awktown to me, so I started tuning into The Box because "Ghetto Supastar" was in the heaviest rotation The Box had ever seen; basically if you turned on Channel 8 you were going to get Mya Wyclef and ODB riffin on "Islands in the Stream." One thing led to another, I bought the Bulworth soundtrack, and "Joints and Jams" was Track 10. This is how I met Black Eyed Peas.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the family computer room (we used to have rooms dedicated to a single computer), Napster was not-yet illegally delivering "Weekends" and a BEP freestyle featuring Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, and I kind of became enamored with the goofy legumes.

My friends and I would drive around at night stealing lawnmowers and "Tom Shellak for School Board" signs and placing them in awkward positions on our friends' lawns. Not really pranks, because there was no cause-effect or even joke associated with it, not really even vandalism because we were too scared to do that, but a little gangster to us because we were listening to the BEP Family while we did it.

Flash forward a couple years to Eminem and college, the eventual return of hardcore, battle-based rap to my life via 8-Mile, and suddenly the cheeky fun-rap of BEP seemed stupid. Still, I bought tickets to their 930 Club performance and was going to go with a pretty girl named Steph who wound up transferring to Columbia later, but my roommate had made me go to a Rollins Band concert the week before and the second-hand smoke had made me sick, so I stayed in and my roommate took Steph. At that point, BEP and I basically parted ways. Kazaa and T-1 had rolled around, and I got possessed by that undergrad urge to find out "what this Minor Threat is all about," "who are the Bad Brains anyway?" and "Ooh! Radiohead!"

This worked until I left for Senegal and stayed with a rich Catholic family that was patched together after my host dad became a widower in 01, promptly replacing his Russian wife with a half-Vietnamese, half Wolof woman who ruled the house with sternness and not much care for the two newly-motherless children.

On the upside of the domestic situation, Tele5 broadcast in Senegal and my host brother had a big TV, so we sat around several afternoons watching a Box-like call-in TV show where people all over the French diaspora were requesting, of all things, Black Eyed Peas.

Only now, suddenly there was a blonde chick with them who appeared tacked on to the BEP Family's already tacked-together schtick, and this just confused the pants off me. Plus I was busy listening to "Frontin'" by Pharrell and Jay-Z, not to mention "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Pretty soon I came back to America, discovered everyone hated "Where Is the Love?" but still had bought it or requested it, and forgot about Fergie. Years passed without even the slightest hint of Fergie being anything. "Let's Get Retarded" came out and that was alright with me, such a stupid-fun song that now I could feel nostalgia for, almost five years post-high school, and everyone clowned on BEP because really, who can be serious if they're writing songs about becoming retarded? Moreover, Fergie didn't seem to do anything in that song other than just dance and prance in the video. Her purpose was always in question, which also led me to wonder about her viability as an individual performer and as a human being.

Now, finally, Fergie is fully in view, and I am free to judge her without the dubious buoys of the Peas to support her. Baby girl, fully busted out solo, is performing songs like "Big Girls Don't Cry" that remind me more of Shania than Mya. "Big" shows the degree to which Fergie was always an afterthought sex symbol, in that the purpose of the song appears mainly to have an accompanying video in which Fergie, who actually is kinda hot, walk around in her panties and a largely unbuttoned shirt.

Given that she started in funky hip-hop stupidity and now roosts firmly in jangly, unoriginal country-pop-Matchbox 20 stupidity, really, Fergie would have been better placed in a different age. In The Box era, music videos were hard to come by, and the Internet provided porn, sure, but alone-time in high school by the family desktop was rare, so guys named Chip were still selling stolen Playboys to freshmen. As a sex symbol/performer, Fergie belongs back in those days, when the scarcity of music videos would have kept a song like "Big Girls Don't Cry" out of my life, but I might've scored a photo spread of her in a worn, thumbed-through adult mag. This would be harsh if it didn't seem so close to what Fergie actually wants. Call it early-90s of me, but if a performer of music is serious about being a performer of music and not just a performer of her own underwear, she might have to do more than bang out some shellack and then walk slow-mo in front of a camera "givin em a little shoulder."

Soft porn or music, Fergie. The multimedia age was not made for constipated waffling. Time to shit or get off the Hot 100.



*UMG won't let me embed this, I suppose to suppress proliferation of this song throughout the Internet. Good idea.