Yet, buried in the bombast is genuine innovation. will.i.am had long been a pioneer of using the voice as an instrument (pioneered on Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D. in 2009). On (feat. Afrojack), he chops his own vocals into rhythmic stutters, turning human breath into a percussive loop. The Deluxe track “The World Is Crazy” (feat. Dante Santiago) offers a rare moment of restraint—a moody, synth-led meditation that recalls Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (released the same year). But will.i.am cannot help himself; within two minutes, the song erupts into a brass-and-bass hybrid. This restlessness is both his genius and his curse. Part II: The Deluxe Narrative – Excess as Expression Why focus on the Deluxe Edition? Because the extra tracks are where the album’s true thesis emerges. The standard edition (11 tracks) is a safe, radio-friendly EDM record. The Deluxe adds six more songs, including “Smile Mona Lisa” and the infamous “Fall Down” (feat. Miley Cyrus). These cuts are darker, weirder, and more revealing.
is a key text. Co-written with Dr. Luke and featuring Miley Cyrus during her Bangerz “twerking” era, the song’s lyrics sound like a suicide note set to a club beat: “I’ve been up for four days / Getting high off my own ways / I think I’m gonna fall down.” The juxtaposition of Cyrus’s bright, affected drawl with will.i.am’s robotic panic is genuinely unsettling. It is a song about burnout—creative, chemical, and emotional—disguised as a banger. Will.I.Am - Willpower -2013- DeLuxe Album - Mp...
#willpower is not a great album. It is not even a good album by traditional measures. But it is a great document —a digital fossil of a moment when pop music looked into the screen and saw a stranger staring back. And in that stranger, will.i.am found his truest self: not a human with willpower, but a ghost in the machine, forever screaming and shouting into the void. Yet, buried in the bombast is genuine innovation
Introduction: The Voice of the Machine In November 2013, will.i.am—the charismatic frontman of the Black Eyed Peas and a self-styled tech visionary—unleashed his fourth solo studio album, #willpower (Deluxe Edition). By this point, will.i.am was no longer just a musician; he had become a brand ambassador for Intel, a coach on The Voice UK, and a walking embodiment of pop’s uneasy marriage with Silicon Valley. #willpower is not merely a collection of songs. It is a fever dream of early 2010s EDM (Electronic Dance Music) excess, a confessional about fame’s hollowness, and a deeply flawed but fascinating artifact of an era when pop music tried to digitize its own soul. On (feat
Tracks like (Deluxe bonus) predict the “stripped but digital” aesthetic of artists like 100 gecs or SOPHIE (RIP). The album’s failure was not its sound but its timing: it arrived just as the EDM bubble was bursting and as listeners began to crave the “authentic” (think Lorde’s Pure Heroine , also 2013). In retrospect, #willpower is a bridge between two eras—the maximalist, blog-housed 2000s and the fragmented, meme-driven 2020s. Conclusion: The Willpower Paradox The title #willpower is ironic. The album is not about strength of will but its absence. It is a record by a man who outsourced his artistic decisions to focus groups, radio programmers, and his own fear of irrelevance. The Deluxe Edition, in its glorious mess, offers no answers—only a mirror. When will.i.am chants “I am the machine” on “The World Is Crazy,” it is both a boast and an elegy.
remains the album’s gravitational center. Produced with Lazy Jay and will.i.am, the track’s iconic hook—“Bring the action / When you hear us in the club / You gotta turn the shit up”—is less a lyric than a command. Britney’s dead-eyed, robotic delivery is legendary, and will.i.am plays the hype man. But listen again: the song is about performative hedonism. The “shout” is never joyful; it is a simulated emotion for a simulated environment. In this sense, #willpower is less an album than a concept record about the performance of happiness in the digital age. Part IV: The Critical and Commercial Verdict – A Flop of Ambition Commercially, #willpower was a modest success. It debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, but it fell far short of Black Eyed Peas’ multi-platinum dominance. Critics savaged it. Rolling Stone gave it 1.5 stars, calling it “a bloated, soulless EDM slog.” Pitchfork dismissed it as “the sound of a man Googling ‘current pop trends’ and pressing ‘select all.’”
This essay argues that #willpower ’s Deluxe Edition is a schizophrenic masterpiece of contradictions: simultaneously futuristic and dated, hedonistic and paranoid, collaborative and deeply isolated. It captures will.i.am at his most commercially savvy and artistically vulnerable, revealing the hidden cost of chasing the algorithm’s approval. The Deluxe Edition of #willpower (17 tracks, including four bonus cuts) is a textbook case of “kitchen sink” production. Every track is overstuffed with pitch-shifted vocals, four-on-the-floor kicks, dubstep wobbles (circa 2012), and auto-tune that is less a correction than an aesthetic choice. Songs like “Let’s Go” (feat. Chris Brown) and “Geekin’” are built for festival main stages—massive, empty, and relentlessly loud.