Black Eyed Peas

They've transcended their vigilant hip-hop roots and have become a global phenomenon, the likes of which the music world has rarely seen. Ever-curious and ever-confident, that group is The Black Eyed Peas, and after energizing crowds 'round the globe with the monster-stomp of Elephunk, it's time for the quartet - William, Fergie, apl.de.ap and Taboo to get down to business - Monkey Business, that is.

2003's Elephunk was a breakthrough album for The Black Eyed Peas, vaulting them to a level of success unparalleled by any other hip-hop group. The accolades are quick to recite: sales approaching 7 X platinum in Canada, 7.5 million albums sold worldwide, 1 Grammy award, and an unforgettable performance on the 2005 Grammy broadcast. But fitted with loose rhymes, buoyant anthemic funk and an ebullient live spirit, the album also heralded a new sound for the modern age - one that is inspired by hip-hop, eschews boundaries and inhibitions, and cuts across ages, races and backgrounds. It is a sound that can be described only as One Nation Under A Black Eyed Peas Groove.

But if Elephunk was the group being crowned prince of the castle, then Monkey Business, their fourth album, is The Black Eyed Peas conquering the throne to become King. It is an album that further intensifies their passion for making music together, for connecting with their audience through the most fundamental of ways: making people have a good time. It is a credo that has inspired the group since they formed in the late 1990s, earning their keep in the nurturing environment of Los Angeles' vibrant hip-hop underground. Even then, the group possessed a magnetic spirit that helped them establish a worldwide following through their first two albums, 1998's Behind The Front and 2000's Bridging The Gap.

In many ways, Monkey Business is a direct descendant of its predecessor. The success of Elephunk kept the group touring around the globe for nearly 18 months. "In going on the road for so long, we got an idea of what kind of music we wanted to play and make," explains will.i.am. "Monkey Business is very much about the types of songs we play live. It's about a party. It's layered differently and has energy to it that reflects how we tour - from the beats to the types of instruments we used to how we interact with the audience. It's very much about us and the crowd on this record."

Monkey Business was literally produced and recorded during The Black Eyed Peas everlasting road trip. "I was in Brazil doing some CD shopping," will.i.am recalls. "I came across this compilation and I thought it was one thing but it turned out to be something else. The Dick Dale song 'Miserlou,' was on it. At first I was angry - this isn't what I wanted to buy," he laughs. "But then, really, that song is hot. I said, 'we should do a song like this.' I jump-started the computer and made some beats on the train. Then we had to fly to Tokyo and I tightened up the beat on the plane. Then I recorded vocals in this park in Tokyo. And that's how we recorded the song, 'Pump It.'"

The song, a jump-up party anthem, is one of the featured tracks on Monkey Business - and made its debut in a commercial for Best Buy electronics. "It's the beauty of technology now - you can record anywhere, anytime, any which way. And I love that song because it feels like our live shows, it has that energy."

Monkey Business also furthers the bond the group forged as friends during the making of Elephunk. Before recording that album, the three original members of The Black Eyed Peas - will.i.am, apl.de.ap and Taboo - had been ensnared by personal demons. "I remember that we were each talking about the things that were haunting us and seemed to be crippling us," recalls will.i.am. Adding the vocal talents of singer, Fergie, the group used music as a therapeutic vehicle. Making music with that near-desperate fervor also is maintained on Monkey Business, says will.i.am. "You're always challenged not to go back to those bad habits in life," he says. "When you're comfortable living, you sometimes think that, well, I beat it once so I can do it again. But you never really escape the things that haunt you."

Thus, making Monkey Business became an effort put forth by all the members of the group - the first the foursome co-wrote together - and the more sophisticated songwriting; the layered grooves of the record and its fulfilled spirit reflect that. "This was really about all of us building a house together," says will.i.am.

"Don't Phunk With My Heart" is a gripping soulful serenade that will.i.am describes as a sequel to The Black Eyed Peas song, "Shut Up." "Not sonically but in subject matter," he clarifies. "When you're on bad terms with a significant other, you don't want to break up. You tell her things and at the time you really mean them. But she's saying, stop f****ing with me."

If it sounds like the personal lives of the members infiltrated their songwriting, it is mostly because it did. "Don't Lie," is a song will.i.am says was born of true experience of deceptively bending the truth to an ex-girlfriend. "It's a song about owning up and apologizing and realizing your faults. It's about being a man or a woman - an adult - and confronting situations honestly."

Singer Justin Timberlake joins the group again for the song, "My Style." He first sang on the song, "Where Is The Love?," the breakout single from Elephunk. "We get along real well," says will.i.am, "and he sees music in a very similar way. Plus, he's just a good dude." The song was produced by famed beat-maker Timbaland. "I like experiencing things I've never experienced before," will.i.am says. "It brings you out of your comfort zone and that can be creatively inspiring. And Timbaland is an incredible talent."

Other collaborators join The Black Eyed Peas on this album, too, like Sting on "Union." Neo-folk singer, Jack Johnson is sampled on the song, "Gone Going." The Peas also got to live something of a dream when they hooked up with the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, for the song, "They Don't Want Music."

Oasis

Eleven years after their first gig, eight years after their first album, five years after the mid-nineties madness started to subside, there's no mystery why millions still love Oasis: honesty. The men are honest, the music is honest. We trust Oasis. That's why one Saturday morning this winter, when 120,000 tickets went on sale for the band's two summer shows at Finsbury Park, Noel Gallagher was able to take a call from his manager by lunchtime to say that all the tickets had gone. "That's without them hearing any of the new stuff," says Noel, shaking his head in admiration. "For all the fans knew, we could have made a reggae album."

They haven't made a reggae album. What they've made is Heathen Chemistry: explosive, yes; experimental, no. It's another, great, Oasis album; their fifth. "We've moved on a wee bit," says Noel. "But to re-invent ourselves completely we'd have to be contrived and we're not capable of that. I couldn't take on an alter ego and I know Liam couldn't because I'd be stood behind him going 'you look like a twat'. I don't think I'd look good in leather trousers anyway. We do Oasis music and that's it." Honesty again. Similarly, there's nothing too deep and meaningful about the album's title.
It came from a T-shirt Noel bought in Ibiza.

"I love this record," says Noel. "But I would say that wouldn't I?" With any other pop idol, of course you'd share his cynicism. Coming from a man so ruthlessly self-critical as to virtually disown the band's third album, a man who is scathingly dismissive of the marketing hype that threatens to take over his industry, you pay attention when he says: "It's a better collection of songs than the last two or three. It boils down to that: the songs are better. It does get more difficult. You can't just write Raspberry Fields Forever."

"I don't know if I'm a better songwriter," he says. "But there is something in the air around the band that breeds better songs." He is reluctant to analyse it further, but admits that Liam contributing three songs and Gem Archer and Andy Bell one each might well have forced him to raise his game. "Maybe it's a competitive thing, I don't know. Keith Richards said "you don't go after the songs, the songs find you."

"The best songs," he says, "pour out of you. You sit there with a guitar and a piece of paper and a pen, get the first line right, the rest of it comes immediately." That happened to him several times last summer. "I was living in a hotel near Buckingham Palace. Warm day, fuck all on the telly, in love with my girlfriend. I wrote She is Love in ten minutes. Live Forever was like that. Slide Away was like that. They're the songs that mean something to other people. You write it, put the kettle on, come back, sing it into a tape recorder, play it back and go: 'yeah, that's finished.' Fast forward six months and there's 60,000 people in a field singing it to you. What the fuck's that about? That's magic, as Paul Daniels once said."

Noel conjured up Stop Crying Your Heart Out in similar fashion. Buskers be advised: learn it quickly; this track will be the Wonderwall of its time. If She is Love is about Noel's new girlfriend, many will assume that Force of Nature is about his ex-wife (I certainly did). But they'd be wrong. "I'll have to answer this a million times," he says wearily. "I wrote it for a film with Jude Law and Jonny Lee Miller a year before I got divorced and I've got the video to prove it. There you go. I'm going to bring that video to all my interviews for this album." In any event, it's a cracking song.

Celine Dion

By 1988, Celine had established a strong name for herself in her native province of Quebec,
where she was enjoying superstar status, receiving numerous Felix Awards and racking up
platinum albums. That same year, Celine won the prestigious Eurovision Song Contest in
Dublin Ireland, where she performed live before a television audience of 600 million viewers
throughout Europe, the USSR, the Middle East, Japan, and Australia.
In September, 1990 Celine released "Unison" - her first English-language album and her first
for Sony Music - and scored a breakthrough US hit with the Top 5 single "Where Does My
Heart Beat Now."
Celine's international breakthrough came when she recorded the title track for the soundtrack
to the animated Disney hit movie "Beauty and the Beast." The song went to #1, garnering an
Academy Award for Best Song and a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or
Group with Vocal. "Beauty and the Beast" became the cornerstone for Celine's second
English language album, simply titled "Celine Dion." That album produced four more hit
singles including "Love Can Move Mountains," "Water From The Moon," "If You Asked Me
To" and "Did You Give Enough Love." In Canada, the album went six times platinum and set
the stage for an incredible streak of Juno Awards.
On December 17, 1994, Celine Dion and René Angélil were married at Notre Dame Basilica
in Montreal.
At this time, the Celine juggernaut started rolling at a momentous pace in the UK. British
fans took extremely well to "Think Twice," a ballad on "The Colour Of My Love." For five
consecutive weeks, the song and album stood on top of the respective British charts, an
achievement not replicated since 1965 during the heyday of The Beatles. "Think Twice"
remained at #1 for two more weeks, surpassing the magic million mark to become only the
fourth million-selling single ever in the UK by a female artist. With "D'eux," Celine achieved
a feat which everyone thought impossible: she'd successfully introduced French music to the
top rungs of the British charts. Selling more than 7 million copies and topping charts around

the world, the album became the largest-selling French-language album and the best-selling
non-English-language album in music history. The world had truly discovered Celine Dion.
Blessed with one of popular music's great voices, she has crossed all barriers - including that
of language - with her electrifying series of international hits. Given her breakneck pace of
recording, video shoots, touring and appearances on TV shows and awards specials, it seems
like Celine has time for little else. Not the case when it comes to causes she believes in.
Celine has used her talents to further the cause of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
In fact, one of Celine's most emotional songs ("Vole," from the "D'eux" album, later
translated into English as the song "Fly," which appears on the "Falling Into You" album) is a
touching memorial to her niece, Karine, who was taken from her by this disease.
Released in March 1996, "Falling Into You" became that year's best-selling album. Topping
the charts in 11 countries, "Falling Into You" was voted Album of the Year and Best Pop
Album at the 39th annual Grammy Awards ceremony and has gone on to sell more than 30
million copies worldwide.

POP

Pop music is a genre that, regardless of the instrumentation and technology used for its creation, it retains the formal structure "verse - chorus - verse" Its major differences with other musical genres are in the clear, melodic vocals in the foreground and linear and repetitive percussion. The modern pop music have some common components of strong rhythms and simple melodies. Most of the issues often pop songs. The word "pop" comes from the English abbreviation of the word popular.

Historically, the term "pop music" was not understood as a genre with specific musical characteristics. The music listed as "Pop" was understood as the opposite of worship music, classical music. Under this definition came genres, funk, folk or jazz. The pop was understood as that great band for people with little musical culture. Over time, the pop has been winning its meaning as an independent genre, books

ROCK & ROLL

Rock and roll, rock'n'roll, rock'n'roll is a genre of rhythm, derived from a mix of different genres of American folk music (rhythm and blues, hillbilly, blues, country and western are the most prominent) and popularized since the 1950s, and its most influential singer Elvis Presley, most influential guitarist Chuck Berry and most influential bands The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
The term "rock" is derived from the rock and roll "a distinctive and popular musical genre in the 50" and each of the various musical genres from rock and roll. However, whether in practice there are many artists in rock music, rock and roll without making the 50, continue to call their music "rock and roll."

REGGAE

Reggae is a genre of Jamaican origin. The term reggae is sometimes used to refer to most of the typical rhythms of Jamaica, including ska, rocksteady and dub. In this sense, reggae includes three sub-genres: Skinhead Reggae, roots reggae and dancehall.
The term reggae is a derivation of ragga. This name was used to designate the poor in Jamaica, and also to the Rastas and cultural movements of the slums.
Reggae is based on a rhythmic style characterized by regular courts on background music played by rhythmic drums. This pace is slower than that of other precursors of reggae styles like ska and rocksteady.

Some of the best known performers and artists of the genre are Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Inner Circle, Jimmy Cliff, Steel Pulse, Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Lucky Dube, Eddy Grant, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, King Tubby, John Holt, Gregory Isaacs.
Reggae, like his predecessors, rocksteady and ska, is influenced by other styles developed that were heard in Jamaica, based on Afro-American sounds like the rhythm & blues, or Afro-Caribbean origin such as Calypso, ska and other rhythms.

John Lennon

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, and together with Paul McCartney formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager, his first band, The Quarrymen, evolving into The Beatles in 1960. As the group began to undergo the disintegration that led to their break-up towards the end of that decade, Lennon launched a solo career that would span the next, punctuated by critically acclaimed albums, including John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine".

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, his writing, on film, and in interviews, and became controversial through his work as a peace activist. He moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him, while his songs were adapted as anthems by the anti-war movement. Disengaging himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to his family, Lennon reemerged in October 1980 with a new single and a comeback album, Double Fantasy, but was murdered weeks after their release.

Lennon's album sales in the United States alone stand at 14 million units, and as performer, writer, or co-writer he is responsible for 27 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.a In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008 Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth greatest singer of all time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Paul Mc Cartney

Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, record and film producer, poet, painter, and animal rights activist. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings, according to Guinness World Records, McCartney is the most successful songwriter in the history of popular music.

McCartney gained worldwide fame as a member of The Beatles, alongside John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. McCartney and Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships and wrote some of the most popular songs in the history of rock music. After leaving The Beatles, McCartney launched a successful solo career and formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine. McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100 million singles in the UK.

BBC News named his song "Yesterday" the most covered song in history by over 2,200 artists and, according to the BBC has been played more than 7,000,000 times on American television and radio. Wings' 1977 single "Mull of Kintyre" became the first single to sell more than two million copies in the UK, and remains the UK's top selling non-charity single. Based on the 93 weeks his compositions have spent at the top spot of the UK chart, and 24 number one singles to his credit, McCartney is the most successful songwriter in UK singles chart history. As a performer or songwriter, McCartney was responsible for 32 number one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and has sold 15.5 million RIAA certified albums in the US alone.

McCartney has worked on film scores and classical and electronic music, released a large catalogue of songs as a solo artist, and taken part in projects to help international charities. He is an advocate for animal rights, for vegetarianism, and for music education; he is active in campaigns against landmines, seal hunting, and Third World debt. He is a keen football fan, supporting both Everton and Liverpool football clubs. His company MPL Communications owns the copyrights to more than 3,000 songs, including all of the songs written by Buddy Holly, along with the publishing rights to such musicals as Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and Grease. McCartney is one of the UK's wealthiest people, with an estimated fortune of £475 million in 2010.