Pay to Slum: Black Eyed Peas, "Boom Boom Pow"

Video: Black Eyed Peas - "Boom Boom Pow"

Taboo is a fellow in Black Eyed Peas. Also known as He Whose Name Has No Periods, the rapper, dancer, and top notch haberdasher is apparently also a galactic ambassador, a dude who filled the Sea of Tranquility with asparagus dip just so he and apl.de.ap could chomp on planets and taste rainbows. It has to be this way. BEP are popular vertically, horizontally, and every which way but loose. Their digital downloads come with extra ones and zeroes to handle the breathless overflow. They break periodically into television broadcasts with messages of faith and power in the form of easy-to-read beats and language without sentence structure. This is easy when you have a summer house on SPACEWAY-1.

But let's get back to Taboo. He's on a supersonic boom, you know, and when you hear that spaceship zoom, that's when he steps inside the room. Or so it sort of goes in a later verse of "Boom Boom Pow," BEP's current chart topper and the lead single from The E.N.D. Taboo continues, forsaking English in favor of the jargon spit on the showroom floor at the Alpha Centauri Best Buy: "That low-fi stupid a bit," he glitters. "I'm on that HD flat." Taboo knows what he raps. That Best Buy has the greatest deals in the universe.

Fergie, of course, is also along for the Peas' latest meteoric ride to the jutting tip of the Billboard Hot 100. Warning: she dismisses the world as "2000 and late." We're all dead like Duchovny in The Rapture. But she offers us solace, too -- while we'll never stalk the stars and rings of Saturn like the quartet, whose great space coasting jeepney is tricked out with lazers, we must only declare that we're friends with Peas. Presto, it's salvation.

"People in the place," the Fergalicious Lady of Fatima bellows. "If you want to get down, put your hands in the air." And then she gets will.i.am to drop the beat that will save us. Because In BEP's universe, the day the earth stood still was also the day it danced contentedly toward revolution.

JTL

Each week Johnny Loftus will select a song from your hit parade to explicate, celebrate, or humiliate.

Black Eyed Peas: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki.