Will.i.am and James BKS tell us about their collab ‘Jungle Go Dumb’

nme.com:

Will.i.am has teamed up with pioneering French world music producer James BKS on new track ‘Jungle Go Dumb’. Check it out below along with our interview with the pair.The track is taken from BKS’s latest album ‘Wolves Of Africa Part 1’, which also features contributions from his label boss Idris Elba, as well as Little Simz, Q-Tip, Royce 5’9 and James’s late father, the legendary Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango.Having made his name as a hip-hop and pop producer in the US, placing tracks with P Diddy and Snoop Dogg and working closely with Ja Rule, James returned to his French homeland in 2012, only to learn from his mother that Dibango was his real biological father.Meeting Dibango for the first time shifted his musical perspective dramatically, and he began reinventing and modernising African culture on singles such as 2018’s ‘Kwele’, a collaboration with his father, and 2019’s ‘New Breed’.The will.i.am collaboration was the result of four years of James trying to forge links with the Black Eyed Peas lynchpin. “I loved his tone and I always thought that he was truly ahead of his time when it comes to finding new flows, trying to make fusion out of different genres of music,” James told NME. “I was trying to work with him because I knew that African fusion I was trying to do would speak to him.”Signing to Polydor France, James was finally able to get his music to will.i.am. “He loved it right away,” he said. “I was just asking for, like, a verse…He made a verse, he made a bridge, he worked on the outro, he sent it to me and I was like ‘whoa’.“I was blown away by the direction.

He understood completely where I was trying to take that record. But then he was like, ‘Hold on, I’m not finished, I really want to add some.