Imma Be
"Imma Be" is a song by the American group the Black Eyed Peas from their fifth studio album The E.N.D. (2009). The song's title is a slang expression, meaning "I am going to be" or "I will be". Initially released as a promotional single, the song went on to receive a full release as the fourth single from The E.N.D. on January 12, 2010, by Interscope Records.
"Imma Be"
January 12, 2010
- 4:16 (album version)
- 3:53 (radio edit)
- The Black Eyed Peas
- Keith Harris
- Thomas Brenneck
- Michael Deller
- Daniel Foder
- Jared Tankel
- will.i.am
- Keith Harris
A commercial success, "Imma Be" became the third single from The E.N.D. to reach number-one on the US Billboard Hot 100. Critical reception to the song was generally mixed. The accompanying music video for the song was filmed back-to-back as a ten-minute video, titled "Imma Be Rocking That Body", with "Rock That Body". The song was part of the soundtrack of the film The Other Guys (2010) and was used in the bar scene,[1] and appeared in the film The Hangover Part II (2011).
Critical reception[edit]
Critical response to the song was generally mixed. Eric Henderson from Slant Magazine stated that in the song, "halfway through, the pulse gets an upgrade, the tempo hustles up to a strut, the rudimentary synth hits explode into a chunky-funky rush, and before you know it, will.i.am has transformed a deliberately lazy self-parody into a heated club-floor burner. He added: "The dialectic without conversation within "Imma Be" is replayed ad nauseam throughout the album's entire bloated running time".[2] PopMatters gave the song a positive review: "Highlights of the album include 'Imma be', which despite the repetition of the title no less than 105 times...takes a really interesting path from hip-hop attitude to club hit to jazz romp that holds up well to repeated listens".[3] Vibe Magazine said that "Imma Be is the 2008 version of 'My Humps'".[4] Billboard said "The group sounds as unabashedly confident as ever here.....A brazen horn section and smooth keyboards cruise along until the song's sudden transition, when the beat switches from a snap music-meets-Neptunes stomp to a funk-house glide, meshing with a seemingly endless vocal loop of 'Imma be' to form a pounding, assertive club thumper. Given the success of its predecessors, 'Imma Be', while inherently gimmicky, should be sticking around for a long time".[5]
Chart performance[edit]
Prior to The E.N.D.'s release, "Imma Be" was released as a worldwide promotional single and peaked at number 50 in the United States, based on downloads alone. It was later released as the fourth single from the album in the U.S. and became the group's third number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending March 6, 2010 and halted the nine-week run of Kesha's "Tik Tok". It was the group's third number one from The E.N.D., following their first two number ones, "Boom Boom Pow" and "I Gotta Feeling", as well as their fourth consecutive top ten from the album. With the single reaching number one, the Black Eyed Peas became the first group or duo to place three number ones on the Hot 100 from one album since the Wilson Phillips's debut album, Wilson Phillips, in 1990–1991.[6] This placed the Black Eyed Peas adjoined with Usher's 2004 Confessions album to have their singles from the same album spend the most weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, at 28 weeks, only beaten by Drake's Scorpion, (2018) whose singles spent 29 collective weeks at number one. "Imma Be" reached the top ten on the Canadian Hot 100 due to a significant increase in digital downloads following a performance of "Imma Be" at the 52nd Grammy Awards.[7]