Everything will.i.am Touches Wants to Be the Future

will.i.am—lowercase mandatory—has been chasing a second career in consumer electronics with the kind of persistence most musicians save for their music. His i.am+ BUTTONS wireless earphones landed in Berlin this week, celebrated at the Voo Store on Oranienstraße with a guest list that included albino model and actor Shaun Ross and model India Love. Kendall Jenner was apparently invited and didn’t show. These things happen.

What I find genuinely interesting about his tech fixation is that it seems real. He held the title of Director of Creative Innovation at Intel for several years—a role that could easily have been a vanity appointment—and seemed to take it seriously enough to actually show up. The i.am+ line spans smartwatch accessories, headphones, connected devices; it’s not the most coherent product vision in the world, but there’s an earnestness to it that separates it from most celebrity hardware plays, which typically exist to generate press rather than products.

Whether the BUTTONS are worth owning is a separate question. Wireless earphones in 2016 were still negotiating with the problems that Bluetooth always creates—dropouts, battery anxiety, the mild humiliation of watching one fly out of your ear mid-run. will.i.am insisting they also be stylish, colorful, and distinctly his is either a legitimate design sensibility or an excess of confidence. Probably some of both. The Voo Store crowd seemed to be enjoying themselves either way.