Keep It on the PositiveBy Kam Williams
Jaime Gomez, aka Taboo, is a member of the Black Eyed Peas, the hip-hop quartet which just performed earlier this month during halftime at this year’s Super Bowl. Despite presently appreciating the group’s stratospheric perch atop the music industry, it wasn’t very long ago that this once-reckless rap star came perilously close to blowing it all. In his heartfelt autobiography, Fallin’ Up: My Story, Taboo recounts in entertaining fashion how a skinny, half-Chicano/half-Native-American kid raised by his grandmother in the modest Dog Town section of Los Angeles managed to overcome such humble origins and emerge a revered one-name icon with adoring fans the world over. However, part of what makes his rags-to-riches tale unique is the fact well after he was already famous a substance abuse problem almost cost him his career. Taboo hit rock bottom after being arrested on March 27th of 2007 for rear-ending another driver with his Range Rover while under the influence of a drug cocktail. When he came out of his stupor behind bars hours later, he didn’t know where he was and couldn’t remember what had transpired. But after the cops helped fill in the blanks, he felt so humiliated and disgusted with himself that he says he wanted “to pull off my head and throw it against the wall.”
He credits the spirit of his late grandmother with putting him on the road to redemption at that juncture, a path which would lead to sobriety, reconciliation with his son, Josh, marriage to the love of his life, Jaymie, and then the birth of another son, Jalen. His checkered past fading away in his rearview mirror, this moving memoir reveals the more mature Taboo to be a well-grounded superstar with both his feet now firmly planted on the ground. Fallin’ Up: My Story
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Lloyd Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S. and Canada. He is a member of the African-American Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee, and Rotten Tomatoes. In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
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