A 2005 Pop-Rap Curiosity Just Entered YouTube’s Billion-View Club
Hooray-Huzzah and bravissima! Welcome to the club, gal. The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” has officially surpassed one billion YouTube views, giving one of the most gloriously unavoidable songs of the 2000s another milestone to place beside all that junk inside its trunk.
The achievement makes “My Humps” the group’s third music video to enter YouTube’s Billion Views Club, following “Where Is the Love?” and “RITMO,” their collaboration with J Balvin for the Bad Boys for Life soundtrack.
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Return To The Monkey Business Era
Revisit the Black Eyed Peas’ official world, the album that gave us “My Humps” and more music from their generation-defining run.
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Thee Song Was Built To Be Impossible To Ignore
Released from the Black Eyed Peas’ fourth studio album, Monkey Business, the 2005 single arrived during the group’s Fergie-powered pop takeover and quickly became their second song to reach the top three in the United States.
The record was co-written by will.i.am and David Payton, with its central musical idea drawing from Sexual Harrassment’s 1982 track “I Need a Freak.” The production turns that foundation into something shinier, stranger and built for maximum repetition.
Then there is Fergie’s lead vocal, delivering every line with the exact combination of camp, confidence and straight-faced commitment required to make the entire spectacle work. The song does not ask permission to become lodged in your brain. It simply moves in.
My Humps Nearly Belonged To The Pussycat Dolls
Before it became a Black Eyed Peas signature, will.i.am originally wrote “My Humps” with the Pussycat Dolls in mind. He ultimately changed course, kept the song for his own group and gave the Dolls “Beep” instead.
That decision changed both groups’ catalogs. “Beep” became its own Pussycat Dolls hit, while “My Humps” gave Fergie one of the most recognizable vocal showcases of the entire Monkey Business cycle.
It also gave the music video a very specific assignment: sell the attitude, the fashion, the choreography and the song’s knowingly ridiculous luxury fantasy without blinking. The visual did exactly that, later winning an MTV Video Music Award, while the track itself earned a Grammy Award.
Twenty-One Years Later, The Humps Are Still Humping
Part of the video’s endurance comes from how completely it captures its moment. The styling, editing, choreography and gleaming mid-2000s excess are not merely nostalgic now—they are a time capsule from an era when a pop-rap single could be bizarre, instantly quotable and played absolutely everywhere.
One billion views later, the verdict is in: people are still watching, still quoting it and still returning to a song that critics could never fully kill because the public had already decided it was too much fun to abandon.
Watch The Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps Music Video
Return to the Fergie-fronted Monkey Business visual that has now officially joined YouTube’s Billion Views Club.
Source: ABC Audio, Universal Music and MusicBrainz.
