One of the best things about Saturday Night Live is you have absolutely no idea what the next sketch is going to be about. Sometimes it’s topical, as we saw last night with an Easter Cold Opening that included Dr. Fauci, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and more. Sometimes it’s random like Lizzo playing a flautist who moves it a little more than the conductor wants her to, and sometimes it’s commentary on something that happened a long time ago. Enter the Black Eyed Peas.
The pop-rap act had an incredibly successful run in the aughts with a string of huge hits including “Let’s Get It Started”, “Where Is The Love?”, “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling.” They dominated the radio and were played widely at bars and hotspots, but the lyrics to some of those songs weren’t necessarily the most sophisticated. So, more than a decade later, SNL took aim at some of those rather on the nose phrases. You can check out the sketch below, which features Kenan Thompson, Chris Redd, Cecily Strong and Bowen Yang as the group in question and Lizzo and Aidy Bryant as record executives trying to get them to go deeper…
First of all, let the record show Lizzo is a good actress. She’s obviously done music videos and has acted here or there, including a bit role in the excellent Hustlers, but I was impressed by her work throughout the SNL episode. There were times in which she smiled/ giggled a little, but her lines were mostly delivered with authenticity and conviction, even when she had to get weird. She just jumped in and went for it, which is all you can ever ask of a host without extensive comedy experience. So, cheers for her. I truly hope she’s invited back to host again at some point down the line.
But as for the sketch itself, this is just too much fun, especially for all of us who were high school/ college/ post college aged when Black Eyed Peas were tearing up the radio. There was a several year period where it felt like you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing their music; so, this was a really fun trip down memory lane. I also think this toggled a good line by including pointed jokes at the group’s expense but not going so far where it came off as too mean.
Fans really seemed to enjoy the sketch on social media. There were a lot of tweets about how much people were loving the jokes and how clever a lot of the references were, especially the nods to “Let’s Get It Started” and the song’s original title that certainly does not play today.
SNL will return for additional episodes this season, though the specifics have not been made clear beyond Benedict Cumberbatch returning to take up hosting duties on May 7th with Arcade Fire, which will coincide with the opening of the highly anticipated Doctor Strange 2. Expect to see a terrific episode, as well as plenty of coming speculation about which cast members will stay and which cast members will go after Season 47 concludes.
