The Black Eyed Peas

Since their promising 1998 debut, Behind the Front, the Black Eyed Peas have become the group you love to hate, an unabashedly pop act who would have earned the epithet "sellout" if everyone else wasn't selling out too. Monkey Business is shallow and corny, an overproduced and derivative simulacrum of hip-hop in the post-Coolio era. If most of the album -- particularly "My Humps," with Fergie's icky display of her "lady lumps" -- isn't very sophisticated, at least BEP bring together Q-Tip, John Legend, and Cee-Lo for "Like That," a charming roundelay that hearkens back to the precocious innocence of hip-hop culture in ways the rest of this disc does not.