Will.I.Am here skats like a jazz singer from the 1920s. Check out a real pro in Ella Fitzgerald (wait for it at 0:50):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbL9vr4Q2LU

While the sentiment is universal, it’s especially descriptive of the “Jazz Age” setting of The Great Gatsby. Specifically for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Lost Generation” of writers, the 1920s were an era of disillusionment (and early 20th century version of today’s YOLO) after the shock of World War I. The dominant response to this disillusionment was indeed to “party” to excess. As Fitzgerald writes in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”:

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

In keeping with the “Jazz Age” setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this line plays on a number of motifs of the era. A speakeasy was a secret location for consuming alcohol—the 20s was also the height of prohibition.

“Easy,” though, further plays on the more updated term “breezy”—to be sexually liberal, or “easy.” Fergie thus modernizes the 1920s flapper character for a new era just as this song updates jazz standards of the time.

The opening horn riff evokes the dominant brass instrumentations of the “Jazz Age” during which The Great Gatsby is set. Fergie’s track here contributes to the soundtrack.

The lyric and the melody here are borrowed appropriately—given the setting of The Great Gatsby—from the “Jazz Age” standard, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” written by Duke Ellington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg

Baz Lurmann nailed this image in the 2013 film version of the novel:

Gatsby and Daisy were lovers before she met Tom, before World War I. Gatsby had been stationed in Louisville before shipping off and their romance began, as Nick relates, with his class safely hidden behind the “invisible cloak of his uniform.” This past history is represented through sepia-toned shots here.

Gatsby’s futile dream is to return to these glory days, despite Daisy’s present with Tom, and the secrets of his own past.

This is the climax of the Plaza Hotel room scene from Chapter VII of The Great Gatsby and of the opening scene of the film trailer. Tom’s racist, elitest rant against Gatsby has finally made the latter lose his composure until he screams and threatens Tom physically.

Even Daisy seems shocked at this uncouth display of emotion from Gatsby, and it is after this scene that it becomes clear she can never run away with him. The security of Tom Buchanan proves a more powerful force than James Gatz’s passion.

Beyonce’s rendering of the second verse of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black.”

Though not a tale about drug or alcohol addiction like the song, The Great Gatsby is the story of the excesses of 1920s America, which were at least in part alcoholic, as the trailer repeatedly emphasizes with oversized wine bottles. The larger addictions of the novel and that era, though, relate to the excesses of wealth that Fitzgerald clearly criticizes in his text.

Moreover, like the protagonist of Winehouse/Beyonce’s song, Gatsby too “goes back to black,” not to addiction, but to the oblivion of death and poverty in America.