It is the second longest-running single to stay atop the chart in 2009, beaten only by their own "I Gotta Feeling", which held the top spot for 14 consecutive weeks.

[3] It opens with will.i.am meditating on and affirming a new, progressive sound for the group: "I got that rock-and-roll, that future flow".

will.i.am stated on Merrick and Rosso that the song was heavily influenced by the electro sounds he heard in the nightclubs in Sydney during the filming of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and his visit to Australia.

It was scheduled to be released in the UK on May 25, 2009, however due to three alternative versions of the song entering the UK iTunes Top 50 songs, the Black Eyed Peas version was released two weeks early, on Sunday, May 10.

One of their full performances took place at the American Idol Finale of 2009, during which the Top 13 girls sang "Glamorous", and then Fergie came out and sang a small part of "Big Girls Don't Cry", eventually switching to "Boom Boom Pow".

These remixes credit recording to Pardraic Kerin and mixing to Dylan "3-D" Dresdow.

A remix by DJ Ammo and A Poet Named Life is played in the ending credits of the 2009 Summer blockbuster film G.I.

At the 2009 American Music Awards, the guitar riff from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana was played after the performance of this song.

On the fourth season of America's Best Dance Crew, a District 78 remix of the song was used for the sudden death challenge on the first episode, in the dance-off between Beat Ya Feet Kings, Southern Movement, and Fr3sh.

In 2009, Jeffree Star created a remix with more explicit lyrics, that was originally available as a free download.

[12] Nick Levine from Digital Spy gave "Boom Boom Pow" four out of five stars, saying that "it's a fairly ridiculous robopop stomper featuring no real chorus, 808s & Heartbreak-style beats, lashings of Auto-Tune, techno synths that arrive half-way through and this vintage diss from Fergie: 'I'm so 3008, you're so 2000 and late.'

As of October 2015, the song has sold 6.9 million downloads in the US[23] and was certified 4× Platinum by the RIAA.

[24] The song debuted at number 71 on the Billboard Hot 100 after garnering heavy airplay.

The single sold 465,000 downloads in its first week of digital release, the third-largest number of download sales in a single week overall, and the largest single-week and debut-download totals by a group in the history of digital-download sales tracking, reaching number one on the U.S.

This subsequently marks the first time a song has had two separate runs at the summit of the chart since Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" in July 2006.

Fergie had stated at an interview on The Insider that the music video would be shooting the week of March 8, 2009.

[32] In an interview to MTV, it was said that "... the concept of the video is the Peas' birth into the digital afterlife," Fergie said.

"So the transformation is us going into a sort of birth or cocoon and coming out the other end as forms of energy.

This concept was based in a line of the song, in which singer Fergie states "I'm so 3008 / You so 2000 and late".

The video starts with Taboo flicking through pictures on a HP TouchSmart, he selects the image of a mushroom cloud.

While this is happening, dancers are seen in striped zentai suits, dancing to the song, and negative images are turned into positive images; for instance, the explosion cloud turns into a tree swing, the grenade into a microphone, a gun into a trumpet and a nuclear waste barrel played as a drum.

As of December 2023, the music video of the song scored over 472 million views on YouTube.

In January 2010, Chicago artist Ebony Latrice Batts, better known by her stage name Phoenix Phenom, alleged the song is simply a copy of her track, "Boom Dynamite" (written by Manfred Mohr).