Kitty Empire 

Pharrell Williams review – dazzlingly executed songcraft

The late-period rebirth of the former Neptune, NERD and super-producer Pharrell is resplendent, writes Kitty Empire
  
  


There are no second acts in American lives, wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. Singer, songwriter, producer and hat-wearer Pharrell Williams – now 44, and two years into a second imperial phase – pretty much reduces that old epigram to kindling. Small children the world over now try to ape his little dance moves, thanks to the effervescent Happy, officially the most downloaded song in UK history. Their parents, meanwhile, will fondly remember Williams’s earlier winning streak a pop generation ago, when he and Chad Hugo’s sound atelier under the name the Neptunes helped make stars of Britney Spears (key track: I’m A Slave 4 U), Justin Timberlake (key track: all of Justified and Jay) Z (key track: I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me).

On stage at the iTunes festival, wearing an electric blue hat and a Sex Pistols T-shirt, flanked by two backing vocalists and a dynamic four-piece band who can play just about anything, Williams flicks insouciantly through his CV for an hour and a bit. The cameras lap up his every half-smile for the online broadcast. (If you’re quick, the whole show might still be up on iTunes.) Williams himself is an equal opportunities employer, having hired his six dancers from a rainbow of ethnicities – a theme echoed on his own recent solo album, GIRL, which provides the night’s less immediately famous cuts. If there is one bone to pick with his performance, it’s the way Williams lovingly praises Apple every few minutes. Other than that, all is urban pop perfection. It’s a fabulous doorstop of a thing, Williams’s CV, chock-full of hits and some misses, most of them sublime. They are delivered by a man whose charms remain somehow undimmed, even though he co-wrote Blurred Lines for Robin Thicke, one of the more salacious of sexist hits in recent memory. It gets a play tonight.

For starters, though, there is Lose Yourself to Dance, that other song Williams co-authored on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album. It’s about the ecstatic loss of control. It’s delivered with the precision of a body-popper. It features Pharrell’s deathless falsetto, and it’s wonderful.

For pudding, there’s Happy, a still-inescapable hit that doesn’t get noisome, no matter how often you’re force-fed it while on hold to the gas company. It comes with ejaculating confetti cannons, and the feeling that all might just be all right with the world, if only for a few minutes of dazzlingly executed songcraft.

Mid-set, in among the slew of hits Williams rented out to other people, there’s an almost forgotten blast from the past – Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl, effectively a bling cheerleading chant with attitude. It, too, is amazing. Gossip has it that Stefani is working with Pharrell on her comeback. Climbing up the chart positions, Beautiful – technically a Snoop Dogg single from 2003 – removes the drawling rapper from the equation tonight, and still ends up with an edit that makes everyone swoon.

So spectacular is this run of songs – from the wolfish Like I Love You (Timberlake) to the breathtaking minimalism of Drop it Like it’s Hot (Dogg) – that it’s hard to remember that there was ever a lull in Pharrell’s CV.

Alongside the Neptunes, Williams had a band, NERD, with Hugo and Shay Hayley. Shay is along for a handful of their old songs such as Rockstar, which serves to underline how incredibly unterrible the corners of his back catalogue are. (“Giants don’t die, they sleep,” Pharrell says of NERD, which could mean something is in the offing.) His debut solo single under his own name, 2003’s Frontin’, feels as fresh as a daisy.

After producing Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury, a hip-hop album of chilling sonic minimalism in 2006, however, Williams’s hit rate effectively plateaued. Sure, there were tracks on Madonna and Britney albums, for Beyoncé, Shakira and J-Lo, but nothing from that period particularly dynamited the pop landscape as so many of his works had before.

Then, suddenly, Pharrell’s fortunes jackknifed around 2012. Overnight, it seemed, he was everywhere – fronting Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, one of the biggest hits of 2013, the penultimate bout of pleasure tonight. Then came Happy, and transgenerational fame, a hit that could have skewed Williams away from the raunchier end of his oeuvre. Not a bit of it. He co-wrote on two songs on Miley Cyrus’s album, Bangerz. Major Lazer’s Aerosol Can, released this year, featured Pharrell rapping a paean to graffiti, drug-taking, high-end labels and Mario Kart. It sounds great. “My dick like a table you can place food on,” it goes at one point.

He’s a dirty dog – at least, according to the NERD song, Lapdance. But by the end, Pharrell is warming to his more feelgood theme. “Is there any room in this building for fear?” he demands like a motivational speaker, as the cue for Happy. Afterwards, Pharrell hands his microphone to a stagehand. He returns for a little dance with the rest of his troupe, unthreatening and joyous, one that ends in a group hug. You know it’s choreographed, but it’s still heartwarming.

 

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