![]() It’s as if G I R L is implanted with an auto-destruct device that instantly eradicates the record from your brain the moment it runs out of quick-release pleasure tablets to administer. Then you might suddenly feel like never putting it on again. The rest of G I R L is fine until the exact moment you’ve heard it one too many times. The default adjective for G I R L is “likable,” which I won’t dispute even though (1) I didn’t like it at first, and (2) I still only really like three songs: “Hunter,” because it sounds like the perfect throwback pop-funk single I want to believe Prince can still write and wish he just would already “Come Get It Bae,” because it has the album’s best beat, and creating the best beats remains Williams’s highest calling and “It Girl,” because Michael Jackson is dead, and this is the closest we’ll get to a great new Michael Jackson song in 2014. (I’m betting on this occurring two weeks from now.) Only after constant overexposure from the radio, TV commercials, and department-store PA systems will despising “Happy” not only seem appropriate but virtuous. Musically and lyrically (“Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth,” Williams implores, to the objection of no one but cave-dwelling sociopaths), “Happy” is so pure and effervescent that criticizing it feels like a hate crime. Just as he did with “Blurred Lines,” Williams raids Marvin Gaye’s back catalogue for “Happy,” though the song is ultimately similar to ’60s classics like “Ain’t That Peculiar” and “Baby Don’t Do It” mainly in spirit rather than design. The message is obvious: This song is for everyone. Images of the frightfully youthful 40-year-old Williams are intercut with clips of celebrities and regular folks dancing (sometimes well but mostly not) to the song’s handclap-happy rhythm. 1 song in the country and G I R L’s signature track, Williams has embraced this without reservation. Judging by the video for the single-mindedly upbeat “Happy,” currently the no. “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines” didn’t just put Williams in the middle of the road, they made him the very pavement of which that road is constructed. It is good-time, broad-minded, cross-generational dance music influenced by only the most obvious and widely accepted “party” touchstones: Motown, Off the Wall–era Michael Jackson, ’80s Prince, Williams’s own early ’00s records with Justin Timberlake, and of course Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the two inescapable 2013 hits that Williams cowrote. This is because, while Mind was pitched to a contemporary rap audience, G I R L is very much a wedding reception record. Instead, he sings in his distinctive, quasi-competent (though greatly improved) ’70s soul-guy falsetto. Williams does not rap on G I R L as he (mostly) did on Mind. Pharrell Williams apparently (now) sees it as Pharrell Williams’s mission to create the coolest uncool music on the planet. But after listening to Williams’s newly released sophomore solo effort, G I R L, I think I understand what he is getting at. At least that’s what I thought when I first read the GQ story. Now, you could chalk this up as typical famous-person “my future self is my hero” style self-aggrandizement. The failure of In My Mind “was the universe saying, ‘Look, you have a voice, you have an opportunity. I thought you just did it just to do it,” Williams says. ![]() “I didn’t realize you should have a purpose. Williams seizes upon it when Baron presses him on what his “purpose” was back in the mid-’00s. “I was so under the wrong impression at the time,” Williams says. In the story he attempts to distance himself from Mind’s braggadocio tone. (Jay Z, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Nelly, and Pusha T are among the album’s guest stars.) Williams now dismisses the LP, claiming he “wrote those songs out of ego” and that “there was no purpose” to the project. However, it’s not immediately evident that he’s doing this, because his quotes also happen to make very little sense.īaron talked to Williams about his solo debut, 2006’s In My Mind, a troubled and commercially flaccid nonstarter that in retrospect sounds like Williams’s farewell to hip-hop. ![]() Zach Baron’s recent GQ profile of Pharrell Williams features a passage where the singer-songwriter-producer–tall hat enthusiast articulates his station in life as an artist. ![]()
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