Which is the weird loophole Pharrell exploits for street cred. “Tough guy, not I,” he says over “4th Chamber,” a relentless and paranoid and tough RZA beat. He’s an effete and clumsy loverboy with middle-class backpacker roots, and he’s up-front. He’s also rich, and he loves cataloguing his belongings. He’s interested more in colors, numbers, and all-around stats and less in what it means to own so much: “I ordered the Phantom coupe that was smoke-pipe gray/And the interior was like crack-rock beige/At least that’s what it looked like when it was on that page/I combed the whole brochure but it did not say/Oh well,” he raps over Noriega’s “I’m A G,” a song Pharrell produced. Jewelry is regularly compared to candy, and his Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream clothing lines are prominently advertised in his lyrics. Pharrell’s interest in the drug trade (“Sound Boy”) is in its precision and financing: “Pusha told me you can get a ki for 16.”

Pharrell pulls together his world view in one massive statement at the end of his spot on Lupe’s “Kick, Push” remix: “Hate it or love it, nigga, I Warhol’d the world.” The kinship Pharrell feels with Andy Warhol could be for anything: the simple gesture of flipping the commodification of art into the artification of commodity that Pharrell so deftly does with his insistent raps-as-BBC-adverts; the 15-minutes-of-fame turnovers he’s experienced as the Neptunes sound has become blasé and inevitably his own raps are pushed aside for the next new thing. Says Pharrell, echoing Warhol’s democratic view of the artist, “You be buying my shit and I be rapping to you, but you could do it too, yessir.”

Where Pharrell fails Warhol is, well, on In My Mind. Pharrell’s infatuation with the industrialization of music cripples him when he aims to please his fans — fans who are too savvy to fall for that ruse. On the Prequel mixtape Pharrell poked away at the difficulties of commercial hip-hop, a curious venue where Jay-Z gets called a swaggerjacker for his sampling of lyrics, where lawyers swindle swill for an old funk song nobody would remember had it not been sampled to begin with, where “Pop is dumb” is a self-fulfilling conclusion. But on In My Mind we get Pharrell bragging, “I’m a master, baby, at taking off your bra” — not because he isn’t, but because legally it’s the only thing he’s allowed to be a master of anymore. “You can do it too,” he also says — but who’d want to.

On the Web
Pharrell Williams: //www.pharrellwilliams.com/

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