Preach Pillow!—Someone Please Tell Pharrell Williams That Bling is D*E*A*D

In my reccuring segment, "High Times, Hard Times: The Year 2003," I attempt to unpack the inherent contradictions between cultural and political events/persuasions within that mini-epoch. I also present the marked differences between our current tastes and those of that far more Baroque season (a mere five years ago!). In 2003, NOBODY could touch Pharrell Williams. He was a prophet of the sound (that sounded 'up with people,' but was slyly, coldly 'up with things' instead), aesthetics, values, and language of that moment (and the producer, along with Chad Hugo—second half of the Neptunes, of seemingly every major hip-hop and pop hit of that and several previous and subsequent years). That music is meaningful to me; they are the sum of my adolesence, many of the songs I danced to, drove to, songs that connected me to people and served as soundtrack. But, when I glance backward, it is not just the materialism that I find cloying. The songs are wildly, blissfully ignorant and free—there is no pain felt in the three minutes of a Neptunes track, definitively youthful, a perfect sound for teenagers (and their emulators); but really, who can claim that youth is painless? They are a bastardization, a sugary extract, a filmic youth, an utterly confusing sound for actual youth, a devastating distraction.

I harp on '2003'—it's a number that is meaningful to me (I graduated from high school that year), but the shift from past to present has been slower than I imply. Williams was still very relevant in 2004 and 2005, when I found out a friend had dated him and was very impressed. I will always listen to his music, that which he produced and sang (such an incredible catalogue), but I cannot say that I like or respect him anymore, or that I think of him as clever or culturally attuned enough to make such work again. He is money-blind. He wears fist-sized diamonds in his ears. He wears his Ferrari keys on his wallet chain. He runs a clothing company called "Billionaire Boys Club" (sort of unironically). He carries LV luggage or (worse yet) ice-cream-colored, extra-large, rare-skinned Birkin bags about town. This baggage cannot contain his ego, as evidenced by Pillow's earlier post. In this fast-changing, fast-sobering world, crumbling economy, (as ever) devastated eco-system, in this moment of folks finally waking from their sugar-and-SUV-induced comas, one thing is certain: BLING IS DEAD. Gross consumption is simply gross, and Pharrell Williams has not received the message.