Neptunes’ Pharrell Comments On Record Labels, Susan Boyle, Proves That He’s A Genius

I was clearly kidding about Pharrell being a genius.

Actually, I find comments like the ones he’s making to be rather questionable. And he knows it, because if you listen to the sound bite, he makes mention of it being easy to question his motives for saying some of these things. He essentially calls record label prehistoric, and comments on Susan Boyle, saying,

They were tryng to change her look, she should have stayed the way she was, cause it’s no longer intersting. Leave her alone; that’s what engaged everybody. She’s talented. Someone should be signing her right now. It would work. The world would want to hear that. The last 12 to 15 years, this whole aesthetic thing has ruined everything. It’s not about how good your hair grows, or like how strong your cheekbones are, or like how much colagen is in your lips, or if you’ve gotten a boob job. What music was, and what it’s going back to, is how talented is this person?

My thing is, you think someone should sign her. Ok, so sign her! You have a label. You have relationships. You have money. Make it happen.

Ok, so maybe it’s not that easy. But still, it kills me when people who are in a position of influence don’t use that influence for the greater good. Maybe Pharrell doesn’t fall into that category completely, because I do think the guy is a proponent of cultural and musical change. The Neptunes definitely shifted the landscape for urban-driven pop music. And a lot of the skater aesthetics, the European and Japanese fashion, and so on, Pharrell was heavily complicit in that movement. That movement is by and large what youth pop culture is right now, at least in the urban space. So I give Pharrell a lot of credit for doing things differently for arguably most of his career.

Musically though, it’s been a few years since The Neptunes have really gotten behind any talent. Which is what he’s talking about. He’s saying, the aesthetic is over. It’s about how well you can hit this or that note. I agree. It is about talent right now. Because the filters and the companies that owned them, have either totally crumbled to the ground, or been leveraged by other forms of media, replaced by other filters, and just people in general. Those social networks that Pharrell talks about, he’s right, they have found ways to get eyeballs on new forms of music. That said, they’ve also gotten eyes on people like Tila Tequila too. So the aesthetic is not completely gone from people’s consciousness. The “show” part of show business still factors in. Just maybe not as much.

What’s so crazy to me is, I think if Susan Boyle was a hot broad with big tits, blonde hair, and a coke bottle shape, and she sang the same exact song the same exact way, she might not have gotten nearly as much attention. It would just fly under the radar as some other hot chick with a dope voice.

So the aesthetic factor, or lack thereof, works both ways.