The best wedding songs always feel like they’ve grown into that role after years of slowly being ingrained in pop culture “Happy” came out of the womb tailor-made for weddings. It’s earnest, it’s retro, it asks you to clap along. Especially considering the rise of the pop-by-committee approach that’s favored by everyone from Kanye West to Ed Sheeran, that’s no small feat.Īnd yet, “Happy” feels like an insignificant blip, the lowest common denominator of Pharrell’s career. Also worth noting: thus far, “Happy” is the only #1 single of the 2010s to be performed, written, and produced by one person. Not only was it relegated to the soundtrack of a children’s movie, but it was originally intended for Cee Lo Green, and is far and away Pharrell’s biggest hit as a solo artist. “Happy,” the Despicable Me 2 cut that I alluded to earlier, was the last of those #1 hits, and the most unlikely. Between 2013 and ’14, Pharrell spent 22 weeks - almost half a year - on top of the BIllboard 100.
Then 2013 hit and Pharrell ascended to another echelon of stardom, thanks to a #2 single and two #1s. Pharrell – “Happy” (#1, 2014)Īs the Neptunes’ hot streak fizzled out in the late 2000s, Hugo and Williams continued to produce as separate entities, with Pharrell’s clients increasingly high-profile and Chad’s more often in the realm of Kenna and Stalley. Here are all of them, listed with the date and position of their Hot 100 peak, ranked from worst to best. Over that time, Skateboard P has produced, rapped, and/or sung on a whopping 18 Top 10 hits by everyone from *NSYNC to Daft Punk. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of “Lookin’ At Me,” we’re paying tribute to two decades of Pharrell’s pop dominance. But Pharrell, to borrow a phrase from Rich Homie Quan, has never stopped going in. While he’s busy making hits with modern stars like Migos, ensuing generations periodically play around with the iconic sound he and Hugo rode to the top at the start of the millenium - most recently, SoundCloud rap standout Rico Nasty flipped the Neptunes’ “Superthug” beat into something astonishingly fresh.Ĭhad Hugo’s trajectory deserves shine of its own - shout-out his little-known past as a techno producer and saxophone wiz (that’s him blasting away on Jay-Z’s “The City Is Mine”) - but most of his work in the past decade has been relegated to N.E.R.D’s comeback album, Snoop Dogg’s Bush, and Justin Timberlake’s Man Of The Woods. For years now, the more vocal, visible, and enduring half of the Neptunes has occupied an enviably multi-layered space in pop culture. Producing for Jay-Z and Beyoncé seems to come as easily to him as producing for Lil Uzi Vert, flipping a Despicable Me 2 soundtrack cut into a #1 single as easily as securing half of the real estate on Ariana Grande’s upcoming album. Today, we all know Pharrell as the ageless synesthete that somehow fits into a million pop and hip hop boxes at once. Five years later, at the end of 2003, they’d have ten more under their belts. The single marked the first Top 10 hit produced by young Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo.
But the irony of “Lookin’ At Me” and its chart success was its Trojan Horse-style smuggling of the Neptunes, a production duo that went on to steal a good deal of that airplay away from Puffy, into the mainstream. The behemoth that New York hip hop had become would soon devour itself and leave a vacuum in the pop-rap lane. In that sense, “Lookin’ At Me” represented the old guard. After the considerable waves Harlem World’s funky “Feel So Good” and steamy “What You Want” made on the radio in late ’97 into early ’98, “Lookin’ At Me” was a very safe bet for pop success.
Label boss Puff Daddy was in his opulent, shiny-suited prime, and Bad Boy was, for the moment, too big to fail. Twenty years ago this past weekend - on Jsomething very predictable happened on the Billboard Hot 100: Mase’s “Lookin’ At Me” became the third consecutive single from his Grammy-nominated, multi-Platinum album Harlem World to break into the chart’s top 10.
0 kommentar(er)
