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In 1966, the jangle of a 12-string Rickenbacker electric guitar or the resonating overtones of a sitar made clear that today had replaced yesterday. In 1978, a pumping 4/4 beat and squeaky strings watermarked the music. In 1985, a comically large snare drum told the time. What typifies Right Now in 2004 are the sharp beats of three producers from the Virginia Beach area: Timothy (Timbaland) Mosley, 32, and the Neptunes, a k a Pharrell Williams, 30, and Chad Hugo, 29. Turn on any pop radio station in America and you'll hear their work. The song may be nominally pop or R&B, but you'll hear a genetic link to hip-hop. The surface is shiny and the beats are proudly digital, articulated to the point of restlessness. The melodies are flecked with eruptions of the mechanical, as if NASA were hacking the signal. If it's not Timbaland or the Neptunes you're hearing, it's a knockoff.
Timbaland and the Neptunes found success in the late 90's with hip-hop tracks, but they are not strictly hip-hop artists. They use samples and drum machines to make music, but they write songs with bridges and key changes. They are producers who also make records as solo artists and appear in videos. They play instruments when they need to and work in song-based forms like R&B and pop, but they rarely write the bread-and-butter ballads that drive many pop careers. Timbaland is not a trained musician, yet his tracks pulse with complex syncopation and subtle harmonic information. The Neptunes are trained musicians, but some of their best productions are brutal and machinelike.
Rather than specializing in any single part of the songwriting process, the Virginians are creating their own idiosyncratic summations of everything that has worked in the last 20 years of pop. They're harvesters, not crop-burners, and their work is the product of lives lived through digital technology. If you can hear any music you want, all the time, chances are good you'll become an astute judge of what works and what doesn't. Digital technology also enables you to turn what you're hearing in your head into great recordings without waiting for humans, or history, to catch up with you.
After their names weren't submitted for last year's Grammy Awards -- an omission that no one can account for -- the Neptunes have been nominated for Producers of the Year, Nonclassical, this time around, with eight different records cited in the nomination. Timbaland has already won a special Impact Award from the New York branch of the Grammys. He is nominated as a co-writer in the Best Rap Song category for Missy Elliott's ''Work It'' and as one of the producers of her album ''Under Construction'' as well as Justin Timberlake's ''Justified,'' both nominated for Album of the Year. (The Neptunes also produced tracks on ''Justified.'') Tonight's Grammy Awards ceremony will, among other things, christen Virginia Beach as the birthplace of a certain sound, something like Detroit's claim to 60's pop-soul or Seattle's to 90's grunge.
Pop seeks transparency, a language that will read quickly and clearly everywhere. Over the last decade, hip-hop has become that common tongue for global pop, and what we might call Timbatunes are establishing how that language is spoken right now. The collapse of larger categories like pop, hip-hop and R&B is partly a result of their innovations, which are now the default moves for much of pop music. Neptunes and Timbaland tracks fit into D.J. sets alongside German techno, popular Jamaican dancehall and the Asian-British hybrid dance music bhangra. The biggest-selling rock band in America, Linkin Park, uses the kind of sampled beats and keyboards Timbaland and the Neptunes use. At the top of the food chain, the Rolling Stones hired the Neptunes to do a remixed version of ''Sympathy for the Devil.'' Jagger was an early adopter of country rock, disco and rap; his papal nod is, at the very least, an indication that something or someone is not going away.
Vah Beach, as some locals pronounce it, is split in two; a large suburb-filled interior flows out onto a long, thin waterfront. Away from the beach, it could be anywhere in America. The only remarkable feature I came across in the day I spent there was a stream of Navy officers coming and going at a waterfront seafood restaurant. ''There's a large military base in Norfolk,'' Chad Hugo told me. ''My dad was in the Navy. That's what brought him here from the Philippines. Lots of squids here -- that's what we call Navy guys.''
Heading out to the Neptunes' studio near Princess Anne Road, one of Virginia Beach's bigger arteries, you can't really tell which part of town does what. Is this the ''bad'' part of town? The ''good'' part? There are few tall buildings, and no particularly shiny centers of commerce or sin. ''Ain't nothing spectacular about it'' is how Timbaland described Virginia Beach to me. ''Ain't nothing going on out there, really.''
In Hugo's terminology, Virginia Beach is ''sort of suburban-slash-melting-pot-slash-conservative. We're on the northernmost part of the Bible Belt.''
Punk musicians funneled the boredom of suburban living into a potent language of teen frustration, and hip-hop artists from East New York to Compton have used place as a way to discuss disenfranchisement and systematic exclusion. Timbaland and the Neptunes have their own, less aggressive take on place. The space-age keyboards, weird noises and abstract sequences that mark their sound create a vivid fantasy world, a playground free of sticky agendas. Their music is hard but their own lyrics rarely are. In ''Straight Outta Virginia,'' a recent song with the local rapper Magoo, an old friend and collaborator, Timbaland brags about going to a high-school football game.
The rapper and singer Melissa (Missy) Elliott, 32, is another prominent Virginia Beach-area native, and among her many collaborations with Timbaland is the 2002 hit ''Work It'' (which introduced the phrase ''ga-donk ga-donk donk'' into everyday speech). To her, Virginia Beach almost defies description. ''There's nothing in particular there,'' she says. ''We'd sit on the beach, go in different stores. We didn't come from a place like New York or L.A., where there are big events in a club. A lot of music we made was just done in the house, and it kind of circulated through friends on the block, on tapes.''
Set aside their sonic qualities, and you'll find another reason Timbaland and the Neptunes have connected with so many listeners. They are a different generation of hip-hop -- not the pioneers who struck out to settle new lands, but the settlers who bought in and modified what they found. Like many of their listeners, they didn't grow up in cities. ''We're from the suburbs,'' Williams says, ''and the suburbs are pretty much the same everywhere you go, just like the projects are the same everywhere you go.''
Hugo and Williams met at summer camp for gifted kids. ''Pharrell was playing drums, and I was playing tenor saxophone,'' Hugo recalled recently. ''Have you seen that movie 'School of Rock'? That was us, except we played jazz standards like Herbie Hancock's 'Watermelon Man.' ''
In the early 90's, Williams and Hugo started a hip-hop group with a friend of Williams's from junior high school named D.J. Timmy Tim, later known as Timbaland. The group, which also included Magoo, was called Surrounded by Idiots, but they disbanded before recording anything. ''Tim was sick back then,'' Hugo said, which he meant as the highest praise. ''He was doing Anita Baker and Michael Jackson loops.''
Though Timbaland and the Neptunes sometimes sound like a bolt from the blue, their music is rooted in what came before; their sharp-edged funk is drawn from ''new jack swing'' of the 1980's, a more aggressive, almost mechanical form of R&B heard in songs like ''Groove Me,'' by the New York trio Guy. The man responsible for producing Guy and creating this style was Teddy Riley. In the late 1980's, Riley was considering a move out of his native Harlem. ''I came down to Virginia Beach on a day trip with a bunch of my friends from Harlem,'' Riley says. ''We chartered two buses and came down for a picnic. I said, 'If I wanted to move anywhere, it would be here.' It's so calm, the atmosphere. So I moved my whole operation down here in 1990.''
Riley set up his Future Recording Studios near the Princess Anne High School, and then held a talent show there. ''The Neptunes played -- they were a band then,'' Riley recalled when I met him. ''Chad was the D.J., the keyboard player and the saxophone player all at once. It was like R&B meets techno/new wave/hip-hop. It sounds the way they sound now.''
Impressed, Riley invited them to come by the studio. ''Pharrell went in and freestyled for him for like an hour, and then he wrote Teddy's verse on 'Rump Shaker,' '' Hugo says, referring to the 1992 hit by Wreckx-N-Effect. ''That's when we started writing for Teddy.''
Riley liked Williams and Hugo but wasn't quite sure how to use their talents. ''I tried to keep them as busy I could,'' he says. ''I didn't have time to put out a record on them, but I didn't want to disappoint them. I gave them stipends, just to keep them motivated.'' (Riley himself remains active -- he is talking to several major music companies about an executive role.)
According to Hugo, the nascent Neptunes tried their hand at making ''spacey, psychedelic R&B'' but soon gravitated to hip-hop, where there was more popular interest. Finally, in 1998, they hit it with ''Superthug,'' a song they produced for the rapper Noreaga. The beat was news all by itself, clearer and fiercer than anything around it, as if the Neptunes had simply boiled away all the eccentricities in hip-hop and revealed the DNA of rhythm and noise. For months, it was MTV's instrumental music of choice between videos. ''We were trying to blend hip-hop with rock, but we didn't know how to play guitars, so we made that sound on the keyboard,'' Hugo says.
When they first started making records, the Neptunes worked in New York. Now their base is Hovercraft Studios in Virginia Beach, located on a cul-de-sac. An oil painting of the planet Saturn takes up a whole wall. The studio was called Mastersound in the 90's, when Timbaland and the Neptunes sometimes worked simultaneously in the adjacent rooms. ''There was a great moment here,'' Andrew Coleman, the Neptunes' longtime chief engineer, recalled not long ago. ''It was 1999, and Missy and Tim were working on Missy's 'Da Real World.' Chad and Pharrell were working on Kelis, and they were doing 'Caught Out There.' ''
They especially liked the song's chorus, Coleman said. ''Tim and Missy could hear Kelis screaming, 'I hate you so much right now!' They had their ears right up to the door. They loved that song. Tim was like, 'That's crazy.' Then they went right back to work.''
The Neptunes bought Mastersound in 2002. When I visited last fall, a tour bus -- with a huge picture of Williams reclining among several young women painted on the outside -- was parked in front of the nondescript concrete studio. Inside, Hugo played me a track in progress from ''Fly or Die,'' the coming album from N.E.R.D., one of the Neptunes' side projects. The song I heard was ''Don't Worry About It,'' a one-chord vamp based on an organ that wouldn't be out of place on an old reggae record. Williams is screaming ''Ow!'' and ''Baby!'' like James Brown, then crooning ''Don't worry about it'' like a very young Michael Jackson. After two minutes, the song shifts radically into a long bridge, and Williams begins singing ''Ah,'' like the backing vocals from the Beatles' ''Magical Mystery Tour.'' As Williams sings, he quotes the rappers Mobb Deep: ''There's a war going on outside no man is safe from,'' a line from the well-respected 90's single ''Survival of the Fittest.''
What makes the sound new? It shows deep appreciation for 60's rock, but the rhythms are informed by hip-hop. When Williams strolls down Penny Lane, he's got Mobb Deep in his head. Hugo and Williams play well, but not necessarily well enough to play this song top to bottom in one take like studio musicians. ProTools, a program for recording and editing music directly on a computer hard drive, allows them to seamlessly stitch together the best bits they've played and make half-human/half-computer composites that sound as if they've been done by a live band.
''I want my live records to sound like they're programmed and my programmed records to sound like they're live,'' Williams says. ''Once you can label us as something, we want to get away from that. After we did 'Superthug,' everybody started making loud, left-wing, rambunctious records. You have to be brave enough to go: 'O.K. I'm gonna make a quiet record.' ''
That explains how the Neptunes came to work with Babyface, a skilled singer, songwriter and producer who specializes in polished love songs. In need of a fresh sound in 2001, he hired the rising Neptunes to produce a couple of tracks on his album ''Face 2 Face.'' The first single was ''There She Goes,'' a syncopated love song. The big, blocky shuffle is Neptunian, but the gorgeous chord changes in the chorus could have been XTC or another quirky British rock act. Williams sings all over the track, a brave move next to a controlled pro like Babyface. Yet Williams pulled it off.
Whoever the collaborator, the Neptunes have a fairly consistent way of working. ''Usually I start with some chords that move me and then a whole track goes around that,'' Williams says. ''I'll send it to Chad and he'll add a section or a sound.''
Hugo described his role modestly. ''I consider myself a musician for hire,'' he says. ''Pharrell writes all the songs and the ideas. Usually, he puts down a beat and a melody, writes a song, and then I'll fill in the blanks.''
Depending on the artist the Neptunes are producing, Hugo can get more involved. With Kenna Zemedkun, 28, a friend from high school who goes professionally by his first name alone, Hugo produced a juicy, florid album called ''New Sacred Cow,'' which came out last year. Imagine romantic rock bands of the 1980's like the Cure and U2 rewired with bigger beats -- that's the sound. Kenna and Hugo recorded most of the songs together in a rented house in California. Kenna played keyboards and sang, while Hugo played and programmed the rest. ''Chad is a living, breathing chord,'' Kenna says. ''He dreams and breathes in music.''
Complicating matters for the Neptunes these days is that Hugo and Williams are often not in the same place. ''Chad stays at home with his family a lot now, so we e-mail each other beats,'' Williams says. ''I did a lot of songs on my bus this year, when I was on tour with N.E.R.D.'' Williams also frequents studios in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Technology allows them to make music wherever they happen to be and handle many projects simultaneously -- when I saw Williams, he had started work on tracks for Gwen Stefani, the rapper Jadakiss and the pop superstar Beyonce, and he was finishing the Clipse and N.E.R.D. albums. For anyone trying to construct a theory of Virginia Beach, it bears remembering that while the sound may have come from there, it is no longer tied to the place.
It was almost 80 degrees in Aventura, Fla., and Timbaland was working inside the Hit Factory/Criteria Recording, a boxy white building where he spends more than half the year now. He was about to start LL Cool J's new record and would soon be heading to New York to produce an updated version of ''We Are the World,'' the charity single from the 1980's. He had just finished working on new albums by the R&B singer Brandy and the rapper Cee-Lo. ''It's crazy that these two boys from Virginia run the whole of New York,'' Timbaland said, referring to himself and Williams.
As I sat there, Timbaland was remixing ''White Flag'' by Dido, a soft-spoken English singer whose melancholy love songs fall between Sting's romantic odes and contemporary dance music. He was hired to overhaul the song so that it might connect with a different audience than the original did. (Dido herself was not present.) Unlike the Neptunes, Timbaland uses live instruments only occasionally. The body of his work is built from keyboard sounds and short samples, little crumbs of songs that only music nerds would recognize. Timbaland rarely borrows another song's melody or structure; instead he finds neglected moments of noise and excitement that fit into his larger web of keyboards. It's the way hip-hop producers often approach making beats and loops, but Timbaland does it to create entire pop songs.
The engineer, Demacio Castellon, played back ''White Flag'' at eye-wobbling volume. Timbaland is not tall, but he cast a large shadow in his Yankees jersey, black jeans and shower slippers worn over white tube socks. The Neptunes could be from anywhere in the country, but Timbaland reads quickly as Southern. He moves deliberately, and his speaking voice has a rich twang. Timbaland piles up sentence fragments quickly, reorganizing his thoughts as he goes. If there were a part for a grouchy, patriarchal bear in a Disney movie, Timbaland would be perfect. We met at 10 p.m., some eight hours after our scheduled appointment. Timbaland never mentioned it.
Most of Dido's original recording had been discarded, except for the vocal and string arrangement. Timbaland had filled the space around her voice with a huge drum beat and a simple bass line. As the song repeated, he quickly added and removed new elements. Timbaland tried each idea for a few minutes and then dialed up a new sound as if he was distracted, or simply testing his gear.
On Dido's album of the same name, ''White Flag'' is a strong song, but the lyric's elegant negotiation between guilt and surrender is neutered by the polite production. Timbaland's version turns the whine into a genuine ache. Isolated, Dido's voice is gorgeous, roughed-up but sweet: ''There will be no white flag above my door/I'm in love and always will be.'' Timbaland may have been hired simply to repackage Dido's music, but the song has been served. A man who has never studied an instrument is being paid many thousands of dollars to improve on the work of a busload of professional musicians. Pop opens many doors and this is one: a great record can knock any paradigm out of shape, if only for three minutes.
Timbaland has been doing the same thing for more than a decade now. Missy Elliott explained to me how the connections got made. ''The first time we met, he was doing something with his turntables, saying he did tracks,'' Elliott recalled. ''He started playing the tracks, I started singing -- he had a little microphone. I started writing, and I wrote my first record with Timbaland. It seemed like every day we'd end up over at his house.''
Elliott became part of an R&B group called Sista, and she started working closely with Timbaland. Before long, around 1991, they signed with DeVante Swing, a member of the popular R&B group Jodeci who also had his own production company.
Over the next couple of years, Swing transplanted the Virginians to New Jersey and then Baltimore to perfect their craft. Working with Swing and Timbaland, Elliott's group Sista made its debut album, ''4 All Da Sistas Around Da World.'' Sista released a single, ''Brand New,'' in 1994, but the album was distributed only in Europe. ''I was so bummed,'' Elliott says. ''I told everyone we had an album coming out, and it never did.'' But no one gave up. Swing moved the Virginians once again, this time to Rochester for nearly two years, to work some more. This is where the engineer and producer Jimmy Douglass met Timbaland. Douglass is a veteran of the music wars, an engineer and producer who has worked with the Rolling Stones, Hall and Oates and Gang of Four. ''It was a smart setup,'' Douglass says. ''DeVante had everybody working, writing songs and producing. A bunch of them lived in lofts together. Missy was staying with members of this R&B group Sugah, this group with Tweet. Ginuwine and Magoo lived upstairs and Tim lived in the basement of the studio.'' According to Timbaland: ''DeVante and Jodeci, that was my first thing. Being around them and learning from them was good.''
Elliott was the first to leave the Rochester camp, and Timbaland soon followed. The two started shopping their talents as songwriters and producers. Craig Kallman, co-president of Atlantic Records, was searching for people to produce a 17-year-old singer. ''We had signed Aaliyah and were looking for someone to produce her new album,'' Kallman says. ''Timbaland played me seven or eight beats on my couch. Each one sounded like a hit track.''
Elliott and Timbaland teamed up with Aaliyah to write and produce most of her second album, ''One in a Million.'' The first single was ''If Your Girl Only Knew,'' a sinuous tune easily mistaken for a Prince song. The next single, ''One in a Million,'' gave a taste of Timbaland's deep swing. The vocal harmonies are lush and unusual, and the beat punctures any moves toward conformity. The stuttering rhythm started a trend. Around the same time, Timbaland broke into the Top 10 for the first time with Ginuwine's ''Pony,'' an even more radical piece of sound. It's a sex tune, plain and simple (''My saddle's waiting, come and jump on it'') but the track undoes the smooth operating. A vocal sample -- someone saying a word that sounds like ''Bow!'' -- clumps down the stairs slowly. Huge blank spaces surround the voice and bass line. It's a sound that is both familiar and odd, like Dickens translated into Japanese and then back into English.
After ''Pony,'' Timbaland went on a superindustrious roll. Missy became the public ambassador for Timbaland's unadulterated style while Aaliyah became the blue-chip version, sleek and quiet. (Aaliyah was killed in a 2001 plane crash, and Elliott and Timbaland continue to eulogize her in song.) Timbaland struck up a relationship with the popular rapper Jay-Z, and the two subsequently made some of their best work together, including the 2000 Top 20 hit ''Big Pimpin'.''
''That's one of my biggest classics,'' Timbaland told me as we sat and talked in the studio. ''That record didn't sound like nothing else on the radio. I made about seven classics that you can still play to this day and still rock in the club. And I tell Pharrell, 'When you do that, that's when you get your veteran stripes.' I think he's got about three -- that Nelly song, ''Hot in Herre,'' Mystikal's ''Shake It Fast'' and Jay-Z's ''Give It to Me.'' I'm not talking about records that are hits, but records that still get played for years and years,'' Timbaland continued. ''I like to make it complex because that way, it stays around longer, and you can always listen to it. 'Are You That Somebody?' is still playing, 'Try Again' is still playing. Gotdang 'Cry Me a River' is phenomenal, wipes 'em out. 'Pony' I still hear, 'One in a Million' I still hear; they play it all day down here on the radio, all day radio airplay, 'Get Ur Freak On,' 'I Can't Stand the Rain,' they play 'Love 2 Love U,' that's the all-time classic. I could start naming, boy. I got title belts, you understand?''
Timbaland acknowledged his old bandmate and competitor with complicated praise. ''I love everything Pharrell does,'' he said. ''I like 'Clones' '' -- the album the Neptunes released last year under their own name -- ''but I did hear comments, people saying it's whack. I like that record no matter what, because I know all the hard work he put behind it.''
Timbaland professed to have a simple, unassailable philosophy. ''My thing is 'Who sold the most records?' '' he said. ''That's my friendly competition.'' And who sold the most records? ''Me. That's without a doubt. If you look at the charts, one year, I broke three artists, back to back, and they all sold at least 900,000 copies. Petey Pablo sold 900,000, 'Raise Up' was an anthem, and they still play it in the armies and over in Kuwait.''
When I told him Timbaland's theories, Williams shook his head vigorously. ''No way,'' he said. ''That's cancerous to my spirit. Knowing how many times a song got played on the radio? No. I'd much rather be in the studio, listening to a Burt Bacharach record, listening to chord progressions, studying them and teaching myself to go somewhere else. I want to pull energy from other worlds into my music. Life, love, science, religion, history, that's what I want to pull into my music. Let's face it -- you make a certain amount of money, and after that, no matter how much money you make, it all feels the same. The only real true joy that is new to me every day is discovering music. I don't know how Tim thinks about sales and then goes and makes a beat. That ain't my world. Tim's a genius, though.''
Timbaland's hyperbole is distracting, but his overall point isn't wrong. In more than eight years of making big-time music, he has lapped the field many times over. A few of his stray songs on soundtracks are better than other producers' entire oeuvres -- like the Lil' Kim song ''Money Talks'' from the 1997 soundtrack of the same name. The box-set format, for once, would be entirely appropriate to represent Timbaland.
He got to this point by working fast and furiously. ''Tim will start work for the day, and when he wraps up, at least two songs are mostly done,'' Douglass says. ''Very few songs take more than two days. 'Are You That Somebody?' was written, recorded and mixed in eight hours. Tim came up with the beat, gave it to Static'' -- the nickname for the collaborator Steve Garrett, who sometimes writes lyrics for Tim -- ''and then Aaliyah came in. And then it was done.''
''Are You That Somebody?'' captured the radio in 1998 and never let go. The song is full of huge stops and an uninvited baby, crying. The melody hugs to the bass line and the whole thing lurches about in a way that suggests some unspoken law of pop music is being broken.
It's also a good case study of who does what in this mode of production. Timbaland created what he'd call ''the beat,'' though it is made of more than rhythmic patterns and drum sounds. Timbaland's bass line and keyboards determine the key and the rhythmic inclinations of the tune, while Static's nimble lyrics and melody hew to Timbaland's grid. Aaliyah's soft-edged voice works within this structure to lighten the load and make it pop music.
The words to describe this process are hard to pin down, even when you're sitting in the studio with the creators. Songs are generally called ''records,'' but ''song'' is also used to mean the vocals and lyrics, and people like Static are often called ''songwriters,'' though they're working inside the parameters of the beat. This is how Timbaland described his process to me: ''I'm a one-man show. When I do a song, half the time I do a song, I write it myself or write the hook. Of course, I'm gonna work with Missy, because that's what we do, we tag-team. I use Static and another guy named Walter Millsap. He's a new writer; he wrote a lot of Brandy's stuff.''
Whatever his methods, the pace and volume of Timbaland's work over the last several years have taken their toll. He repeatedly voiced to me a frustration with pop music, particularly the hip-hop end of it. ''It's time for me to retire, because it ain't the same,'' he said. ''Music's almost becoming like damn near toys and cars. It's too easy. That's why I want to go over there to that rock side, but it ain't popping like it used to.''
I asked him what he likes.
'' 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' he quickly answered. ''I was at the Trump in New York, and my assistant Mike was cutting my hair. I was watching 'O Brother.' I was laughing my butt off. And the song came on -- 'I am a man of constant sorrow . . . ' -- and I was like, 'This song is hot.' Next thing you know, I bought the CD and I would bump it in my car just the way it was. People would look at me like, This dude gotta be crazy. No, I wasn't, because this record gonna sell about 10 million. And what happened? It sold 10 million!'' (It sold 6.6 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.)
''The best music right now is country music,'' he went on. ''The old country music, the old bluegrass stuff -- the lyrics in that stuff are incredible. And the damn melodies? Think about Bonnie Raitt. She's country, right? She made the illest song ever, 'I Can't Make You Love Me.' '' He sang me a line: ''Turn down the lights, turn down the bed/Turn down these voices inside my head.''
Timbaland also thinks Pat Benatar's ''Love Is a Battlefield'' is the ''illest song ever,'' and he adores old hits by Men at Work and the Human League. ''Eighties music is music to me,'' he said. ''Those are records that make you feel good, you know? I'm tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do. Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That's music. Norah Jones is music. I love real music that I can play and never get tired of. The stuff I don't get tired of is the stuff that's musical.''
The day after I met him in the studio, Timbaland flew to Atlanta to appear in the video for Cee-Lo's ''I'll Be Around,'' a song he produced. Our appointment for another interview vaporized, but I saw him again -- on TV, sitting next to Mike Tyson at the World Series. The day after I met Williams, he showed up on BET at an awards show. It would be easy to imagine that Timbaland and the Neptunes really do run pop music through some kind of Masonic brotherhood of funk.
Williams, though, is leery of the hype. ''The Neptunes are not the answer to everything at all,'' he told me. ''Some people treat us like that, and that's wrong. They're just going off of the charts, not the music. They make statements like: 'What's in the water down there? The Neptunes and Timbaland!' We're not Michael Jordan, and we don't think we are. We still look at ourselves as rookies trying to get drafted.''
Timbaland, in his way, agreed. ''I need somebody else to come out of Virginia to really see what it is,'' he said. ''Somebody else with a different sound, somebody else that wasn't affiliated with us, that Pharrell and I didn't even know from Adam and Eve.''
Virginia is still home, and every Thanksgiving, Timbaland returns to his old neighborhood, including a stop at Hovercraft Studios. ''Yeah, every Thanksgiving, Tim swings through,'' Coleman, the engineer, told me recently. ''It was real mellow this year. Pharrell and Tim were talking about these people in the Top 10. Pharrell would say, 'No, that record is whack,' and Tim would say: 'Yeah, but it's selling. They did it.' ''
Sasha Frere-Jones is the music critic for Slate.
― o. nate (onate), Monday, 9 February 2004 16:36 (twenty years ago) link
two months pass...
seven months pass...