Lately, Takashi Murakami, mastermind of the Superflat postmodern art movement and those Louis Vuitton patterns with rainbow colors, has been getting a surprising amount of press. First, he was selected to create the eye-searing cover for Kanye West's Graduation. Then, his work was shown at the Gagosian. And now, he has a five-month installation at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art.
All this is surprising because his art is compelling in an uncomfortable way. Often it's dainty, but there is always a sinister edge to the sweetness. A canvas exploding with smiling flowers quickly dissolves into a depiction of cold, cheshire grins and empty eyes. Upon closer inspection, a busty jump-roper is actually leaping over a stream of her own breast milk or a nude male figure's lasso is made from a stream of his semen. Outside of its obvious references to manga and anime, there is little in his work that evokes familiarity, closeness, or warmth. The spareness and artificiality of his work is overwhelming. It never takes from nature unless to subvert it and any humans depicted are only loosely based on real people. Murakashi peddles alienation and disaffection, so it makes sense that Pharell is a fan of his.
I've always felt that the success of the Neptunes is one of the weirder pop phenomenons. Their production aesthetic is equal parts dissolution, dissonance, and devolution with no consistent effort for communion. This is why even casual music fans can name the samples on Kanye albums, but most music critics would be hard-pressed to name one sample from any Neptunes-produced track. The aptly-named Neptunes don't hark back or borrow to give the listener a sense of comfort, instead they chop up, configure, and package their drums and loops into something that could exist on another planet in some minimalist future. That packaging, that "sheen" is what the surface of the Neptunes' art shares most with Murakami (whose canvases often look coated in a layer of brilliantine).
With paradoxical beliefs in withdrawal and gloss as their canon, it only follows that the Neptunes would construct a speaker-rattler like "Grindin" - which is basically a precisely-executed ode to percussion. "Milkshake" and "Drop It Like It's Hot" also feature as successful attempts to make shiny fuzz. But, there are also instances when Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo let the yang overpower the yin and produce syrupy tracks like "Beautiful," and "Excuse Me Miss." However, you still hear their moral conflict raging on as the drums refuse to cooperate on "Excuse Me Miss." "I Know," one of two Neptunes-produced tracks on the leaked version of American Gangster, is another exemplary tortured soundtrack in the Neptunes' catalog.
The "big fact" about the Neptunes is that Chad Hugo is the peanut butter and Pharrell is the jelly, i.e Chad brings the foundation, bass, and substance and Pharrell brings the swirls, sweetness, and prettiness. So, I'll blame the unidentifiable chimes on this track on Pharrell. These chimes chatter on behind the track, stealing the show, while the synthesizers and bulbous drums struggle for dominance. Lost in the background, I didn't get around to listening to the lyrics until the fourth time I heard the song.
Meant as a song that explores heroin addiction through the lens of a complicated relationship, Jay-Z double-entendres himself to death on this song. Saving the trump card line for the end, Jay-Z stuffs every verse with words and phrases that could apply to a relationship kept together by sex or a debilitating heroin addiction before signing off with, "Damn I miss the days when you needed the D." The delivery works beautifully. After all, love as drug addiction is an apt analogy. Though, if I ignore the love and listen to the song as just a tale about a woman addicted to heroin (a drug derived from poppies), it does put an unshakably tragic spin on the song.
I guess flowers aren't as innocent as they look.
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