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Have you seen The Truman Show? All of our lives are like that... in a sheltered bubble.
— Pharrell Williams, in The Face (Jan 2004)

"Frontin'" made listeners want to sing along, because the singer seemed to be merely singing along, too.
— Kelefa Sanneh, "The Sweet Sounds of Really Bad Singing," New York Times, 18 January 2004

I call you "For Real" 'cause you the truth.
— Jay-Z, "Frontin'"

At the Grammys this year, Pharrell Williams played the drums. That is, he pretended to play drums, the way that drummers tend to do for "live" televised performances, the track piped in from elsewhere as he went through motions. In front of him, straining to sing "I Saw Her Standing There", stood Sting, Dave Matthews and Vince Gill.

It's hard to describe the oddness of this particular show, featuring singers a friend of mine dubbed "old white guys" and a drummer who could not have looked more out of place. The oddness increases with more context: this was the night that Pharrell and his producing partner Chad Hugo, as the Neptunes, were winning the prize for Producer of the Year (for six songs plus two albums, Justified and The Clones), something of a makeup prize for not even being nominated the year before, due to an "oversight" back at label HQ. It might have been a huge moment for someone else, on TV before millions of viewers, with big name celebrities. But for Pharrell, these three minutes turned stranger by the second, as he sat, small and un-smiling, atop a raised platform and behind the kit, occasionally picked up by the swooping camera.

And so the Grammies 2004 performance goes down in Pharrell Williams' scrapbook as a weird footnote to an astounding couple of years. Just 30 years old, the Virginia Beach native has become what's called a "superproducer". Just how this differs from a regular producer is not entirely clear; one thing is certain, Pharrell is everywhere: as one half of the Neptunes, one third of N.E.R.D. (with Chad and their MC friend Shae Haley), as a magazine cover pretty boy (The Face, Paper, Dazed and Confused). Pharrell the musician turned producer turned pop star is increasingly identifiable, a first-name-only favorite for fan-sites and groupies.

That's not to say he's unusual. The celebrity producer has long since become common in hip-hop. From Dr. Dre, RZA, and P. Diddy to Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and Kanye West, producers are increasingly visible. It's good to be the anti-Puffy, (as P. Diddy himself suggests), but fine to build on his lesson. For Puffy, of all people, provides a most useful object lesson: in what seemed one fast-and-furious moment, the self-deemed Bad Boy lost the shiny suits and J. Lo, escaped corny-hell and prison, changed his name and professional affiliations. If Mr. Take-Hits-from-the-'80s can look respectable, if Missy can make Gap ads with Madonna, it's clear the gauge for "selling out" has shifted.

This turn means that producers are producing themselves as much as anyone else, performers and emblems of particular aesthetics, values, and politics. Though, as Todd Boyd observes, "Hip-hop production favors originality," it also allows for rethinking and remixing, even of adages like Boyd's (The New H.N.I.C., NYU Press 2002). Reviewing the Neptunes' second album, Oliver Wang notes, not entirely unfavorably, that "the Neptunes often recycle their own beats -- 'Frontin',' 'Rock Your Body,' and Snoop Dogg's 'Beautiful' are variations on the same theme" (LA Weekly 21-27 November 2003). In another artist, this sort of reiteration might be risky, disrespectful, and even boring. But the Neptunes' work with other artists has resulted pretty much in non-stop hits, many related to Pharrell's appearances in the videos: the Village Voice's Jon Caramanica calls him "hip-hop's most visible video 'ho" ("Post-Rappers' Delight", 19-25 December 2001).

And that helps to make him one of the "super-producers", those who, according to Wired magazine, are "hitmakers and powerbrokers, and their names have moved from the liner notes to the front of their own albums. They're the new rock stars" (October 2003). The rise of the performer-producer denotes a privileging of specific hip-hop skills, as well as further absorption and mainstreaming of hip-hop's potential subversions and reinventions.

To his credit, Pharrell knows enough to make fun of this vaunted status. He does it in his own adolescent style, in the single "Rock Star" (off N.E.R.D.'s 2002 album, In Search of...: "You can't be me, I'm a Rock Star/ I'm rhyming on the top of a cop car"). Pharrell embodies such contradictions in different ways, beginning with the sheer range of artists he and Chad have produced, from Mystikal, Jay-Z, Nelly, and Snoop, to Mary, Babyface, and Beyoncé, to No Doubt, Janet, and Usher. The Source calls Pharrell the "brotha from anotha planet", a nod to his uncanny combination of flexibility and stylistic integrity, as well as his nerdy appreciation for all things Star Trek (the Vulcan sign for "Live Long and Prosper" is his signature gesture), his trucker caps (abandoned when they became too trendy), and generally juvenile demeanor (vividly illustrated in his cartoonish collaboration with Busta Rhymes and Bokeem Woodbine on the video for "Light Your Ass on Fire"). His youthful, awkward affect is decidedly non-threatening, granting him leeway for childish behavior and outrageous lyrics that seem comedic rather than offensive.

In "Lapdance", for instance, Pharrell plays a player, hovering between fantasy and experience. For the video, in one visual register, he's "an outlaw", complete with tough guy mustache, in a club where the sofa is endless and the girls are endlessly available; the camera circles the room, bodies coming continually. And in another register, Pharrell the suburban kid is hurling down a suburban street with a squad of bicyclers, as the lyrics declare their perversely political outrage: "It's so real! How I feel!/ Cause this society, that makes [me] wanna kill!/ I'm just straight ill! Ridin' my motorcycle down the streets/ While the government is soundin' like strippers to me." If you're only watching the video, with Diane Martel's deliriously orchestrated camerawork, you might miss that "Lapdance" is sincere, fine-tuned social protest.

In "Cot Damn", he performs with the Clipse (brothers to one another and fellow Virginia Beach natives Pusha T and Malice). Again, the videos underline the idea of performance as a means to represent. In "Cot Damn", the MCs are introduced "Sabotage"-style as characters (Pharrell is "The Neptune"), in a neighborhood setting that resembles a scene from Cops, declaring their ascendancy while images show their abuses of the law and by the cops: this is one of the few instances where the producer raps, in this instance naming his clothing line, Billionaire Boys Club -- Pharrell the hustler.

For "Frontin'", last summer's hit single, he plays skater-boyishly coy. Striking a Stevie Wonder-ish romantic pose, he appears in multiple frames, in a video whose thematic focus is video and image-making, from the digital camera wielded by partygoers to the changing digital pictures on the walls that adorn the hallway (just a few feet from the prominent skateboard ramp, in use by long haired boys seeking lithe girls' attentions). Again and again, the camera cuts to faces: shy or curious girls and boys, luscious, thrilling, all surfaces, whether seeming real or reproductions.

Pharrell repeatedly demonstrates hip-hop's restless acquisitiveness, citing sources from Prince, Sly and the Family Stone, to the Dust Brothers as much as from Michael Jackson or Cyndi Lauper. While the combination of blithe discovery and canny incorporation is certainly lucrative -- London's Evening Standard asserts that the Neptunes' work with pop stars makes them a "unique example of successfully merged commercial clout and street credibility" (27 February 2004) -- it also risks backlash. It's hard to claim non-mainstream status when you're singing hooks for Britney and Justin, let alone dancing (or just shuffling) in their videos. (Pharrell sensibly explains his work with Britney: "I didn't want people to feel like a pedophile for looking at her. There was no reason she should still live in the shadows of the Mickey Mouse Club" (Newsweek 29 December 2003).

And yet, the Neptunes' is a curiously amorphous dominion, fresh, unreadable, and wholly recognizable. Oliver Wang writes, "[Their] sonic playfulness has helped them all but make the rest of today's hip-hop, R&B and pop production indistinguishable" (LA Weekly 21-27 November 2003). In this takeover, Pharrell might be reframing the very idea of stardom. It's not a state of attainment (or even one to be attained), but ongoing, not linear, but a splattering of moments, ubiquitous and ephemeral. "We're like the antithesis of a rock band," Chad tells the Evening Standard. "Which is what makes us in some people's eyes a rock band. We just do whatever the fuck we wanna do."

The mixed critical reactions to the new N.E.R.D. album, Fly or Die, suggest that what they "wanna do" isn't what everybody wants to hear. It's "mopey" kid rock, with "emotions and sounds cribbed from MTV", writes Hua Hsu in Slate (30 March 2004). Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield describes Chad's guitar riffs as "endearingly clumsy" (also noting he only started playing last year), while "the drumming just plain sucks, which is brilliant" (15 April 2004). Dedicated to live instruments, authentically "played" to generate a compilation of sound that is simultaneously highly produced and under-produced, the CD seems, above all else, distracted.

It's easy to dismiss Pharrell's overexposure and his obvious posing as conventional, inevitably inadequate stardom. Indeed, DeVone Holt submits that Williams is "pushing the limits of our listening patience" (EUR Report 6 May 2003). But again, pushing limits may be what the Pharrell does best, whether by repetition or innovation. "Some people," he tells Wired magazine, "like the recordings from 50 years ago, because they embodied so much warmth and thickness. But the reason they have that sound is because the technology wasn't as good as it is now. The tools people use today give you actuality, and that's going to sound thinner. For us, it's what feels right" (October 2003: 128).

This thinner sound pervades Fly or Die, a producers' album, pieces patched together. The video for "She Wants to Move" is surreal in the way that invites Interpretation: big red wolf-dog girl, floating-nodding heads, band spinning in a cave, assaultive sexuality, and Pharrell, in shorts, on his back, and on a bike, again (this time with a motor), his helmeted head looking damn alien. The video, like the single, emphasizes moving (bodies, beats, bikes), as this is a function of breathing, or better, a function of music that is breathing, ritualistic and rhythmic.