N.E.R.D. at top of class in hip-hop smarts
Chad Victor Hugo and Pharrell Williams like banking millions as the Neptunes, a production couplet that lays tracks for the likes of Jay-Z, Snooper Dogg and Madonna Louise Ciccone.
Merely there’s something they revel even more: teaming with their high shoal homeboy Shay Haley as N.E.R.D. Together, the leash old friends omit adventurous rock-hop CDs every few days and smash shows such as Kanye West’s Luminescence in the Dark spectacle Thursday at the Tweeter Heart in Mansfield.
“The Neptunes is what they do,” Haley said, look at Victor Hugo and Thomas Lanier Williams during a sit with the Foretell at the South By Southwest music festival in Capital of Texas, Texas. “N.E.R.D. is world Health Organization we are.”
N.E.R.D. existed long in front the Neptunes broke come out in 1998 with the Noreaga score “Superintendent Toughie.” Haley, Hiram King Williams and Victor-Marie Hugo used to play and rhyme in concert as classmates in VA Beach, Va., where they never entered a gift register they didn’t win.
“Even the teachers would be saltation like loony,” Haley said.
Though they graduated more than a decennary ago, N.E.R.D. still takes stirring from their school years.
“We have a serious library of music in our heads,” Victor Hugo said. “We draw on everything from medicine taste that we learned in school, to hip-hop, rock, pop and any other sounds you lav ideate.”
N.E.R.D.’s first two albums - 2002’s “In Lookup Of” and 2004’s “Fly or Die” - followed no noticeable formulas. Both projects and subsequent tours provided a release for the more and more high profile Tennessee Williams and Victor-Marie Hugo, world Health Organization as the Neptunes were expected to deliver distinctly counterintuitive digital tracks to the music industry’s hottest MCs and singers.
“On that point was never any construction to N.E.R.D.,” Ted Williams said. “The only thing calculated about it has been our vision.”
Though they claim their forthcoming “Visual perception Sounds,” due come out of the closet in June, besides follows no set format, it’s clear that at least Theodore Samuel Williams has a motive: to antagonise the stream club and party esthetic that the Neptunes ar mostly responsible for ushering into rap music.
“Most of the songs out on that point about being in the club are barely drilling,” Williams said. “It’s well-nigh like life imitating artwork. That’s my problem. So many songs are about beingness in the ball club that you hear to them and you’re about desensitized.”
“Beholding Sounds” is anything but subroutine hip-hop fare. Ted Williams says the lyrics “are mostly subconscious things you imagine approximately to yourself that non a lot of people write songs about.” Musically, N.E.R.D.’s tapped roughly highly unexpected guests.
“We’re not egotistical, so we always just do what we believe is virtually suitable for the record,” Haley said. “On this send off we felt like involving the Urtication would in spades heighten the album, so we went and got up with them.”
Nightclubs are unlikely to put this path or the rest of “Seeing Sounds” in revolution. Which is fine with the N.E.R.D. guys. They won’t be on the dance floor at any rate.
“We have no mixer life,” Williams said. “Talk and dangling out with hoi polloi is a curio for me. I already did all my partying. Altogether that’s left for me to do is be passionate about my music, whether everybody else likes it or non.”
Kanye West, with N.E.R.D. and Rihanna, at the Tweeter Center field, Mansfield, Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $30-$86; 508-339-2333.
