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What he really did in that video, for Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” was _sing _to the lamb- You the hottest bitch in this place- but it’s true, people were into it. “I fucking held a lamb in a Robin Thicke video. “Let’s speak metaphorically through the rodeo world!” he says, urgently. On the phone with Usher, Pharrell is building to a kind of crescendo.
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Zimmer and Marr were just sitting there, arguing about chord changes, Zimmer says, “and by the time we’re finished, he’s written a fully formed song.” The composer Hans Zimmer will later tell me a story about working on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, composing in a room with Pharrell and Johnny Marr, and watching Pharrell write an entire song on his cell phone in five minutes. He is one of the two or three most successful producers of our time, a man who makes hits out of sinister pockets of silence and bits of other people’s songs and cell-phone ringtones and the golden sounds of the ’70s. His catalog could play literal hours before reaching a song you hadn’t heard before. Very likely he once persuaded you to attempt a trucker hat, or a kickflip, or the music of No Doubt. He’s spent the past two decades selling you things you didn’t think you wanted but turned out to want very much. You can tell Usher is unsure there on the other end of the line, for reasons that seem pretty sensible, actually. “This is a time for everyday people!” Pharrell says. He talks about the synergy potential, all the different markets and classes and types of Americans that Usher could unite by bringing the gift of Usher into the competitive horse-riding arena. The ’90s-rap-video god Hype Williams should direct, Pharrell is saying. Okay, so: a song and then a video.about the rodeo world? It is, at first, not at all clear what they’re talking about-just that Pharrell is trying to talk Usher into something preposterous involving horses. His phone rings almost immediately, the name “Ush”-for Usher-displayed on its screen. We wedge ourselves into an SUV and start driving, Pharrell in the captain’s chair, his cheerful, pixie-cut wife, Helen, beside him. And so, on an overcast Tuesday in January in Los Angeles, we are off to look at some meditative trees. Someone mentioned this Japanese Zen garden in Van Nuys, said Pharrell would like it. He has looked that way for forty years and counting. The peaks of his Vivienne Westwood buffalo hat are huge and uneven, like the Alps. “We’ll be learning together,” he says, standing in the lobby of his Bel Air hotel, surrounded by outrageous ferns. Pharrell Williams looks like he’s been to many Zen gardens in his four decades on this planet, but in fact, today’s field trip will be a first.