N.E.R.D was on everyone’s Sun God radar through Fall and Winter Quarters ‘mdash; and this spring, for once, the rumors manned up and hit the lineup. That’s right: This time tomorrow, we’ll be frothing and mothing toward a proud RIMAC spotlight on the great Pharrell Williams, international guru of making cute things cuter by cartoonifying them (A.S.’s baby Sun Gods, pictured on the right, fall creepily in line) and original imagineer of making space for white-hot pace in the club beat.
Less anticipated ‘mdash; to say the least ‘mdash; was this year’s choice for principal non-hip-hop act. Samuel Beam, grandfatherly singer-songwriter behind stage-name Iron and Wine, has lingered in the lower, slower tips of the nation ever since his South Carolina childhood ‘mdash; and it shows.
He’s like an escaped wisp of cirrus cloud, sort of curious to see about love but still bored, stopping for a second to look pee-colored in the California sunset but not really caring. In fact, it’d be a sturdy bet to wager he’s never been excited enough to make his beard move (aside from an emotional tickle in that moment when those notorious freckles aligned).
Wait ‘mdash; I think there’s a name for this strange kind of human. Oh, right. A fucking downer.
And a thousands-strong herd of horny nerds who’ve been cooped up in a dark room with lab chemicals and laptops since September (FML) aren’t exactly equipped with the patience it takes to tolerate a downer. Each of the three whopping studio albums and two rarity/B-side/live snores that Beam’s got under his country buckle is piss full of happy-sad baby birdies too busy contemplating the sky to fly away.
‘She says if I leave before you darling/ Don’t you waste me in the ground/ I lay smiling like our sleeping children/ One of us will die inside these arms,’ he schmoozes on ‘Naked as We Came,’ whose title seems Sun God-worthy enough until you realize it’s about tender, missionary love-making (need I quote 50 Cent here?).
We know the ‘real world’ will suck, OK? Please, now, before my boner puddles into my party boots.
Indeed, all will be forgotten by nightfall. It’s actually creepy how cut out Williams and N.E.R.D-mates Chad Hugo and Shay Haley are for this job. Their clean chords and boy-next-door doodles aren’t much on paper, but helium into an exercise in energy when put to the amp. All that, and with a Neanderthalic minimalism that scratches all our evolutionary hard-to-reach spots.
Williams is a serial lady killer, one side of a hipster grin raised under elevator eyes, somehow never making the girls feel violated even when comparing their asses to rideable spaceships ‘mdash; come on, he’s just here to please. Case in point, ‘Tape You,’ from their dynamite debut: ‘I just want to see you come,’ ‘Nah, baby, don’t worry about your makeup,’ ‘Now go kiss her boobs, and you kiss her boobs too.’ Well put.
Hilarious fact: Turns out the N.E.R.D baby-face is more than a year older than grandfather willow in the 3 p.m. slot. Hmm … must be something in the cartoon ice cream.
In any case, they’ve both got more grunt than Sean Kingston, who was somehow expected to bring 20,000 best-day-of-the-year hopefuls to climax on one (pretty hot) single alone. And, like T.I. the year before him (with ‘What You Know’) he didn’t even bother to finish singing the only song we knew.