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Left to right: Chad Hugo, Shay a.k.a. N.E.R.D., and Pharrell Williams. Photo courtesy of The Neptunes.

Revenge of the Nerds

The Neptunes do it their own way

One of my favorite singles last year was Jay-Z’s “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me).” What better slab of sexy, stripped-down, terminally sick beats made it to the top of Billboard’s hip-hop charts? With its sing-along chorus of “Give it to me / Give me that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushy stuff,” the tune was so deliciously debauched that it made the phrase “Motorola two-way paging” sound like a particularly sleazy sexual position.

So I was looking forward to talking to the producers responsible for that infectious bit of nastiness: Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, otherwise known as the Neptunes production duo. Last weekend, the T-shirted, tattooed Williams and the fatigue-clad, buzz-cut Hugo were in San Francisco, lunching on rice plates at the R&G Lounge, taking calls from their hometown of Virginia Beach and, in the case of Williams, going eyeball to eyeball with a particularly massive pink fish lounging on a battalion of lobsters in the tanks. Their current project? Mixing America’s favorite pop handpuppets, N’Sync, of course.

“They’re on an R&B level now, more soulful, not so much strict pop,” says Hugo, 27, the Filipino American half of the Neptunes, who met the African American Williams in a seventh-grade jazz program for musically gifted youngsters. (With residents like Missy Elliott and Timbaland, Virginia Beach is apparently thick with talent.) “It’s exciting, because from the stuff we’ve heard, they’re on a different level now. Working with Justin [Timberlake] has kind of given us a whole different view of how talented the guy is.”

The prefab hearthrobs are lining up with fellow popsters like No Doubt to get a dose of the Neptunes’ sick perspective. But N’Sync will have to wait a few days before Hugo and Williams finish the mix in L.A. Right now, the pair are taking a break from wrapping their fantastically dirty minds around such popular bump ‘n’ grinders as Mystikal “Shake Ya Ass” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money,” and they are talking about a pure product of their crazed imaginations: their own album, In Search Of… (Virgin Records), created with fellow childhood pal Shay under the moniker N.E.R.D. — an acronym (sort of) for “No One Ever Really Dies.”

The name of the CD comes from their belief that life is a cycle, says Hugo. In a similar way, they’ve cycled about three years worth of ideas and tapes into the new album. “We originally started out as a group before we even started producing more,” Hugo explains. After being discovered by Teddy Riley at their high school talent show, the pair discovered their calling as producers. “This project is kind of like our stored archive of ideas just put down on one big album, not worrying about one genre and not worrying about any musical boundaries.”

In Search Of… finds the pair trying out their signature electro-rock on a variety of genres: Williams tries out country-ish vocals in the song “Provider,” and teams up with Lee Harvey and Vida on the metallic hip-hop of “Lapdance.” Trio-ish Krautpop consorts with breezy “Incense and Peppermints”-inspired mod keyboards in “Baby Doll,” before the duo goes the Sly Stone funk-rock route with “Run to the Sun.” Deceptively minimalist, Hugo and Williams’ music bubbles with layers of vocals, percussion and keyboards that sound both menacing and familiar, both ‘80s retro in its uncomplicated instrumentation, yet completely current in its cinematic scope and high drama.

With Williams’ and Hugo’s eclectic tastes, a smorgasbord of music is up for grabs. Walking from Chinatown back to his hotel in the sun, Williams picks up some discarded CD-Rs scattered on the pavement, tosses them down the street like Frisbees, and then cops to a love of Stereolab and Sergio Mendes. “Man, because honestly, that shit takes me to another level musically,” he says, loping down the sidewalk with his bright yellow Harley Davidson cap firmly clamped on his head. “There’s nothing like when we ain’t working with nobody, and we’re just in there, coming up with hot tracks and new musical directions and shit like that.”

Still happily living the quiet life in Virginia Beach, and proudly aligning themselves with nerds everywhere, the boyish twosome aren’t exactly the limo-ensconced megaproducers you might imagine. They get their jollies where they can. “We could be in a store and hear some really dope song with nice chords — it could be elevator music and have a nice chord change — and we’ll be like, ‘Shit, did you hear that?’ And I’ll go home and I’ll try to emulate it on the keyboards.”