Cliff: Today we’re talking about in search of an album by N.E.R.D.

Kyle: Cliff, you remember what we were doing in 2002.

Cliff: Unfortunately.

Kyle: Did this also give you like technicolor 2002 memories, just like an insane all five sense stream of them?

Cliff: To a degree that we will have to talk about multiple times because I don’t think anything’s viscerally put me in a timeframe quite like this did, and I don’t think I realized. What an anchor point this literal album was to everything else that sounded the way it sounded literally during the time we were in high school.

Kyle: Dude, same. I had to ask Caralee, I was like, I think this actually informs more of who I am as a person than I ever thought or gave it credit for. And I said, do you have an album like that? And we determined that it was Garbages 2.0. If you held up a picture of me and in search of, and a picture of her and the garbage record, it’d be like, oh, well that explains everything about them.

that was a formative period. Record. I was gonna ask you the same thing. Do you feel like you have one? So it is surprisingly kind of this also then I feel like you gotta probably have another more rocky counterpoint would like the Blood Brothers crimes, be it, it’d be something like in that vein, I would want to say, if you ask AI to comb the podcast transcripts, they would say Francis the Mute or maybe Laus.

Cliff: Yeah, but those, even the, the last several things you mentioned. Came out 3, 4, 5 years after this particular record. And I would say those were eras for me. And so this era prior to, oh, I like weird shit actually. The weirder it can be, the more I’m actually gonna like it, this point. 2001

Kyle: about, there’s something about age 14 Carleigh and I were talking about where you’re like not quite baked yet, and I guess by like Francis, the mute time, you’re, you’re kind of off to the races in a direction, but like 14, we were in ninth grade when this record came out and like maybe there’s kind of a super batty thing to it where you’re like just kind of a shithead trying to be an actual person.

but thi this is that, but this activated, something, something in my spinal cord. It’s like, I haven’t thought about that in years.

Cliff: Yep. so I will partially cheat. But answer your question in a really fun way, and I wanted to bring this up anyway, so now’s a great time. If I had to pick a song from that era that best describes me, but that’ll immediately connect to this, it’s the BOB remix, the Rock Remix. That was never available until they finally released it on the 20th anniversary thing, because we were all passing that song around on Kaza and Napster and Limewire.

Yeah.

Kyle: kilobytes per second quality, just the worst quality of anything you’ve ever heard in your life.

Cliff: And no matter how bad that quality was, it was still like, oh, this is the best song I’ve ever

Kyle: Uhhuh Uhhuh, and we were, a year into Stan Onia by the time the original version of this came out, and about 18 months in to like here, down in the south, having our wigs blown back and connecting it to Virgin, Virginia. we’d had a handful of months or years with Missy and some Timberland and Magoo at this point.

and there’s such an interesting intersection point With Virginia and these guys being like suburban guys. Uh, and I wanna come back to the Virginia thing, but yeah, 2002. I think it was an interesting time. I keep thinking about this being like an elder millennial time capsule because we were right on the cusp.

We were born at a time that we were right on the cusp of an era that will never exist again, that the youngins seem to yearn for now. But also the world was right at the beginning of changing profoundly post Y 2K and post to nine 11. So there was the geopolitical bullshit that has wrought the world that we see right now.

But there was also like, it cannot be overstated. The technological excitement of Web 1.0 and the communities and the like access and discovery that had opened up. And I think there’s so much about Pharrell and Chad and NERD and who we both are as people that were really defined by that sort of moment and the momentum that that created.

So like it’s very interesting third episode of the year. Rd Berman was the opposite of this. Like, this is the most point in time we could possibly be. Rd Berman, we’re talking about a whole entire lifespan. OTA is a very much a moment in time, 1964, another like hyper-specific turning point type year culturally and really known as a turning point year in a lot of ways.

But one that we weren’t alive for. So to be like, oh, this is a moment in time where culture started shifting, but it hasn’t been historically recognized as one. ’cause culture has been moving so fucking fast. But also we were very, like, our systems had fully come online at this point, we were drinking in the full bandwidth of it.

And I don’t think really realized. We, we talk about like the past five, seven years we’ve been living through history or whatever. This was history. This, this shaped so much of what we’re experiencing now in maybe tough ways, but I think in a lot of great, like anything I think that is worth being excited about or wanting to continue living for now has roots in the energy and output of this moment.

So I guess if nothing else, it’s a like little bit of a, a nostalgia trip for us, but also a rerouting in like, there were good times. They will come again there’s a lot right now. To be thankful for that has roots in this time.

Cliff: How, how could we not be born of that ridiculous time? And especially now, everyone has their version of this, but to the point you just made, especially with, working in the corporate world necessitates an engagement with the AI hype cycle. everyone listening can think now immediately of at least one person they know of who’s just still on the train of this is gonna change everything.

Right? And it is changing a lot, but like when we are talking about. Post Y 2K, post nine 11, the internet. We have now connected human beings for the first time, like the late nineties were the first moment that retailers even realized that shopping through non-tangible means was a thing now. the entire world started shifting, and. the realities of the internet that we have today, the good and the bad of all of it was created from whole cloth during these periods of time. And so to have that much change happening on top of. The way that music could then explode and be, now it’s proliferating differently. Not, not just, oh, I can buy it through iTune streaming.

But again, the phenomenon of sharing files. Was bigger than just getting free music for a while. You could get unreleased cuts, you could pass around leaks from a studio. Like we were getting advanced copies, demos, we were downloading. I mean I, me and Kyle, literally, yes, but a lot of people, like we were downloading entire into end discographies of an artist things that were only heard of in a blog post off somewhere in the corner of the internet. We could go hunt this thing down and then verify it and then build out a discography of all this. Like it was a really interesting time for so many things to be changing and passed around in reused, and I think one of the ways that came back up for me listening to this album is that.

Two things are happening simultaneously in this record in particular. One is everything’s happening all at once for all the reasons we just mentioned, Even down to the rerecording, we’ll talk about where they just like shifted genres in the same album by rerecording it less than a year apart with a whole new live band to change the whole thing.

But on top of it, the inverse I’m noticing was true. This also created an opportunity for Neptunes to recycle Little sound bites in ways that I don’t think we had really noticed before in production, and then became a staple of other MCs and producers and beat makers and all this stuff later on.

yes, it is sampling, but the way and the. I guess the breadth of possible samples had now widened to like an infinite horizon. It’s not just go grab something off vinyl like Kanye or whoever was doing where it’s go play this. Go record it. Go grab it, go slow it down. Yes, those things are true.

Or you might be able to find in a regional recording that one human being made in one warehouse somewhere, one time of the sound of a piece of wood hitting the ground, Wild shit. And I, think that again, this album specifically thinking of it as like a nexus point into a lot of different points in the past and the future really opened this up for me again ’cause it’s a nostalgia trip, but I came to appreciate it in a new way this time around.

Kyle: I love all that. I think the, it’s such a reminder, like this podcast wouldn’t exist without that period of time For

Cliff: a hundred percent.

Kyle: Because it was such a paradigm shift to like, the pie grew for everyone and there was reward for curiosity. You know, so you think about a name like Nerd where they were trying to reclaim being smart and learning more things, just the realization that you were only constrained by your own imagination and appetite, and that there was a mechanism other than going and spending all day at the library to surface unknown unknowns.

Like, I don’t even know what categories of thing to think about, and now you just. Find them. You could be on a message board for a band you like or something, and somebody’s like, Hey, did you know about this thing that happened in France in 1574? And then you’re off on this whole new kick learning about how they used to make mead or some shit.

And now you have a beer community. And the thing that you said about like trading tapes and MP threes and stuff like that was a niche subculture for like deadheads and stuff. But then it became a real thing. Like I was doing that with three 11. I was like a small teenage kid and I was part of this community and I had access to this culture and these people that shared my interest because I was doing jam band light shit with my puka shells on, I spent so much time thinking about, we’ve joked about my love of three 11 so many times on this podcast, but it like, made me really proud that that was my like first signature band actually because of they were on the front end of technology.

They had a radio station, uh, like what would probably just be an artist playlist on their Spotify profile. Now they had a radio station embedded in their website in like 2001, where the first time I ever heard no Quarter by Zeppelin was on there. I learned about a lot of reggae. Like I don’t think we would be talking about Augustus Pablo if I hadn’t.

heard stuff like Toots in the Maytals and rub it up style and all that dance hall stuff. and then they were on a tour together. I think I sent you the poster not too long ago, the Sprite Liquid Mix Tour 2002, Jay-Z and Memphis Bleak, three 11 NERD. Fucking Huba Stank Nappy Roots, with, what was that record called?

Watermelon and Grits. Was it wa was it straight out Watermelon, chicken and grits, or am I mixing that up with chicken and beer?

Cliff: Now, watermelon, chicken, and grits. Yep.

Kyle: such a good record. And now they have a brewery in Atlanta. Those guys, BL Blackalicious was on that tour. Talib Quali was on that tour. Nonpoint, DJ Z trip. So I was getting into some like house and jungle stuff at that time as well. there was not a time before that where it was not extremely effortful, at least to be a kid in the suburbs locked away from culture and have access to any amount of culture that you wanted. So like you could, there was a reward that manifested itself. Like any RD is a manifestation of a time where you could be rewarded for becoming whoever you wanted to be, exactly who you felt like you were and We kinda lack that now. We were, we were doing a great job with it and, that scared some people. but I, I guess this whole thing is maybe like my call for us to rediscover the power and be in the one you, which I know is a thing we talk about a lot, but this is just like, as, as potent a recipe of it as possible. So, like you mentioned, the, the two different versions of this record, they rerecorded it, you know, late oh one and then March 12th, 2002, this comes out, this version. But can you paint a picture of Pharrell and Chad and the phenomenon of the Neptunes that sort of brings us up to this point. The, 9 98 to oh, one moment I guess with them, your experience of them.

Cliff: My experience of them at that time would be relatively limited. I can fully credit you for bringing me online to NERD and Neptunes in general. No sarcasm. The first two things I ever learned about you were that you liked three 11. This NERD record, I will always remember that like it’s, it’s viscerally associated with you.

Even though I’ve like come to better understand why and like what, what that actually means over time. Like, neither one of those bands actually as a pinpoint describe you or your vibe, but the fact, including what you just mentioned earlier, just like the approach you had in choosing them and why does speak to who you are, I think and is.

Carried all that forward. So I did kind of come to learn. I probably had more exposure to Neptune stuff than I realized at the time because I was a little bit of a kid idiot. I honestly, I spent probably five years in like popular music at all before I took that extremely hard turn into very weird music.

So, I, I’m admittedly limited and I, I realized though that, you know, especially like. Starting when this record came out, oh 2 0 3 0 4. There’s a lot of stuff we can talk about that is deeply in me that I now recognize. But I would say like prior to that and sort of understanding as much as I can about where Neptunes comes from and you fill in where you’d like or what’s missing.

but of all, I was, I, I’m proud to say I was a relatively early Kelis fan. I know they did a lot of work with her, which is not only cool in and of itself, fine, but. My understanding is that their success producing her record in Europe was in fact why they released the first version of this album in Europe to start with, with the idea that they had, you know, a warm market or whatever for this concept.

we can, we can talk about this more for sure, but they released a version that I would. Love for everybody to go find and listen to. It is fundamentally different than the record that we’re actually

Kyle: Totally. Yeah.

Cliff: But you can, I mean, you can really feel the progress in between the two

Kyle: and by the way, I don’t think we’ve come across this phenomenon on the podcast before where there’s two parallel realities that exist. They’re both widely known and available. Like I saw a YouTube comment on the, the guy that shared the original version on Google Drive or whatever, also tried to post it on YouTube and it’s mostly muted.

And somebody was like, I used to have this on a burnt CD when I was living in Tokyo in 2001. Thank you for this

like cra and, and you have to feel like your whole life has been Mandela affected, ’cause that that one just sort of went away and now there’s only the rock version commercially available. But yeah.

Cliff: So mentioning a few kind of accolades to bring us up to, especially the moment of the first records release in 2001. The record we are actually talking about today was then subsequently released after being rerecorded in 2002, but. To keep answering Kyle’s actual question, a few things leading up to that moment.

So, Neptunes as a, a duo, they are in the late nineties. So especially like 1999 is when things start picking up. So they produce got your money old dirty Bastards single, which had kice on it. Then they would go on to produce her entire debut studio album, kaleidoscope in 99, and the follow up in oh one.

And in 99 Neptunes produced clips exclusive audio footage. So that was intended to be their debut album before it got shelved, and then they produced in 2000, the Jay-Z Single. I just wanna love you from the dynasty. and then also mystical, shaky ass, which now everyone has in their head immediately, which was my first reminder of like, oh yeah, that’s right.

They stumbled on something that then like brain wormed me and everyone else for like five years or more. once I started to onboard this record sort of into my brain in a different way than I ever did as a kid. And then you sent me a playlist full of Neptune shit, and I finally heard the mystical track.

I saw the thing like, it, it doesn’t mean that it’s my favorite thing or I love it more than I did before or whatever, but like I saw the thing and I all of a sudden realized what I’ll keep trying to talk about probably for the rest of this episode, we learned that beats sound away and come in away because of Neptunes, and it’s like an inception level thing.

Kyle: Yeah, the four count and stuff. I have the two distinct recollections of precisely the things that you set up. I remember seeing the video for caught out there and like video culture huge at this time, right? We’re, we’re getting close to like peak CD 16, $17 cd. So like Monoculture Market I think is at its height because of MTV’s pervasive influence over youth culture.

I remember seeing the caught out there video and other than immediately falling in love with Kise and maybe getting some wires crossed, I’m realizing as I say it out loud with loving scary women. I remember the sound of that beat and it sounded alien. It sounded like nothing that I had ever heard before.

The, the drum sound and then the like, boo Boo p was a little bit like Gallaga and Pacman and stuff and just being like, sonically, I’ve never heard anything. Even a little bit like that. And then I remember seeing the Shake Your Ass video. There was a guy singing the chorus with a woman on his arm, and he had a dirt stash and a trucker hat on.

And I was like, he’s kind of got the vibe that I’m trying to go for. Maybe a little kind of a rock and roller guy.

Cliff: I am mystical.

Kyle: No, I, I decidedly was not, not mystical, but, but Pharrell in that video looking like he just rolled out of a truck stop, was like, oh, this guy’s kind of a rocker.

What’s his deal? Uh, and he was like, kind of a mysterious figure. And then I kept hearing parts of the DNA of the Neptune sound all over. And then it dawned on me that like, producers could have a sound. To your point, there was Timbaland and the, and like all it all kind of locked in at once. There was the gigawatt beat from Jay-Z’s volume two where he put in like space whoosh, like air whooshing noises in that.

And then there was the Neptunes and there was sort of, this was like the first era of the super producer. And I think we’ve talked about this before. You know, there’d be no Mike will Metro Boomin, any of that. Like this was maybe of the Scott Storch era. just Blaze was kind of getting going, but. The moment when like hip hop culture became popular culture, these were the guys that shaped it more than anyone.

It was like these two camps. and yeah, I, I put together that playlist based on Craig Jenkins complex list that he did back in 2013 or 14. That was like top 50. And I was like, this can’t be, there’s gotta be more than 50. So I did his 50 and then I think it wound up being like 65 or 70. and that wasn’t even all, there’d be like, it’s, it’s easily been over a hundred songs, but 50 big ass songs.

So I think before you get to NERD moment, you gotta recognize that they’re cresting as their sound is everywhere with that. There’s that apocryphal stat that they were like, they counted of for 20% of UK radio by 2002 or 2003. So like, they are the sound of pop music like mustard kind of was for a minute.

I don’t know that we have one now. Shit, that sounds like a gap commercial. I think you just really have to try and internalize to appreciate what is happening on this record. To the fullest extent. I think you can like it no matter what, like anything that’s funky and it’s gonna make you shake your ass.

This record’s fun, if you need fun, put on this record. If it feels too loose or irreverent or whatever, fuck it. Like we need more of that in our lives. So like, just give it a try. You don’t need any encouragement. You know, take the joint de we, but you can really appreciate the, like, immediacy of it by knowing these guys were like fully in their bag, making dozens and dozens of not just great sonic palettes for all these artists, but they were dominating popular music.

They had no reason to do this, I guess is the point. They could have just kept producing and they, he probably still have gotten to do Despicable Me and all the shit he’s done, but this was a, like Neptunes was like two for you, and NERD was like one for me.

Cliff: Vulture Magazine said. Quote, it’s difficult to see today’s most influential acts as uninfluenced by the very elements of nerd’s music in er D’s music that confounded audiences in the past. I think that was written probably seven or eight years ago. So, but that’s already a good example of what we’re kind of trying to say.

Like it didn’t feel it at the time because you didn’t have. Wow, this is a cool thing to try to express. Verbally. I’d never thought about this, but even in 2004, like yes, internet is growing, but like the way that we have like information maximization now, like you can know everything all the time as soon as you want to type stuff.

Like in how everyone makes internet content presupposing that they already know all this stuff. none of that phenomenon existed for us. So if you wanted to know that the Neptunes produced a thing, you would read the CD liner. You would go to a CD store, you would read. Fucking source or something like you, you would have to go figure it out.

Same way we talked about, um, I think we talked about on the Meshuggah episode, like I had a really consequential moment with a guitar magazine. That’s how you learn shit. And so to this end, like seeing it now is really cool because now we can say like, really quickly, like just in that, 2001 ish timeframe when they are releasing the first version of this.

Right. And going into releasing the second version of it. I mean, you already mentioned some awesome examples, but like 2001, they had produced like, I’m a Slave For You, but Britney Spears and now everyone hears that song, uh, they also produced hella good and like Help write hella good. By no doubt, in 2001.

Kyle: Having a second life now, thanks to Turnstile.

Cliff: Totally and but even those two examples are pretty good. Like that’s the type of thing that was happening immediately in 2001. In, you know, by 2002 they’re writing and producing NSYNC singles. They’re working with Justin Timberlake on Justified, right? They are, um, which I can’t wait to just like talk shit continually about that him, everything throughout this.

but at that moment, 2002, that record, that was the biggest fucking thing that happened that

Kyle: That was hot shit, man. That was hot shit. like I Love You. Was another great example. It was like, oh, the NSYNC guys putting out a record. Like absolutely not. Uh, nah, no. I was big on the, there was a culture war happening on TRL, the boy bands versus the new medal. And I was, I was calling in to vote for Kos falling away from me.

The, the domestic abuse song over, over the feel good breezy pop of, would you be My girlfriend? Really, says a lot. Uh, I was buying two copies of system of Downs toxicity to not let to put a dent in the charts, but the crispness of that acoustic guitar. Like, I love you. Oh shit. And now we clearly know as adults this ’cause all that stuff was originally written for Michael Jackson.

and I only later learned that Michael Jackson rejected it all because he wanted things that sounded more like Noriega’s super thug. That’s the sound that he wanted from the Neptunes. I would’ve killed to hear a Michael Jackson record like that. Uh, but he, he wanted to take chances and, and keep pushing boundaries.

rest in peace. Michael Jackson.

Cliff: That Whooshing sound was my brain leaving the podcast to go think more about what you just said.

Kyle: I don’t even, like, I can’t even conceptualize what it would feel like. It would make me, it would make me feel like a Ralph Steadman painting. I feel. It’s just like I’m angular. yeah. Yeah. That’s a fun thing to sit with. But the like, I love you feel. I remember being, uh, my friend Brent Moss’s house and him being like, no, you’ve gotta listen to this shit.

And I was like, bro, this is the worst. You’re the worst. And then he put it on and turned it up and we, we watched a college football game, NA dip. I will never forget it as long as I live, just being like, wow, this rips. And then the whole record was great, but because it was all. Neptunes and Timberland Productions.

And I just learned there was a bit of an Otis Blue thing written and recorded start to finish in six weeks. surprise the shit outta me. I thought it would’ve been one of those like, two years to make the moment for the solo artist thing. ’cause they were engineering every moment of those people in a lab.

but it was like a lightning strikes moment. I love that record. I know we both have always loved that record. I’m glad that we held off. I just wanna finally say on, on the recording, glad we held off on ever covering it on the podcast and we got to instead observe and enjoy with popcorn, the downfall of Justin Timberlake and his ability, his ability to dance and his soul getting snatched and all that shit.

I can’t in good conscience celebrate a man that can make a song in a video like cry me a river and be like, you know what? That’s the kind of white boy we need out there doing his thing. You know what we need right now? A Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown tour. Let’s hear it. For the men

Cliff: With Morgan Wallen. Yeah.

Kyle: with more. Yeah. They could all do Folsom. I would love to see them. And Jelly Roll all do Folsom. And then, and then the prize is that they all stay there at the end. Abolish prisons. Accept. If we can put them all in one.

Cliff: Good grief. Well, luckily we can then the reason we would’ve ever talked about the Justin Timberlake record to begin with is ’cause the music’s pretty good. And then separately, he’s a good singer, so we can just say, well, he’s a good singer. That’s about as much as we need or want to really say about him in general.

And the rest of it is about who we’re talking about.

So

Kyle: if you want that now, just listen to eighties, Michael Jackson or Donnie Hathaway and you have everything you need. Yeah. Also, speaking of Michael Jackson, I read, uh, Noriega now drink Champs fame, but originally of Super Thug and other things. Fame, said on the record in 1998, Pharrell would be the next Quincy Jones.

And he was like, y’all didn’t listen to me. ’cause I’m Noriega, I’m just, I was just some thug rapper, like his word’s, not mine. but he was like, I called it way back then, like, all right bro, you did drink Champs one of the only podcasts with guys Yapping Worth listening to. You don’t want the version of TIG where we’re sitting around taking shots.

For sure.

Cliff: Nope. You’re welcome.

Kyle: The episodes would be a lot shorter because Cliff would not make it that long.

Cliff: I’d be asleep

Kyle: Yeah, it would just me, it’d be, it’d be me being like, look at this little bitch passed out.

Cliff: Cliff, listen to me. Listen.

Kyle: What’s a pun? A attack. Listen, if this is all going in the congressional record, when all that’s left is the bots talking to each other on a wasteland planet, I want the bots to know You held it down for a while back in the day. You, you did your thing. You punched way above your weight class.

Cliff: I’ve taped two forties to my hands before I, I know how to,

Kyle: Which is funny, considering you, you weigh, you’re about the, you’re about the size of a 40.

Cliff: Yeah, none of that ends happily

Kyle: I love you. You’ve always been a great guy to party with.

Cliff: Thank you. I’ve done my best over the years, and now I’m the best guy to party with because I’m the sober guy driving people home every day. Yeah. Like, Hey, you’ve had too much I can take you. No problem, bud.

Kyle: You are a, to not be a dad. You are the ultimate. Please text me when you get

Cliff: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: I love you. I,

Cliff: This is my goal.

Kyle: I put a blanket in the back of the Uber so that you can have it when you get home.

Also, look in, look in your left front pocket, there’s two Tylenol.

Cliff: yeah. Turn your oven off. There will be a pizza ready to go for you.

in order to get to the, why did they rerecord this like rage against the machine light? I wanna make sure we get to the phenomenon of what was happening there culturally. ’cause I think it’s really interesting. But is there anything else you feel like was really specifically needing to be said about the first.

Version, the like electronic or UK version, so to speak, before we start comparing it to what they eventually would go on to do with Spy Mom.

Kyle: I think give it a listen. Give the, proper one. The O2 version A listen first. If you don’t, if you don’t already know it really well. And then the O one one is good for comparison’s sake. be careful. Don’t listen to it too loud when you get to tape you because of the, uh, long performance art vocal passage on there.

That’s all I’m gonna say about that. It is just as colorful as I remember it being, and I think it makes for a great choice on the rock version that that vocal layer is not included at all. beware of the skits on that version, I guess. which really date it, make it more of like a product of its moment.

Cliff: Sorry, this is really making me laugh. This is reaching back to episodes we did a long time ago. It was, I want to make merch that says, beware of the skits universally true.

Kyle: The only one that I ever feel like they’re fun and they like, you don’t wanna skip ’em, are the first couple Ludicrous records maybe on a good day, Stankonia, they say,

Cliff: I would’ve said exactly those two things.

Kyle: say, Kruta could do my job better than I can damn do it. Motherfucker.

Cliff: Oh, the ludic stuff was good too. I get it. I need you to make it rain. It ain’t gonna rain in my drizzle.

Kyle: the best one was you’re gonna go down Old National, turn on Creole Road, you’re gonna see a big ass mansion with a bunch of cars in the driveway and shit. And the girl’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re in a little HUD house right next door. The door don’t work, so you gotta come in the windows and shit.

It goes click So good. So good. But I mean, he’s extremely funny. He was a radio DJ

Cliff: Exactly.

Kyle: Chris, leVello of Hot 9, 7, 5. Yeah. Per personality, A lot of really good outsized personalities, in this era. You know, a lot of, a lot of really fully developed characters at the turn of the century. What about, is there anything for you on the hip hop version?

To me, it’s just like, I, it, it becomes immediately evident. It’s like this is just the Neptunes, right? This is the Neptunes beat CD that they wrote great melodies over. It’s not differentiated enough now in retrospect, the choice seems obvious. I know it wasn’t at the time. I know it was brave. I know they caught a lot of shit for it from all different camps.

cause it was a thing nobody had really ever heard before, but, it was just a Neptunes record.

Cliff: Yep. It’s the clearest example I’ve ever seen of, I’m glad they did that.

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: it doesn’t like, and it’s not bad, but

Kyle: it’s really good. If there had never been any ERD it would’ve been a solid record, but I think it would’ve been forgotten by history

ultimately for swallowed up by the rest of their production discography for sure. I think, and, and these songs sort of demand to be heard.

Cliff: I think especially for the kids listening, hopefully if there’s some, I hope we do attract people from a younger generation but also for people older than us. I do think that there is context that they might be missing about why it hit so good in 2002, because Among a handful of very notable things happening in music at that time, we were just talking about the sort of hip hop evolution, especially that came after file sharing and everything else.

Created an explosion for all of that. At that same time though, the year 2000, that’s Lincoln Park’s Hybrid Theory and regardless of what we think, feel anything about that Lincoln Park record, again, as the people who were in middle school and high school, like that was monumental.

Kyle: Every, literally everybody I knew had that record and, and not anecdotally, like there were shocking that you had that Lincoln Park record. I thought it was just like a weird kid thing, but

like, cool. Girls had it, everybody had a copy of that record.

Cliff: That’s right. It was one of the weirdest and relatively speaking like hardest singles that had like permeated pop culture and the fact that everyone liked it so much was itself really weird and busted through really interesting.

I guess it sort of crossed cultural groups in an interesting way. In addition to hybrid theory though, we had reanimation, which came out not long after that, which were remixes of hybrid theory. All of this sounds patently fucking boring in retrospect, but at the time, that was a pretty new phenomenon for a record to be more or less integrating.

And yes, I know I’m stretching it here, but like integrating some forms of punk into rap rock, creating singles that everyone knew about, Then saying, yeah, actually we have a remix record of that stuff. Here it is. It’s mostly hip hop. And actually there’s some pretty cool stuff on it too. And it’s like, okay, not bad.

And then that kept building and expanding.

Kyle: I’m loathed to give them credit for like, making a movement. But they certainly popularized, they synthesized a lot of threads that were happening in respective undergrounds in a really digestible way. the person that I’ve seen do this better than anyone in our lifetimes is Kanye.

Cliff: Yep,

Kyle: thinking about things like Yeezus, where he took this sort of death grip sound and the hard underground industrial stuff and invert his maximalism because it was the thing that people were expecting least from him after beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy. Lincoln Park had that synthesis ability and could turn it into a cool, like Californian hybrid, no pun intended.

And I’m also thinking about Fast and The Furious. The genesis of that was 2001, and it seems so goofy the way it was, like Asian culture over here and black car culture over here, and Paul Walker over here. And then, space Alien, VIN Diesel working at the car shop. Talking about verbally over here. but that was like a culture mashing moment.

The soundtrack included that I think has a spiritual cousin in the Lincoln Park phenomenology that has a spiritual cousin, definitely in NERD and what was happening, just it’s easy to take for granted now, the availability of all this stuff and the genre has been successfully mashed. but like, there was even kind of a radical aspect to it.

When Odd Future came out and they signed trash talk to their label, and they, they set off south by Southwest. in the world is a bigger Neptunes Pharrell fan than Tyler the creator. And he’s selling out arenas and none of that would exist without a straight line back to this record where he said the singles were the thing, the the chords on, the singles on in search of gave us Tyler the creator.

And he will tell you that point blank, that exact sentence exists somewhere in multiple interviews.

Cliff: Hundred percent

Kyle: I will say I, you know, in a world of tribalism where there’s like weirdly regressive identity. Marketed to an identity type music. I’m thinking more country, hard air quotes, country music than anything else. You know, the, turning Point USA Super Bowl, halftime show type bullshit. Living in a world like that again feels anathema to the promise of a moment like this.

So I think we’re saying all this to say like, Hey, it was really exciting and we can do it again. And we’re always sort of doing it, but maybe not at the scale of The center of gravity of popular culture like this also just happened to be in the moment. And then the technology bit like we are experiencing the rapid and ification of everything, but the opposite was happening then.

Everything was free, everything was open, everything was building and growing in real time. imagine if AI really did feel like sci-fi and we were using it to cure cancer and like sequence the human genome and power the certain collider, all of those were happening. Like people believed in the promise of technology ’cause they were experiencing and happening before their eyes and cultures were blending in a way where like, it was cool to have a third place.

I, it was becoming cool because they were making it cool to have a third place identity, to not be one thing or the other thing, but to be. Your own thing that warranted its own definition.

Cliff: a great bit right there. Like I, I will mention later, which, which song this created this moment in me for, but like the thing you just mentioned about sort of like, weirdness or individualism or whatever, there was also sort of like a weird. We were having an indie moment. At the same time, we’re talking about these things.

So there’s like the weird rap rock stuff, hip hop explosion, internet on the other side of the.com boost or boom b.com bust. There we go. That’s the word I’m

Kyle: Boom and bust in a short period of time.

Cliff: all those things. So, overlaying, cultural phenomenons, this is like also when like fucking twe and stuff, like had its beginnings.

Kyle: But, but then also like Indie sleaze the New York The Strokes moment. Yeah,

Cliff: So putting all those things together, that was not just a white person phenomenon at the time. There was a lot of movement and space for a lot of people to just be fucking weird for the first time in a long time. And to me,

Kyle: the internet, the internet showed you, you could find a community where it was okay. You weren’t gonna be like, bullied out of your school for it.

Cliff: Yep. And this record feels very much that way to me. Even if it’s just the simple stuff like what they put on the cover. This is an a non-traditional hip hop album cover. Like it’s casual. No one looks fucking cool. He’s wearing

Kyle: I mean, he looks extremely cool to

me,

Cliff: uh, yeah, touche.

Kyle: but not in the way of the moment.

Cliff: But like, they’re not trying to put on any of the, presuppose wealth that anyone else at this time would’ve been showing.

And like it, but it’s not a statement against it. This record is not about how hip hop is. Overindulgent just basically says like, okay, that is it over there. Over here we’re not gonna do that. And instead I’m gonna be sassy and feel like I’m clever. And honestly the, forcing myself to listen to a few Pharrell Williams interviews from this time.

Really brought it all back around though. Okay, let’s not overdo it. He was a fucking goofball.

Um, he, he was a real kind of asshole, especially at that time. You know, he’d do interviews and talked about how much he would hate doing interviews and stuff, and it’s just like, okay, man.

You are probably the person who thought the lyrics to brain were really clever. And I remember feeling clever at the age that he was when this came out. Right?

Kyle: a thousand percent. Yeah.

Cliff: yes. It, so

Kyle: Okay. But

Cliff: taken a

Kyle: this, let me ask you this. In the era of influencers on the red carpet, glazing these people and doing Victorian era, access journalism, would you rather have that or would you rather have the weird, ironic distance of this is a stupid performance and we know it is?

I don’t really like either of them. As a person raised on Josh Hammi never taking an interview. Seriously. I think again, there is a third place of like, you can engage in the stupidity in earnest. and I don’t know, I don’t know who does that. Well, maybe Paul Rudd comes to

Cliff: Brk.

Kyle: Yes. Bjork the best interview of all times.

Haley Williams, I think, has done a pretty

consistently

Cliff: a yes. That that’s a really good

Kyle: as recently as with Amy Poer. but there’s just not a lot. Like people just don’t, they can’t deal with the brutal repetition of it or something. But yeah, the, Spinning the whole interview on the meta layer of commenting on inter the phenomenon of interviews is like, that’s such a, a relic of

its time type thing.

Cliff: And just all the way down to like the, I’m not just gonna shit on him, like we are all little pieces of shit then, that’s what I’m saying. But like, even down to just like his, he has the little shit eating grin the whole time. Right. His body posture is fucking stupid. Just like the whole vibe of like, yeah, I figured out that I’m smart and people are gonna pay me money to make music and I’m just gonna like, kind of be annoyed with everything else around it for better or worse.

it has a visceral feeling to, to me, because I recall trying to use that type of energy. I recall what it felt like to be like. I’m smart and clever, and I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed at everyone for bothering me. Let me go be smart and clever, but also there’s no way for you to know I’m smart and clever unless I do these things that I pretend to hate, so I’m going to knowingly participate in them while shitting on them and call myself smart for

Kyle: You’re gonna make me step into your arena to coexist. You’re gonna regret it. But your point about the cover is a really good one. ’cause it’s very much. I think it resonates ’cause it was just a guy doing the things we were doing at that time. But it also has a vibe of like, somebody popped their head in the room to take the picture or be like, Hey, we’re going to go take pictures.

And Shea looked up from his game of Dave Mira, BMX or whatever the fuck on PlayStation, and was like, what do you want? Like that, that it feels exactly like that moment. And they were like, actually, you know what? I think we got it. You can stay there. And he is like, all right, chill. And then he ripped the bong and kept playing

at three. Three elevens down. Played.

Cliff: This is actually a good time to mention like just very straight up, NERD is not just Neptunes, right? So Shea on the cover is not only the third member of this band, but like for L Williams said in 2010 that Haley’s the root of the band and kept everyone grounded and together the whole time that this act existed.

So we are not, and will not intentionally talk past around or anything, Shea. We will put respect there, but we have to pick so many things apart because this was, again, a, a, a central point of so many things happening at once. And it would be something approximating an actual crime to not talk heavily about Neptunes from this.

But Shea is an important part and pops up in a number of places for sure.

Kyle: Yeah it’s very easy to just do Pharrell, honestly. Like, and, and so much of the journalism is wow, Pharrell’s so great. And Chad’s the quiet one, you know, kinda like boy band archetype. But he is really like the technical wizard of the two of them. A mixing and mastering great. and has gone on to do tons of great things, including working on the, recent Rosalia record.

That’s such a revelation. but yeah, Shea, I didn’t know much about. I was determined to find stuff out about Shea and then about Lee Harvey, the who has the guest verse on lap dance. And I was only successful with one of the two. I think there is, maybe now there is a Christian rapper now, uh, with a long ponytail who goes by Lee Harvey.

And I don’t wanna believe it’s the same person, but maybe it is. I don’t know. Uh, RIP Lee Harvey, wherever you are in the world.

Cliff: Is this a kid rock, Chris Gaines situation?

Kyle: it’s more like I, rap at the church in my small town. Very harmless, sweet, same, like, could maybe not the same person at all. I don’t know. all them white

Cliff: Oh, okay. All right. You’re trying to be generous. I appreciate that. Alright.

Kyle: Yeah. He in a knot. He, he ain’t hurting nobody. he seems to love his neighbor and be loved by his neighbors. Whoever that guy is on Instagram.

Cliff: Fair

Kyle: it’s all love, bro. Um,

Cliff: I’m glad to hear it.

Kyle: I learned about Shea though that he like is an active culture expander. Like he was always digging in the crates, searching for new sounds and I was sort of like, what’s his role in the band?

’cause surely it can’t be his verse on brain and the dog analogy that he makes there. that would not get a guy to remain in my band for sure. but yeah, sort of a, a cultural force, great like swaggy energy he brings to the proceedings. And I can see where he would be like a steady hand behind the scenes.

just like keeping things cool. So we have talked precious little about the actual music. first impressions. Where do you start? What’s the, what’s the first listen layer? For you and can you imagine hearing this record again for the first time? Can you imagine being 40 and having never lived through this or being 19, like you said, I hope somebody young is listening to this. Can you imagine being 19 and having missed the cultural wave of this and getting a big ass primer and then putting the needle down for the first time?

Cliff: I think that experience would be really different. I’ll, I’ll kind of try to empathize from both directions, honestly. and then maybe talk in specifics for younger audiences. I think the shock will be production, minimalism. We have grown up in a decade or more of production maximalism and like walls of sound.

thick music. Loud, thick music. And specifically, not only this record, but Neptunes in general are often characterized by like, there’s three sounds in this whole thing,

Kyle: Sparse.

Cliff: There’s a whistle and 8 0 8 and someone like snapping in the background three times. yeah. And if you don’t believe me, listen to drop it leg.

It’s hot.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: Go see, go see how much you find in there. Right. Building club bangers out of like three Lego pieces, which is itself really interesting. But, so I think that’ll be a bit of the shock. ’cause to us in 2002, this sounded full of everything we’d never heard before. Like it, it was

at the don’t need, you don’t need that many sounds when they’re all wild.

Right, right. I think for older folks trying to reinject themselves into this moment, this record’s probably gonna come across stupid like a lot of things do. But this is, once again, I’m, I’m trying to impress as many people as I can with this. Like, this is a Nexus record. Go through it and go find one of a million things.

I will bring this up again probably while we’re talking, before we end, but one of the benefits of what I just said about there being. little small sparse things and overlaid that with, you know, all the file sharing stuff we talked about. It means that there is an unusual degree of every small detail being outsized important in every moment.

if you hear a sound that you think is interesting, you could pursue that sound and find that it actually came from somewhere, or that it would eventually get reused in something else. And like, almost more than any really other record, I think we’ve talked about. This one is just, you could deconstruct it down to your individual parts and find a lot of really interesting stuff happening inside of it. So I think everyone’s gonna have a, a bit of a different experience with it, especially compared to us. ’cause there’s nobody way to get it back out. But one thing I noticed in. Listening to this again, in a way that, and now here’s another very specific millennial thing, right? we listened to this music in this timeframe we were talking about in our cars,

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: Almost exclusively, we were downloading music to our computer and then burning CDs to play in our car.

Because for the most part, nobody had a good home listening situation. And if you did, it was your dad’s like high five buys thing, which you were not gonna fuck with because he’s playing Barry Manalow and drinking right now. so it, like in our, our headphones were

Kyle: 25 to six to four. As loud

Cliff: that’s

Kyle: can possibly stand it.

Cliff: 25 or six two, one.

So and our headphones at the time were like, this was laptop speaker time. Uh, this was wired cheap head buds that came free with your computer time and then all the way on the other side of it, including people like me and probably Kyle, if you wanted good headphones, you spent like $500

and a and I just want to impress to the kids $500 is, was more than, than it’s now.

Kyle: Yeah. () Go go to the bureau of whatever.gov inflation calculator.

Cliff: this is more like if AirPods cost like $800

maybe.

Kyle: You, you made me think when you said computer speakers, like there’s a version of and justice for all with the base turned up, you need a version, you need a version of in search of that every five to seven minutes, it makes that buzzing noise. ’cause somebody’s calling that used to happen with computer speakers. I guess they sort of replicated that phenomenology when they did the like, childish gambino’s red bone playing in the other room at a party when you’re in the bathroom like that. But it’s, I can’t do it with this mic, but yeah, with a buzz.

Cliff: a hundred percent. Oh man. So many things that’ll never be experienced again. That was just there for a small time.

Kyle: I’m trying so hard not to feel like my dad constantly just being like, remember back in them days when we, when it was like this with them things with them computer speakers. That’s not how my dad talks, but you get the idea.

Cliff: I do. Yeah, I know. But it, it’s fun to contextualize, especially records like this and like hip hop in general and all that. Like we’ve talked about this before on, you know, I think earlier episodes, but the prevalent form of listening at whatever time music is made, influences the way it gets made.

’cause it gets mastered for those particular situations. Um, and so you, this is true. Like you either had computer speakers right, or whatever, or like this record in search of was remastered into Dolby 5.1 surround sound in 2005.

Kyle: Actually, I remember because my dad has been in the media industry our whole lives, we got, a 5.1 Sony system with a subwoofer. That was the first time I’d ever seen a subwoofer in person and it had a CD changer in the receiver. And that was if you were gonna do it. ’cause the record player was gone, the analog speakers were gone.

The 5.1 digital system, a Sony system when nobody was home. I was bumping this shit.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: was, that was Hi-Fi for that moment.

Cliff: They couldn’t even fit it on a cd. You had to put a DVD in it.

Kyle: Right.

Cliff: Incredible, incredible stuff. So anyway I just think all that’s really helpful context. So how will that hit you? I don’t know. I think it’ll hit everybody a little bit. Really. But,

Kyle: Good luck.

Cliff: But, so, okay. Looping back to what I was saying about car listening in the car, though. So what that meant is, at this time when any of us loved a record or a song or whatever, it’s on repeat in the car everywhere that you’re going. And then that record starts to sound like the way it sounds in your car.

I had jail audio subwoofers in an 84 Camaro like I’ve talked about before. Did I like this record? Yeah. Fuck yeah. I like this record. It sounded really cool in there, I talked about this too in the Three six Mafia episode. Like, I’d start listening to a lot of these and then that’s how they would sound point being.

Listening to this record over and over again, I sort of was able to reenter that feeling like you repeat it enough to where not only does it begin to have a characteristic sound of how you’re listening to it, but you, to me it starts to change after about three or four listens in a row. Like I remembered this record, but the first few spins through.

I was sort of operating half on what I’m hearing and half on what I remembered, and by the time I let myself just listen to what was happening. The combination of that attention, plus again, better ways of listening to music now. Man, I was hearing stuff in here I’ve never heard before. I, you could have never convinced me that some of these details exist in ways that I could start drawing out now after I would listen to it.

And then I would also start to identify specifically they. Are pretty cool with just reusing some pretty basic stuff over and over again on this record. There are beats that just reoccur, and yes, sometimes, I mean rhythmically, but sometimes, I mean like the beat is there again from another song in this song, again, pretty much in the same way, not really trying to hide it very much, just doing a different song with it.

And like that just created a looseness as I listened to it more and more just coming to appreciate that there was a again, unfortunately, or fortunately, Kanye is a really good example for some of this thinking it was like the Kanye energy, but without his, for lack of a better term. Sharp intelligence about very specifically how to put things together in complex ways.

This was just more like, nah, we know how to make this, I feel comfortable with it and I’ll use kind of whatever comes to mind. ’cause we fucking are making the best and most important music of anybody. And like you can just feel the confidence here. and then last, sort of tack on to that and I can be specific on songs and stuff, but like walking myself all the way through that and being able to experience that level of energy with the production that’s coming from all of it actually caused me to appreciate the way that they rerecorded it in a fully new light because it actually meant or implies the existence of a humility that I wouldn’t otherwise know where to find.

From this group and I can appreciate how specifically they managed to improve specific moments and specific songs to I mean, really refine an album again in, in a sort of Kanye way. Just saying, I actually don’t like that first version. I made another one. And that’s the new version. That’s the one that exists now.

Kyle: It is sort of a predecessor to the life of Pablo thing where he was like, no, I’m gonna upload the new version of it in its place. Which is another idea to continue the combo of Led Zeppelin of like they were, the band that introduced me to a song is just an idea or a framework that never exists the exact same way twice.

The light’s gonna hit it different every time you look at it.

Cliff: No song ever really dies.

Kyle: but that idea was anathema to me before Zeppelin. And you know, their, they’re like funk. Predecessors, I think about like Bonzo being influenced by Zigoo from the meters, and specifically that no Phil was ever the same twice, like the record that changed my life more than any that we’ve, we talked about on this podcast before being songs for the deaf also came out in 2002.

Another like cultural sea change, counterculture subculture thing. Dave Grohl said, I’m the drummer that I am on this record ’cause of John Bonum and John Bonum is John Bonum because of Zigoo. And it’s because nothing is ever happening the same twice. So I do love the I’m different, so the music can be different too.

There’s a nice permission in there.

Cliff: I would love to talk then about maybe specifics that we noticed throughout some of these songs. It is as noted, difficult to impossible to do some sort of first pass. Listen at this, at this point. Sorry. Yeah. Speaking of led Zeppelin I, I will never have that experience again.

Kyle: I, I will say I think probably the, The closest possible thing to a universal try now that I’m sitting here thinking about it, is whether you have all the cultural context we just wound up or not. You can from wherever your purview is, think about all the things that this isn’t on first.

Listen to some degree you’re like, all right, who the hell are these people? Who do they think they are? What is this trying to be? There’s some expression, some communication that I’m either supposed to connect with or not happening and we, you know, we talk about negative space a lot on the podcast, like think about what something is based on what it isn’t.

And this is a prime example of just like, think about all the things that this isn’t right. This is you. You see like some Y 2K skatey type guys. You’re getting a lot of signals from like the fashion and the visuals and the vibe. There’s like punk Tony Hawks, pro skater energy around a lot of it, but it’s not agro and thrashy.

Like you can totally see a lot of girls being at this show. It started as a hip hop record, but it’s also a rock record is where we landed. So between the two, it’s a very different third thing, it’s funky, and I know we’re gonna talk about that when we get into the spy mob of it all. It’s kind of disco to like, not in the literal sense, but in the propulsion of it.

am I high? Is maybe a, the symbol work of am I High? Is maybe something there. but it’s not a dance record. It’s, it’s got a little bit of the like skater. Uh, oh. you’re in the wrong part of town. At our skate park, it’s got kind of a menacing thing, but it’s also like disaffected you, gen X disaffected youth and like the Y 2K nerd thing, it’s super poppy, but it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be poppy.

Like Tam imp Paula is like this motherfucker’s trying to be the Beatles. There’s a lot of Beatles song craft on this, but it, it’s trying to be different than the Beatles. like Baby Dolls an example of like Austin Powers UK mod, who else could do, could pull this off exactly like this.

so like, there’s a ton of easy ancestry, but there’s not a lot of precedent. So I think you can start to appreciate it when you’re just like, this isn’t quite anything else. And it does sound good. I also had a very visceral, when you were talking about the Camaro, the kick drum of this record.

I’d given you all this rap shit, little John and the East Side Boys Three six Mafia stuff where there’s like long 8 0 8 patterns. Nty 8 0 8 patterns. Just a kick sounding different than the classic rock stuff where there’s good dynamic range. Like this shit had thud, like a hip hop record, but it was just like, I can remember how the NERD record felt in my chest, in your car.

And that’s a thought that I haven’t thought about in that 12, almost 25 years, I guess.

Cliff: I’ve been getting in the habit of asking you questions as if it’s like a test. But I’m enjoying this now. ’cause if you get it wrong, all it means is that there’s a really fun answer. So I’m curious is, okay, so think about what you just talked about, the live band phenomenon and the way that the kick sounded and all that stuff.

Is there another year 2000 record that feels related to this, to you in that way?

Kyle: Oh, I like that. This is becoming a, you know, the sort of like gotcha trivia.

Cliff: It’s never a thing you should know. It’s a thing. I’m curious how far apart our little connections are.

Kyle: you know what, there’s two things that come to mind for me. One is Jurassic five,

uh, which I

Cliff: You’re listening to his arrest. Like five.

Sorry. Carry on. and like remember when the Blackeyed peas were cool for a minute? that, type shit, like skate park stuff. The thing that I really wanna say is the white stripes.

Oh shit. That’s even cooler.

Kyle: do you get why I would connect those things though, like

Jack Jack White in that moment, and Pharrell in that moment were like aliens. They were like a new species of thing entirely. And you’re like, fuck everything that came before this. Obviously these guys exist specifically because of things that came before them.

You know, like we wouldn’t be talking about Sun House the way we’re talking about Sun House without Jack White.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: it’s specifically in our lives. I don’t mean societal wide. but yeah, I’m thinking about, what is the one with Fell in Love with a girl, is that White Blood Cells was the name of that record.

And then we went back and got desal and then Elephant came out

a little later

than this.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: But yeah, white stripes in the Lego video were having their moment at the same time as this.

Um, and Meg and Meg White with the big kick drum sounded fucking great in your car.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: So that’s obviously not what you’re talking about though.

So hit me with a, hit me with a separate third thing, which is the, the bumper sticker for this episode.

Cliff: no, but both of those are really cool and in line with the thing it made me think of, so this, I would’ve never done it at the time, but now this feels connected to voodoo. This, watching them say, actually we need a live funky ish inspired band to make this record actually good. And then throughout they try to really manifest.

You can feel them trying to manifest some real energy in some of these songs. And to me, it carries a lot of the energy that we talked about in Voodoo, where it’s just like this song wouldn’t have worked without the drums.

Kyle: now this is a tesseract, but I know there’s an infinity stone in it,

that type thing. Yeah. It took DeAngelo a lot longer to get to it. but I mean, Voodoo’s Voodoo, it’s the number one record of all time by human beings forever. You, I’ll put, that bumper sticker on my coffin.

Cliff: And they weren’t. Neptunes, NERD, whatever. They were not directly connected. There’s not some mystical, you know, or literal surprise connection with it,

Kyle: Yeah. Now I want to go see like, is there a Questlove commentary from the early Pharrell days? Because like surely they’re aware. Of each other. The roots were crossing over in a big way

at

Cliff: Neptunes did a common track.

Kyle: I saw the roots open for 3 11 1 summer at Lakewood. That’s, that’s fun and neat.

Cliff: What a sentence. so, okay. But they were sort of adjacent to all that stuff, but it just man, it, it brought that energy to mind for me. And again, that’s sort of what I mean by like going back to this now, I can feel the way I felt when it came out, but now I also have this like thick, meaty appreciation for. What people were doing with hip hop in the early two thousands in a way that I never would’ve had before. And this one reminds me of it. It’s not to our point here, it is not voodoo. I unabashedly say this record is nowhere close to that record as a self-contained piece of art, the

Kyle: onto something though that like black music was coming back to getting really cosmic at that time. A lot of people described this record as psychedelic, which I never thought of it of. but I get what they were getting at when they said, there were new, if you were like a young person of any stripe, it felt like a new thing.

And you know, there’s, there’s sly stone in it. There’s. All. Also, there’s kind of steely Dan and whatever. There’s a, there’s a little bit of a lot of stuff here. they were leaning on some of the same cosmic gumbo.

Cliff: Yep. Do you want to go down tracks or pick highlights? I can do either. This one was fun.

Kyle: I think I’ve organized my thoughts sort of thematically. It’s really by instrument, honestly.

Cliff: awesome.

Kyle: so I, I say do whatever you want to do. ‘ cause I, I know this record as well as I know, know my own spinal column.

Cliff: Fair enough. I will start by peppering a few examples of what I have the point, I have belabored for a while here on this episode of just the points, the, the in the out. I can go over here, I can find it later in time. Oh, I can find it back in time. All of that. So I mean, I think the first example of that would be second track.

Things are getting better. I can pull out from the future, I can pull out the Daft Punk stuff. I can pull out what the 1975 would go on to sound like.

Kyle: It’s a shitty butterfly effect, but you know what,

Cliff: Well, okay. There’s a shitty person in front of that band, but that band is arguably pretty good at minimalistic pop music.

Okay. I’m no fan, but I saw them once and I was pretty blown away by it back in the day. But, but the point of it being like, here’s the thing, like DAF Punk 1975 are both examples of sort of bands that would use these little boop type noises in their music, boop, boop, boop, all just all sort of all over the place.

It wasn’t a weird synth hit, it just had this little texture to it that sounds like a small machine or computer or something. And then they would put that into a tight drumbeat and it would create a sensation like the, I’m too much of an idiot to describe this scientifically, so I’m going to do it brutish the like attack.

On the kick on these sounds is so tight, like it immediately goes back to silence. There’s not extra reverberation. It’s not left to echo or otherwise, like impact the music in a lot of ways that we often do. Now, just the sound comes in, the sound goes back out, and anytime it’s not playing, there’s an actual like silence

Kyle: But there is a bit of a sonic genius because. It’s tight and thick. Like normally when you associate a really tight sound, it’s really dry.

Cliff: Right?

Kyle: Look to gang of four for contrast. Look to, peak period ZZ top in the seventies. It sounds great. It’s crisp, but there’s a fatness to the snaring, especially the kick of the drums, which is like, how do you even, it’s a very organic, wonderful sound.

Cliff: Mm-hmm. Then it hitting, hitting some more fun highlights. So then the song provider, uh, one of our problematic faves perhaps, first of all, let me just bring forward one quote at least from Pitchfork, reviewed this album at the time it came out,

Kyle: Oh God.

Cliff: like Peak Pitchfork six. it’s the most exemplary on-brand review I’ve read in a long time from that very specific period.

Um, but when they talk about provider they said, quote provider hints at the fact that if Pharrell and Chad were born 12 years ago, they’d be bumping this album along with Kid Rock’s cocky, which is a hilarious thing to think about in 2026. But also it hits me right in the same place that I sort of remembered listening to a few of these songs and being like, Jesus Christ, dude, these lyrics, Jesus, Jesus Christ. Man, I don’t like lyrics and this is making me actively uncomfortable. but, but I think two things happened that were fun. Uh, one is I’m old enough now to have an odd if misplaced appreciation for what it felt like in provider to be trying to project your identity in the future.

Like, Hey, in the future, I’m actually gonna be a good person. You can actually rely on me for this. Setting aside the heteronormative tropes that are used throughout it, it was 2001. Okay. Like, all that stuff’s still there, but I can go back and see a little bit of yes, I can remember being a little asshole.

Back then, I can also remember me as a little asshole going, don’t fuck with me. I’m gonna be a good person one day. I had a few of those experiences on this record of just immediately getting over how frustrated I was with the immaturity of some of it, through just allowing myself to see it and feel it and not try to judge it too hard.

So that was awesome. And then once that happened, the lyrics didn’t block me up as much anymore and I was able to notice things like the guitar on Provider is Clutch. Great stuff, great guitar work. There’s not a lot of good guitar work on this album at all, in my opinion.

Kyle: The slide guitar, you mean

the, the sort of like Chris Isaac Wicked Game. yes.

Yeah.

Cliff: Well, actually comparing a little bit, I think of the old record to the new one. Truth or Dare has this little, on the rerecorded version, the very kind of end of the hook twice through has these really kind of high pitch strings that go up at the end, or it sounds like strings. And actually if you start listening to it, you get less certain about what instrument is making that noise.

It sounds like strings. It sounds like sampled strings. And then research has apparently shown that it was a guitar, which I’m not sure I fully believe, but regardless, like this is what I mean by like really focusing in on the little noises. Then I heard that sound. Then I went, I’ve heard this sound.

And now, now I’m like running around trying to kind of listen to music at different points. Literally trying to place like, no, no, they’ve, this has been reused. I know that I’ve heard it somewhere and now I can’t find it. And like, this is stupid, but like I, I need something good to distract me with the state of the world.

It’s sending me on little weird musical scavenger hunts, some of which have come up totally empty and it’s still fun, and that’s nice. I don’t know what else to say. That’s nice. It’s nice to just have a thing that causes me to get a little bit interested in it and engages me with other forms of music, but it’s not overly serious.

I’m not looking for some deep thread. I’m literally looking for a noise that I think I heard one time. But again, once I realized how much came out of this record, it was easy to start looking for a lot of other stuff in the places that it either got reused from or we get reused again. Then I honestly, I could keep doing this with more I did want to mention though, you mentioned Baby Doll earlier and its weirdness in particular, and I mentioned up at the top that there was a song that made me think of the Twe moment, and this was it Baby Doll. Was it the I it happened on first.

Listen, actually, when I went back to this one and I hadn’t heard it in a while, my brain immediately went, when did that fucking jet song come out? There’s

Kyle: Okay. When you said twe, I thought you were talking about like death cab. You just mean like cheese?

Cliff: Death cab is a really good example of what I meant specifically by twe. Yes. But yes. Uh, to me, cheese, this is a cool sentence. Cheese. Cheese was a byproduct of twe

Kyle: no, no, no, no. What Like one’s more masculine energy and one’s more feminine, or like one’s more Republican, one’s more Democrat, maybe something more like that. You know what I mean? Twe is Neoliberal, weenie and cheese is like, like the Jet song and Five Finger Death Punch are

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Like, oh no, they done, they done let Men Loose with

Cliff: Everyone listening. Hated that everyone.

Kyle: I don’t give a shit. I love the jet song. I think Jet’s great or like The Darkness, we both love Justin Hawkins and The Darkness, but it’s, that’s in the same, 2002 to 2004. Just like we can’t let him get away with this.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: Like, uhoh, this is, this is maybe gonna sell me a light beer one day.

Cliff: and, and it did. you can keep pulling, pulling these out of me as we go along if you want, but like, I just, overall, like with virtually every song, I just had a, a sort of oh, I remember this. Step two, oh, there’s something here. I didn’t know how to notice the first time through third time.

Alright. I’m still not in love with this record, but I now like can deploy every song. Something in here is like interesting to me in a way that’s useful and like, that’s the name of the game to me.

Kyle: I love it. Do you have a favorite song on the record? I.

Cliff: Do I have a favorite song on the record? I Rockstar has to be taken entirely outta contention because it was too cool when we were a specific age. And just

Kyle: It was on NFL Fever 2002.

Cliff: it was everywhere.

Kyle: Yeah. But that was, I think the first time that I heard NERD specifically was when I fired up my brand new Xbox on Christmas and it was the menu song.

Cliff: God, what a feeling. Sorry. That just caused me to think about the moment I fired up my Xbox. That was really a cool moment for everybody,

Kyle: so,

good. Mr. Mr. Ux. I remember when you shared that thing, like we used to be able to build monuments. We literally can’t build this anymore about that all green UI that goes into like Fast and Furious and Lincoln Park memory hole of just,

there was such a tangibility to so much like everything was going digital, but it was all very tangible experiences that you could go out.

Go out. They weren’t dissociated from the experience of shit. You could go experience with your senses in the real world.

Cliff: yeah. Another very visceral example of that for me is playing need for speed and hearing get low play. there was a moment when that like, they were really pushing things for a second, like Both of these moments we’re sort of talking about, it was like, Hmm, video games are supposed to play these songs, I don’t think,

Kyle: Right, We’re getting away with

Cliff: no. Yeah. And then they’re like, nah, it’s gonna be a party now, not Oh, sick. Okay.

Kyle: But it was also like, I need the perfect winamp skin for my playlist. That rockstar is on that type thing again, where it felt, it felt limitless. You know, there was like delight in all that.

Cliff: Totally.

Kyle: I feel like if you were four or five years older, you would have had a library of custom cliff seal.com winamp skins that you just like made available on the internet.

Cliff: Yes, I would have. I did build a streaming service from scratch that would let me listen to all the music on my hard drive at home at any time. Well, before anyone knew how to do that, that was very cool. That is true,

Kyle: Once again, wanna shout out one of my all time favorite vehicles of music discovery the Cliff Seal Blogger blog from 2003 ish.

Cliff: yes. What a time.

Kyle: Still to this day, I’m like, how the fuck did he know about these records way back then? Huh? How did he know about the Velvet Underground?

Cliff: And the kids don’t know about digital hygiene, but I know you do. We were, we were finding flax and if we couldn’t find flax, we were finding like one 90 twos and then making, manually reviewing the songs. ’cause you couldn’t trust what you downloaded on the internet. Making sure they’re all actually not only do they sound right, but then double checking the bit rate because you could actually list a bit rate that was higher than the actual bit rate.

So then you need to test that bit rate and you need to make sure you have cover art that’s appropriate and there’s no extra files in there that somebody put in there trying to put a virus on your fucking computer. So just like even down to that, like I just have a, a real memory of the people who downloaded these zip files will be getting clean work from me. None of

Kyle: How much time did we spend editing metadata and we still turned out to be all right adults. Like we did all that and had healthy social lives. Did I come home from parties and fucking edit the metadata for a

Cliff: Yes. Yes we did. Yes, we did.

Kyle: guess I did. And then got up and went to zero period to work out for football and that was a normal week. insane. There were no, there were no phones. I guess like our relationship with time was completely different or something.

Cliff: It didn’t feel like you were doing nothing though. ’cause we were sitting on a IM

Kyle: Yeah, that’s true.

Cliff: and then when we weren’t sitting on a IM we were playing Halo.

Kyle: And I guess there was just like objectively less of everything. Like, just like less stimulus

Cliff: Well said. Yes.

Kyle: So you weren’t getting bombarded by

sensory stimulus.

Cliff: Yeah,

Kyle: yeah, yeah.

that’s, cra like thinking about the pie of your day and how much it’s consumed by mediated experiences now, like we all know that, I’m not saying even remotely a new thing, but to think about it relative to like, let me stack up minute by minute, how much I used to do in a week and now, and then part of it’s dull responsibilities and whatever, but like, damn, how

is my body still alive?

How is that possible?

Cliff: Don’t ask out loud too much or it’ll hear you.

Kyle: It’ll, it’s like the mummy, I’ll turn into sand.

Cliff: to answer your actual question from a few minutes ago. I think it’s on, ironically, am I high? Uh, in part got Kyle with that one.

Kyle: It’s too obvious an answer. I would’ve maybe tossed that off jokingly and been like, it’s, it’s something else. Mm-hmm.

Cliff: I know, but I have, I have good reasons for it. One is, you know, I mentioned earlier that once you start listening a lot, at least for me, I started to hear maybe more of the repetition than I sort of had appetite for. Am I high? is a, a divergence even from a lot of the other songs To that point in the record, it, the hook is in my opinion, like fundamentally different than the others up until that point and sort of then the ones that follow, and then even down to just like around 35 seconds, like there’s a piano sounding run that starts to come in and kind of goes up and it has like all of a sudden after being in this sort of like beat drum heavy, vibey, energetic thing for however many tracks up till then, you know, six or seven or whatever.

And then you hit this one. And to me it’s, it. It’s a palate cleanser, it’s ginger it does something really interesting before you immediately go right back to it in rockstar to the degree that like you can start to recognize elements from earlier in the record. Like it just snaps back into place. And so to me that little bit of a respite sort of makes it my favorite, especially now.

Kyle: I didn’t realize how reggae ish am I high is

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: that guitar move seems like a thing that you would do fucking around on guitar at your house,

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: donut. Like you would do like a more Mely Emperor Cab version of that. But there’s also a reggae ish thing, and I would never think to call it that until I had read the retrospective of Aquemini that the Dungeon family did, and Creative Loafing, and they were like, SPIE.

We were doing a reggae thing and it was like, uh, like, you know, you hear your number one favorite song in a new way and you’re like, oh shit. Well, I guess it, I don’t agree with you, but I guess it is that though. ’cause that’s what you say it is. But I hear the same thing in Am High, which gives it a, like a playful dimension.

I’ve always thought of it as kind of a menacing or paranoid, like, am I high? and nobody’s more intimidating than the Clips. and Malice in spite of his name is the less intimidating one, but they got a real serious people vibe. yeah, that’s a, that, that sounds a jam.

Cliff: I feel like you gotta be holding in at least one like container of thing that I haven’t figured out that I have the key on my key ring for just yet. help me out.

Kyle: The note that I made in all caps was give the drummer some. The thing that didn’t occur to me as a younger person was, spy Mob’s a good ass band.

Like they got good material to work with, but like them white boys is funky. they are from Min, they’re from Minneapolis.

I learned.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: and with their small but dedicated following of like alternative folks, they have been really good about giving it up black culture and, their influences so good on them.

so like we talk about the sparseness of it, they’re a good foil for the Neptunes guys because they dial in each of their elements really effectively. so like the first thing I was thinking about even before I thought about the Camaro was drums.

This is a good drumming record. There’s really cool, it doesn’t do more than it needs to hardly ever, but that’s the primary difference that you hear obviously against the hip hop record is the beats and there’s flourishes with live drums that you just do not get. On the original version, the number one place you’re gonna notice it is the intro to Rockstar.

like it, for lack of a better word, it really hits you. And then the part just after two minutes where they’re playing the ascending notes is like kind of a bridge, I guess, but it’s an escalation of a previous part after the chorus. and they’re, he’s doing kind of like a roll thing very tight.

Then in lap dance, which is one of the cooler, like classic Neptunes beats on the record, on the original version, the backbeat in the chorus

is sick. And then there’s like kind of a flexy cowbell thing in the verse. the first time that I remember noticing the drums originally was in brain. there’s the first fill right away, and then they like vamp at the end of that song. They do like a James Brown and the JBS thing, down, down, out, down, out, down, down, out, down, out.

if you listen to tape You, which I don’t remember liking that song as much when I was younger. That’s the one that I like really came around to the chorus of Tape U has like a bounce. Listen to it, listen to the original version, come back to the new one. There’s a lot of big fans of the original version of Tape U, which is weird because of the three minute audio sex scene in it originally.

setting aside that whole thing and like I appreciate the creative choice where none of that shit’s in there. but the chorus of the live versions got great bounce ’cause of the drums. And then on, am I high? Anytime I ever hear somebody playing a closed high hat really tight, like it is hard as shit to do that.

It’s very physical and you know, it’s doing the, the tip of the stick and then the, the sort of base of the stick. So it’s a wrist move too. And then there’s a great kick pattern on that. They play against each other. That’s gentleman’s drumming, it’s hard to make that look as easy as it is.

the other big one for me is keys. Keys are the thing that like made me fall in love with this record when I was a teenager. there’s a bass moment here, here and there, but it’s really drums like. Did you have drum moments? Other than those,

Cliff: I don’t think so, but I had a really similar set of experiences to you in the songs that you mentioned. Noticing fills. I’m saying just like how fucking in the pocket this guy is the entire time. Just ugh. But yeah, the I was glad you tried to kind of bring that out. Like he is playing drums with energy.

It is, yes. It like, yes it is good drums, but like he’s playing the drums in the way that yummy. You mentioned Bonzo earlier, like that’s one of the things we’ve talked about that sounds so fucking stupid, but is like true, like one of the reasons John Bonhams was so good is ’cause he beat the fuck out of the

drums like a menace and like, so he played with a sense of energy and a power and a velocity that like, yeah, in theory you can play some triggered drums and sort of, maybe it won’t sound any different in production, but like that’s not really what’s happening here.

Motherfuckers playing the drums and then they’re producing sort of on top of that in making this into whatever it became. But yeah, like there are great lively hidden fills. In a lot of places that feel really good and they fill out the bars that feel empty on the European version, they really add a lot to me the more you dissect, I’m literally preaching to the choir here.

But like, the more you dissect the beats here, the more you can find tropes, uh, in the way that they make beats like the three. And in almost every song that Neptunes make has an important part to play,

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: And so just even that enough will or alone will give some people things to think about.

but the way that then the drum fills spread out those songs lengthen the hooks. The combination of filling out the songs with drums and shortening the overall record, to your point, and taking out some of the other things like really made for a condensed piece of work in a good way. So, yeah, no, no more specifics than you, but just reinforcing like, yeah, it kind of makes the entire record.

Kyle: I agree. then the other thing, you know, we, we talked about Neptune’s texture, like the Kise song, it not feeling like anything else that I’d ever heard. another example, there’s a great interview with Chad where he’s like, music I’ve loved through the ages. and one of the examples he includes was Lala La by Jay-Z, from The Bad Boys or Bad Boys.

Two soundtrack, parentheses, excuse me, miss Again. Sort of a sequel, but very different song from, excuse me, miss Chad said, of that song, when our career was taken off. I spent all this time making the music. that it also became what was influencing me. There were just good vibes around la la, la Back in the day, it was like a celebration.

Every time we finished a song, the engineer would play it back and it was like a party before the party. I made the scent sound on the song by messing around with the sound design and some programs. There were two scent sounds. They call it a Hoover synth. And it has two layers to it. One is de-tuned. So the song has this harsh, distorted feel.

It’s a track that gets the crowd hyped. That’s a good motive to have for a song. So knowing a thing that always drew me in at a visceral level is a thing that they were searching for, themselves. There’s a lot of keys moments. by the way, Eric FoST is the drummer from Spy Mob. John Osby plays the keys Christian Twig on the bass, and Brent Pasky, vocalists and guitarists.

so I, I think I didn’t really know what Offender roads was before the early two thousands didn’t grow up in a Stevie Wonder household. it is what it is.

we talk a little shit on brain and the, the ham handed metaphor, if you can even call it a metaphor there, but the cords there, roads or other similar type of keyboard, there’s a progression. And it’s the first instance that I could remember where it’s basically two chords, but there’s, you know, like a diminished seventh or some type of shit that I don’t know, as a non theory guy, like you move a finger in the cord on the keyboard. So it’s four different expressions of two chords and that lit up my synapses.

I remember thinking that’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard in my life. and I remember in one of the interviews, I think Brent from Spy Mob, one of the guys was like, yeah, we’re just trying to do pop music with weird chord changes. a normal thing, but turned weird 20 degrees. So definitely that chord progression.

Brain is like the thing of the record for me, it’s the piece of candy that I come back to over and over again. the pre chorus in lap dance, The,

just hitting perfectly and specifically it was not hitting every note of the chord at the same time. Not arpeggiated, but the sort of like lilting finger moves. you know, in the neon moon episode when we talked about the twinkle, the keys, that sounded like the lights in the dive bar that’s all over this record for me, that kind of playing.

and then the other example that’s different from that a little bit is also in, am I high in the chorus? There’s like kind of fucked up stabby piano course. There’s not a lot of like piano, piano, and they’re kind of just doing. And once you hear it, it’s like, it’s like one of those little things buried in a Juicy J beat where you’re like, ah.

But that’s the main thing I hear now. and then that la la la synth, the sort of Hoover sent, if you want an example of that on this record that is right in the lead up to the chorus on things are getting better. and I remember the first time that I heard that, in the rock context, it reminded me of Queen.

And the way Brian May, it seemed like he was like sucking a, big sound out of a small tube. the Killer Queen is an example, it’s just like a thousand points of light going through a small hole. all these sounds have a phenomenology and like if you endure enough interviews with Pharrell, he talks about synesthesia a lot.

So I think there really is something legitimate to the sensory experience of the textures on this record that are best experienced through the keys.

Cliff: I think to add a little bit of supporting evidence to what you’re pointing out. One bit we haven’t mentioned yet. So Chad, Hugo, is and was a saxophonist and pianist who had a background in jazz. So the, the idea of doing a few different things, but among several things you’ve mentioned, like adding sevenths to chords to create slightly different sounds.

And then also they would go on to talk about using this move on some of their justified production and songwriting, but also apparently run to the sun as an example of this. Where in, in a bridge or a pre-course or something, they would shift from minor to major key to sort of give it a. A, a surprising sensation in that shift into it and then kind of come back out of it, right?

They weren’t necessarily shifting fully into major keys. They were doing so momentarily to give themselves permission to play a seventh chord in a major key to make a different type of sound. And like those sorts of things, like, or even the occasional weird, you know, syncopated beats or slight change, like that’s, that is jazz shit.

Once they make you do jazz, your brain works that way. So to me there’s, there’s very little doubt that there’s probably a lot of Chad, Hugo in all of the little moments that feel like they’re perfect and create a cherry on top for whatever it is they’re doing. so trying to give him as much of the flowers as he can because you mentioned him being ostensibly the quiet one, he just doesn’t record vocals,

so. He, he should get all the other flowers that he deserves as well. And I think that’s really cool.

Kyle: Run to the Sun is another great example that, that’s actually maybe my favorite song on

the record. The, the

Ascending Keys on that great example. I, I love that chorus. I sing that chorus all the time and I have, I remember driving around in my truck being a Lovesick puppy singing that chorus to myself, even with the radio off.

Man, I love that song. That’s a good song. You remember. Do you remember our friend Natalie? Do you remember Natalie Williams now? Natalie Davis. I’d be remiss if I win a whole episode

without, and

Cliff: Yeah, Of

Kyle: Cummins, I I’d be remiss if I didn’t say she’s helped perpetuate my love of any RD and Pharrell over the years, and that that’s another core memory.

they attract. wonderful. One of one people, it’s a thing to bond over, but I remember her liking run to the sun specifically.

Cliff: Fantastic. I do think one thing that’s funny, one, one kind of quick thing that popped to mind for me, maybe, maybe it’s technically two we’ll see. One is I think we’ve talked a lot about the drums. We’re agreed that the drums are clutch important. Cool. All that stuff on this record. Two, to really put people in a time machine and put your brain inside 2002, though this.

At the time this was considered frantic drumming.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: this was a, a wild feeling to have not only live drums, but have them be that lively. And I’m not sure I would’ve remembered that sensation unless I had gone back and read a few things from around that time period. so one quote was from the pitchfork review.

So this is another good one. In talking about the transition in re-recording, they said Pharrell, Chad and Shay took the drum tracks off most of the album and added a drummer who could have easily cut his teeth in a slip not cover band.

Kyle: Oh man.

Cliff: While rap metal 1 0 1 drums bang away in the background, the baselines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band, which again, I told you this was the most pitchfork of all pitchfork reviews.

I mean, what a time to be alive. This is what everything sounded like from them back then. But like on top of that, in another quote, I heard honestly it might even be from the same thing, but another quote. The result is an album’s worth of hot to death. Neptunes hooks and bass sounds tainted with the despicable edition of rap metal drumming and distorted guitar

Kyle: Get the fuck outta here, bro.

Cliff: So not that any of that stuff was right, but I think it’s cool to kind of remember that This was new in a number of ways that felt surprising at that time, but we didn’t have all the verbiage to talk about why it was specifically so different or why it felt so different or sounded different.

And so I think that’s one cool kind of phenomenon of the thing. I, I mean, at this point, another modern equivalent of this would be like the b between the spider mob and, and Neptunes and NERD connection. It would be like, you know, we’ve talked about seeing, the last band we saw before COVID was the Free Nationals, the backing band for Anderson Pop.

And

Kyle: Thomas P on drums.

Cliff: so I was about to say, so Thomas Pri is playing drums, the fact that Thomas PRI is playing drums in a backing band for hip hop. if you know anything about Thomas Pri like that, that would’ve been insane back then in 2002, like that would’ve been too much drumming to them, to most people,

Kyle: it’s simply too much drums.

Cliff: Right. I’m sorry, Thomas. I need you to do less. interesting. I think moment I, you know, I never would’ve ridden a dissertation on like the evolution of popular music drums from 2002 to 2006, but like you already talked about earlier, the turning of the corner into like Mars Volta and all that weird shit thinking of two much drumming.

There it is just around the corner. And like, it’s really interesting to go back and think about how, even in those quotes, right, they’re, they’re characterizing and judging a style of drumming and associating it with quote rap metal, which is like not really a term that we even use anymore. Like just what a wild moment to try to rationalize what they were doing and a connective thought to that.

For me was when I thought about then all like the stuff that Baby Doll brought up for me and just like, oh, the indie shit is happening and you know, so many kind of strange things are happening all at once. And this concept of, yeah, I mean you mentioned like Tyler, the creator eventually being very inspired by this, but we didn’t have Tyler, the creator back then, and all of a sudden I had another really great moment like, oh, Andre 3000 represented this as a singular person to the degree that I probably wouldn’t have known that they were Aping Parliament or funkadelic, whatever in some of these songs because I just would’ve gone eventually, whatever, a couple of years later.

Oh, this is, uh, the love blow.

Kyle: The love below is such a good compliment to this record.

They pair really nicely

Cliff: totally.

Kyle: together. They’re both, and they’re both, insane.

Cliff: Yes, exactly.

Kyle: you know, the older I get, I know we’ve talked a number of times on the podcast about like, imagine dropping the needle on are you experienced in 1967 and there’s no world in which you’re prepared for that even 50 years later.

I don’t think I’ve ever let my daughter listen I’ve ever put on Hendricks for my 5-year-old. but I feel like it’s gotta be, I mean, no pun intended, an experience where it’s like, Nope, this is important. this is Jim Jimi Hendrix.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: there is a bit of that feeling with a level below and to a lesser extent, like in, I guess in a sneakier way with this of like, you are hearing something that is going to change everything forever.

And that’s not overstating it. Everyone from Noriega to, that Vulture Magazine writer to Virgil Ablo. Virgil said, this record described a whole generation of young black kids and artists who have since been determined to be themselves and jump through that door that was opened by them.

we’re not overstating it. Other luminaries who have similarly changed the game have said that about them. The rat metal thing really pisses me off. I feel like we need an antidote to that from what other people said about it. So Paul Lester wrote this Ha, geography of Pharrell called In Search of Pharrell Williams.

I checked it out from my local library. ‘Cause those things still exist

and that’s right. That’s right. I hope I get enough points to get a personal pan pizza for this.

Cliff: Hell yeah.

Kyle: he said it had an unusual rhythm, neither rock nor r and b, but somewhere in between melodic and jazzy mellifluous. Oh, that felt good. Only with moments ofra like Steely Dan jamming with the stooges. So Spy mob. Steely Dan is always the number one band that they talk about. steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, which when I listened to their record, that’s what I heard. Todd Rundgren, spacey power pop stuff. Stevie Wonder Slice, stone and seventies Pop.

Steely Dan. Weirdly, having a moment like crowbar, weirdly having a moment because of kids on the internet and their, or Boris of disaffection or whatever. but steely Dan and the Stooges. thinking about the Stooges in relation to the strumming. I can hear down on the street when I listen to some of these songs and there is a youthful primacy, there’s a youth energy to both of them.

And like Pharrell and Iggy Pop 30, 40 years ahead of their time on, on movement making and staying ahead and evolving, radically evolving ever since. I don’t, we could do a whole, we could do a whole tight 30 on Steely Dan, and I bet nobody appreciate it. So we’re not going to, Radiohead is the one-off, I think capitalize extremely white guy music that I think anyone is ever gonna get from Tune dig. We did that to see how it felt, to vacation in the Midwest, so to speak. And I can’t speak for Cliff, but I can speak for myself and I say I’m never gonna do that shit again. We got Husker do and we got Radiohead and the back catalog

Cliff: Jesus. Those don’t deserve to be associated steely Dan. Uh, I can appreciate that. They offer a mirror for people with latent OCD who don’t understand themselves, who then find out, wait a minute, there was a whole musical group like this. yeah.

yeah.

Kyle: sorry, the steely Dan always amounts to a punchline in my head. It’s like, you recorded how many takes and it, you recorded that many takes and it turned out like this. This was where you ended.

Cliff: it’s like incredible plating for a McDonald’s value meal. You know, this looks sick, bro. Like, yeah, no, you crushed it.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s, the bear. Yeah.

Cliff: It’s got the Rick and Morty Chuan sauce and everything like, hell yeah.

Kyle: you should have, you should have stuck with the Italian beef, but instead you’ve locked yourself in the freezer and you’re thinking about killing yourself. It was not worth it. We were all enjoying the Italian beef.

Cliff: So in order to self-manage, because we’ve made this joke before podcast. Now podcast is here. Podcast been running for a minute and we have probably infinity more to say anyway. So how about we just turn the corner into like, alright man.

Kyle: why use few word when infinite word will do trick?

Cliff: Right, that right? Yes. Why don’t we just turn the corner and delight. What do we do now? Because I know you have a take on this. Uh, I’ve tried to express mine throughout, but can probably pepper in a little bit more. But like, we, me and you have our balance of gifts and talents and, uh, anytime we have anything mildly hip hop related, if someone wants a better starting point, they are going to go through you unapologetically.

So with no actual pressure, me on a journey, man.

Kyle: There’s very little hip hop, I would say on my

Cliff: I love this already.

Kyle: ripples list.

Cliff: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: well, hold on. What do you have? I want to see how much we diverged or didn’t.

Cliff: I have mixed feelings. On this a little bit, but I’ll, I’ll shut myself up and try to keep it quick. But we, we can laugh in a dark way. right now

when We are recording, I, yeah, well, alright. I just, I gotta do this little, this little guy and then step on top of it here. Okay. We’re living in a time at this moment where, I don’t know if I should talk about how much I enjoy Clipse because one of the members of Clipse may or may not be involved in the, the largest, terrible, bad, evil thing that’s ever happened.

Kyle: as the Zach Fox caption on Instagram recently said, I’m in her dms, you and them files.

Cliff: Jesus Christ, so I am gonna be as fair as I can in this moment. It’s entirely possible we’ll get more information at some other point, and Maybe that’s not what it all looks like. So I’m gonna just put all that there and say, unfortunately, or fortunately, both new and old clips came to mind pretty directly as a result of all of this shit.

for previously good reasons and for now, dubious ones. Nevertheless, Clipse is a good place to go. Hip hop wise, I think it is in the family. It’s awesome. Like I’m, the new album is good, so I’m really hoping we get some good news about the people involved in it. Yeah, clips. Clips brought Drake’s Health Bar all the way down so Kendrick could yeah. Yes, so that’s one easy one for me, for sure. You know, I’ve tried to mention in general, my jumping off points are less about particular artists at this point and more about the. Interest in finding a noise and then chasing that noise around for a while. That was fun. I, this is overly simplistic, even by my standards, but honestly, what I have been doing, and now will probably continue to do for a little bit in the shadow of finishing this recording, is listening to Neptunes Produce songs on absolute repeat, nonstop shuffle straight through.

I don’t give a shit anymore. You sent me a playlist and I have not stopped listening to it because it at once has, yes, the visceral, nostalgic feel of the songs that came out that I listened to in my car in high school, like you can hear them in the student parking lot type stuff. But, It’s also given me a chance to put my adult brain back on Neptune’s Purdue songs from a time where I didn’t have an adult brain to put on it. And so I’ve I’ve just uni ironically enjoyed going back through in that direction and learning more about the production outside of that. All my shit’s weird man, like every little tendril led somewhere strange.

Bobby James, the track made me remember that I love Channel Orange and I’m going to listen to that forever.

Like it can, yeah. It so it, it connected back through those things. You know, we mentioned during tape you the kind of funk. Directional aping in general that they do on some of these tracks.

And especially that one on my way of thinking that thought I went, oh yeah, that’s right. Childish Gambino did this exact thing with a whole ass record. I think I’m gonna listen to that with new ears. So just, it’s really taken me around to kind of different spots. but I gotta say, as opposed to, settling on a few specific corners to Chase, I didn’t end up doing that one here.

I just, the whole world feels bigger.

Kyle: I didn’t think about Donald Glover. but man, Pharrell, Pharrell flew so. Donald could blast off the whole shtick of black nerd with a backpack. Then turning into, I’m going to be everything that I’ve ever wanted to be. You’re, you’re going to watch every multitude I’ve ever wanted to try on. He had a great archetype.

And Pharrell, I’ve never connected those two before, but that’s a pretty profound connection. so I have one idea with two sort of branches. to me the idea of Pharrell and Chad and Shea and Star Trek is, is the zeitgeist, but better moving the goalpost, capturing the zeitgeist in their hands, picking it up outta the ground and moving the goalpost of it.

Like it would be smarter over here. The light hits it better over here, everybody keep dancing, but I’m just gonna slide the DJ booth down 30 degrees for the feng shui, that, that type shit. so the two branches are one. This record came out on Virgin Records co-founded by Richard Branson.

Um, so the record label that became the airline, another thing without precedent, I failed to appreciate the complexity of Virgin Records’ role in popular culture. And the enormity of it. But that’s what Virgin Records has done. And I’m not here to defend or celebrate Richard Branson or any shit. Like, you know, I’m not a major record labeled defender or champion.

I’m, I’m not gonna wear a Virgin record shirt at a show anytime soon. But I find it really interesting that so Virgin’s first release was Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield in 1973, which then became the Sound of the Exorcist movie, which was a profound culture shift, the music and the film experience.

And I only learned through this podcast that that was Virgin was founded to put that record out because they heard it, they liked it. They took it to six labels, apocryphally, they took it to six labels who all wouldn’t sign it. And so they said, fuck it, we’ll put it out ourselves. How hard could it be?

Uh, so I respect the punk ethos of that. They then went on to do a bunch Ofr Rocky stuff. the big, the most powerful example is Phra Tangerine Dreams, phra, which we covered. So like connecting Tangerine Dream and NERD, Tangerine Dream. And the Neptunes was like, oh. I never would’ve thought to connect those two things, but yes, of course they are.

and the same, the same music that could be an NFL Fever 2002. Also having an artist that reached all the way from the seventies into being the score for Grand Theft Auto five is like, yep, spiritually aligned. But Virgin also put out, nevermind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols watershed moment. Then they became the label of New Wave Culture Club.

Uh, their first number one record on the label was Human Leagues. Don’t You Want Me? They put out Ecstasy and then they would go on to put out everything from the Spice Girls to 30 Seconds to Mars, to the Chemical Brothers, to Florence in the machine to Cliff one that you’re going to roll your eyes 360 on DC talk.

Their major label releases were on Virgin. they also had a publishing arm that they set up to, get another revenue stream off of songwriters. But they did it for a lot of songwriters that I really respect. Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osborne Nirvana tool. Lenny Kravitz, tears for Fears, orchestral maneuvers in the dark, and on and on and on.

And in 1992, they signed the Rolling Stones to a $45 million deal for all of their post 1970 releases. In addition to stewarding their back catalog, put out a Voodoo lounge and bridges to Babylon and saw sort of a resurgence era for the Stones after a very dark eighties. And then were like tangentially involved with everything from, Taylor Swift to Nile Horan and all manner of things.

So like all of those things, broadly speaking are like better than your average bear in terms of mass appeal stuff. So zeitgeist, but better. had an appreciation for that, like that being a sort of through line because there’s no musical through line for that. It was just a like, let’s find shit that’s gonna raise the cultural vibration, but it’s gonna move people.

then I was like, well, who are some artists that I think embody that as well? The first thing that came to mind with like, who’s NERD right now? It’s turnstile like a hundred per, if you’re looking for the feeling of NERD in 2002, it’s turnstile. Turnstile is way better. Mu musically love and respect to Sky Mob, spy Mob.

but I thought of Turns Island Angel Dust and the, the Baltimore scene. I thought of Justice Trip being a like. Maybe he’s a Shea Haley type where he is underappreciated for his role in being a culture shaper, an influencer in the non-social media way, like somebody who you should actually follow.

’cause everything they are into is cool. you know, I know they’re not our favorite band, but Drain is another example. They’ve just like being at Drain set, at Furnace Fest felt like NERD on the liquid mix tour, where you’re just like, what the fuck is happening right now? And it’s very positive and colorful and they’re taking old things and making them really new.

Rosalia I mentioned that new record of hers feels radically different than anything I’ve ever heard before. Ko Vandal who’s being sort of championed by Fred Durst and others right now, eco Vandal, their new song, Molly, e every song kind of feels like a moment that they feel like they could break out, in the vein of hip hop that has mutated into something else entirely. Doug, that new ASAP Rocky record, don’t be dumb, is.

I mean, if it doesn’t wind up being one of my favorite hip hop records ever, I’ll, I’ll be surprised. I’m blown. I cannot stop listening to it. I’m blown away by it. I can’t believe he’s this deep into his career, his prolific career, and he’s still innovating the way that he is. But I, ASAP, mob and specifically Rocky, just the fashion, the visuals, the inventiveness that’s got the same feel and like he’s getting older and he is talking about husband shit and dad shit now.

So it’s not the same exactly as, NERD, but like the crassness of brain or tape You is the same as first you stole my flows, so I Stole Your Bitch or something, whatever that line is.

Cliff: This record made me think a long live ASAP though. And the way that that record sounded when it came out and how that’s different now. Like yes.

Kyle: the the 20 11, 20 12

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: like,

Cliff: yeah. Things were evolving, but that record was, was unique sounding and kind of blew everybody’s doors off for a minute.

Kyle: yeah. Denzel Curry. It was another biggie hugely evolving before our eyes. And like Tia Karine in and out of Denzel’s orbit, I think she’s amazing. Haley Williams would tell Eureka Na probably there. I can’t get into her as much, but I, I have a lot of respect for her. I think she’s dope, but I think Denzel’s really great.

Thundercat and like Les, we forget that he was in suicidal tendencies for a number of years, but we talked about him maybe in the OTA episode even. Like, we just keep bringing him up because he’s so sick. And he’s capable of everything from, Mack Miller to silly adult swim stuff, to very complex progressive jazz.

Uh, I think wet leg has the juice. There’s something about the cool, the, like the coolest young people you’ve ever seen in your life of wet leg and dice spits that feels in the vein of NERD. Um, also fake mink and geese and the buzz band ness. We’ll see if Cameron Winters has the juice to go forelle level.

He seems like more of a Julian Casablancas type cat to me by my estimation. But maybe that’s, I’m just making an unfair New York comparison. but the. If you’re scratching your head at geese right now in that new record in their SNL appearance, I think you are simulating the fe. You can simulate the feeling of being seven years too old for the NERD moment in 2002.

Cliff: Well said.

Kyle: Uh, and speaking of the moment, I will once again put on for Charlie XCX, who I think does, has reached a point where she’s doing pop more interestingly than almost anyone in the pop sphere. She deconstructs it really well. I just have come to be so blown away by her as an artist and I can’t wait to see the moment.

and then, you know, here we are right around the Super Bowl moment. Bad Bunny who just won the first ever fully Spanish language album of the year, Grammy and is so in a world of his own, like he so represents all the things that he came from. but he is so unique and his like, you can just put bad bunny stuff on forever.

You’re like, you’re never gonna be wrong putting on one of his records. You’re always gonna feel better when you do. I would also be remiss if I didn’t say. Good time to get into the leys. If you never have, if you love the funkiness of this, I think the funkiness and psychedelic of the leys, like voyage to Atlantis could be your deal.

And then Earth, wind, and Fire. Pharrell and I share a favorite Earth, wind and Fire song and Can’t Hide Love. He said that was the first song that like, made me really get into music. Did any of those bring up any sidecars for you?

Cliff: No, but I’ll do what I usually do. When you go into the mode you just went in, which is I’m gonna file everything and then follow all of them. Yes. I just like, unironically, I never go wrong. Just like listening to whatever knock on thing you thought about. And then just following that it somehow you have consumed a hundred hours of a thing that feels brand new to me every time.

So no nothing new popped up from what you said other than the Heisley brothers, like Yes, of course. Right. Like of course I hadn’t thought of it, but of course. And now I can go chase that too.

Kyle: Who else is gonna give you the Isley Brothers and tubular bells and DC talk other than Rell as an intersection point? You know what I mean? When else am I gonna get to say the band name Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, which I think is one of the greatest group names

Cliff: The last time this could have been possible is when Target was releasing Masimo mixed CDs. Maybe then, maybe then those people,

not a single context outside of that.

Kyle: that reminds me of when you would spend $50 at American Eagle and they would give you a mixed cd. And that was the first time I ever heard LTJ comb. And that was this journey inwards by LTJ Comb. And that was like what made house music come alive for

me because I was like, oh, I will take a journey inwards with this. Damn,

Cliff: I also, I have nothing deep to say about this, but I will just say it has made me wanna listen to Collision course

Kyle: can dig that.

Cliff: not because collision course was so awesome, but just ’cause like in 2004 when that was out, it was just like, oh we’re really trying to do something we you got the hip hop guys involved in this now. Not just pointing at it and going, y’all crazy, but cool. We’re trying. Fascinating.

I’m not sure all the experiments worked as well as they were envisioned to work ahead of time, but I appreciated the effort.

Kyle: to your point about I’m not gonna celebrate anyone who might be in the files too

Cliff: Yes.

Wow.

Kyle: I will at least say of Sean Carter that not only was there collision course, but there was the MTV Unplugged with the roots somewhere around that same time. And I remember having the sensation of putting those two records up against each other and thinking, man, this guy’s trying to transcend the form.

And then I remember having the meta thought of, wow, I sound, I sound like a music writer. Having a thought like that. And then I was like, wow. Don’t ever describe yourself that way ever again. Shut up and go have a Coca-Cola. I don’t know that maybe that feels very ferre to be like, the world does change a little bit with every thought.

You know, like, you make your own reality. I love Interview Magazine ’cause they get interesting people paired up with each other and, you and I love weird, unexpected combinations. They paired Pharrell for Interview Magazine in like 2010 ish, I think, with a neuroscientist. And I was really struck with that interview.

I couldn’t find a way I, like, I, I wasn’t trying to bring this up, but I think the, like essence of what to take away now is maybe in that interview they talked about how they like, came across each other in the first place. And he said that he had found this guy on YouTube and or Discovery Channel and that he reminded him of like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And, you know, we’re, we’re talking about a guy that belonged to a group that named their first album, their label after. Show the Space Show and their album after a curiosity show that Leonard Bemo hosted. So all very much in that, like he sang the Reading Rainbow Jingle, but all sort of in that same mind expansion vein.

He said, both of those guys have a thing. And he called, he was like, they’re rock stars in my opinion. ’cause they have an ability to, he said, translate genius to the masses. And that doesn’t seem like a big astute insight, but like that’s the Neptunes thing. That’s the zeitgeist, but better. It’s the translating genius to the masses.

Like he said, what we all do as art. he said, we’re noticers. We’re sensitives. We notice the rhythms and certain things and we identify them and then we coined terms for them. And most of the world’s not able to keep up. But some people just have that innate thing that allows ’em to express themselves in a way that majority can follow is a rare gift.

I agree. That’s when you’re affecting culture. and later in that interview he was like, I believe there’s a scientific basis. And the neuroscientist was like, I largely agree for believing that we can create physical reality out of our imagination. So I guess like as a much older person than the young.

girl, crazy punk that loved this record for much different reasons. Originally, what about this in 2026? Why now for me is not only is being a, a nerd, all caps with asterisks between, not only is being a nerd, like a critical antidote to an era of anti-intellectualism, but searching, being in search of the infinite, like we talked about with the beauty of the early internet, being in search of searching is survival, uh, in a world that’s struggling to see the future.

You know, so I, I guess I hope whether you’re 17 or 57 and you’re listening to this, that not only will you believe in a future, but you’ll get out there and make it yourself. I.