In 2001, Jane Dark said, "The Neptunes should be artists of the year (for the second year running)," and 2002, their banner year no matter what the Grammytron says, would bring them up to a threepeat. There is no artist-of-the-year category here, so vote on, free people, but your favorite band this year was the Neptunes. Did you know? We understand. You're having a hard time learning the singer's name, because there's a new one every week. These singers, charming Luddites, think they're important because their name is on the product. Head Neptune Pharrell Williams pays this no mind. He knows that he and co-Neptune Chad Hugo have an unprecedented lock on the charts, unless you want to put Holland-Dozier-Holland or the Corporation on the table. Even then, it's hard to say who wins. The Neptunes write, play, and sing on nearly every production they send to market. Lamont Dozier didn't have many solo hits; James Jamerson may be God, but nobody's got a James Jamerson glow-in-the-dark hat. (Except me.)
Last year was pretty oedipal for the 'Tunes—the first time they were commercially and aesthetically more important than Timbaland, who paved the way for their dirt bikes with his Delorean. Play the hits down—Britney, Busta, Clipse, LL, N.O.R.E., Justin, Snoop, Common—and you hear the Neptunes making a mix tape on the Man's dime with Your Dreamboats. I am even convinced Clipse can rhyme now. What did Tim come back with? Ms. Jade? Do we miss Magoo yet? But in the 10th hour, Gandalf pulled out his magic stick and did the Patty Duke on that ass.
"Work It" beats everything on the table, including "Hot in Herre." At first, it sounded like just another great Missy song. But, then, Matrix-style, it crept back out of your body and into your hands. When you woke up, you'd worked it 45 times in a row and lost your job. (That last part's not Missy's fault.) The Roland Rhythm 77 percolates, the sine waves from the balcony, and before Missy's parsed the Civil War, her voice has blended so fully with the knocks and tocks we can't see the seams between woman and machine. The Neptunes may end up producing Bruce Springsteen, Blink 182, and Charlie Rose, but Tim still made "Work It," and that's what those genius grants are for.
If we had space (and a grant), we could draw out the unacknowledged presence in the Neptunes of Mannie Fresh's ultrabrite keyboard stabs, Pharrell's role as the most important black rock star since Prince, Tim's African-ness (hello, Petey Pablo!) versus Pharrell's whiteness (hello, Rolling Stones logo!). But we'll end with the most emblematic differences between Tim and the 'Tunes.
The Neptunes are the first important producers of the 21st century, happy children of the loud, brassy world of digital audio. It's not just how their beats return again and again, deathlessly big like a can-crushing machine. Their ideology is digital. The sounds they pick are clean and the pop thrills they seek are rarely idiosyncratic. The 'Tunes generalize the general, quote big pop moments that worked the first time (the Stones' whoo-whoos, Chuck Brown's "Busting Loose," the keyboards from "Just What I Needed") and make them bigger, shinier, more new. Which, in pop, is the same thing as better. They'll replay an old tune rather than sample it, and that's a serious break with standard hip-hop practice. They have come—grind grind—to pump you up, using performance attributes like execution and impact to trump genetics and content. They are the first of a new cognitive class, working without a genre or a map.
Tim is still a 20th-century artist, the last great hip-hop producer. He loves the dirt in records and the humans trapped inside them. Timbaland wants to find an original somewhere in the recorded past, to archaeologically extend our knowledge of pop, like auteurs Hank Shocklee, DJ Premier, and Dr. Dre. He's trying to recover the past. The Neptunes just want to remaster it. There is no loss in their vision of history.
