Pharrell Williams is the King of Pop, but he's not Michael Jackson.
That's kind of an important distinction. Skateboard P is the biggest hitmaker in the world, with a ridiculously long string of successes that goes back to before many of his fans were born, but he's not the biggest star in the world.
Part of that is because he's so often 'the guy behind the guy', of course — so many of his greatest hits have come out of other people's mouths. But another factor has to be his approach to live performance. If we're comparing catalogues, the likes of Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars can't hold a candle to Pharrell, but they're certain to sell more tickets when they roll through town because they're master showmen who are guaranteed to deliver arena spectaculars. By comparsion, Pharrell's show feels a little bit like an afterthought.
Let's not get it twisted — I had a great time at Pharrell's show. I think everybody did. He's an absurdly charismatic dude who seems to genuinely enjoy himself on stage and truly appreciate the love audiences have for him. And those songs — well, there's no questioning those songs. 'Get Lucky', 'Happy', 'Blurred Lines', 'Give It 2 Me', 'Hot In Herre', 'Drop It Like It's Hot', 'Beautiful', 'Lapdance', 'Frontin', 'She Wants To Move', even 'Hollaback Girl'; the setlist reads less like one man's discography and more like a Greatest Hits for an entire genre.
But it's not like the show was without its problems. This was billed as a headline performance, but it was really a glorified festival set — Pharrell only graced the spartan stage set-up, consisting solely of a DJ and two dancers, for 55 minutes. (To put that in perspective, support act Baauer — a last-minute addition to the bill — played for just as long.)
The set was a slightly strange, stop-start affair. A minute or two into most tracks, the DJ would cut it short at a seemingly random moment, killing the momentum. This is obviously an occupational hazard when you've sung as many hooks and dropped as many guest verses as Pharrell, but there are surely better ways to handle it — medleys of Neptunes or N*E*R*D hits would have gone over much smoother.
Pharrell had no problem getting the crowd involved (a dozen or so women joined him on stage, and thousands more would have volunteered), but the spur-of-the-moment decision to turn the 'encore' into a repeat performance of 'Happy' while standing in the middle of a circle of fans in the front rows didn't exactly work out as a grand finale, because a solid 90 percent of the crowd couldn't see him. (This is where video screens would come in handy, guys.)
Of course, not everybody has to be Bruce Springsteen and play a four-hour set with multiple encores. Nobody expects that. (There were a few dull moments in Springsteen's BEC show a couple of weeks back, after all.) But this definitely went too far in the other direction, and felt underdone as a result.
I was left wanting more, and I don't mean that in a good way — but I was never bored, either. That has to count for something.
Now get back in the studio and do what you do best, P.
