Apple Music's celebrating N.E.R.D.'s 'In Search Of...' 20-year anniversary
Time flies by when you’re having fun and it’s hard to believe 20 years have zipped by since Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo blessed the world with their unforgettable In Search Of… studio album. To celebrate the insane milestone, Apple Music comes through clutch - as always - with a look back at the albums and artists responsible for paving the way for their moment of reinvention plus the influence on the two following decades.
BEFORE
Stevie Wonder’s Expansive Soundworlds
Wonder’s influence on Pharrell and N.E.R.D is obvious—just listen to “Boogie On Reggae Woman” or “I Wish” next to “Run to the Sun” or “Tape You”: the jazzy chord progressions, the bright surfaces, the way they cut their smoothness with a distinct, percussive bite. But the real legacy is in Wonder’s range. His classic albums (Songs in the Key of Life, Innervisions, Talking Book) aren’t just collections of songs, they’re exercises in world-building, drawing together seemingly disparate facets of his musical imagination—funk (“Higher Ground”), mock-classical music (“Village Ghetto Land”), bitter social polemics (“Living for the City”), and cosmic ballads (“If It’s Magic”)—into a complex whole. Like Wonder 30 years earlier, N.E.R.D took the diversity of the pop-musical world around them—Black, white, alternative and mainstream—and recast it in their own image.
“Planet Rock” and the Hip-Hop Omnivore
On the face of it, a German electronic group and a DJ from the South Bronx don’t have much in common, but that’s the point: The best hip-hop producers have always been magpies, capable of finding material in every source no matter how far-flung. So when Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk for 1982’s “Planet Rock,” it wasn’t just novel cross-pollination, it established hip-hop as a style unencumbered by cultural boundaries—a legacy Pharrell and N.E.R.D have carried out not just in their sound but in their style. The alien voices and brittle drum-machine funk, you hear, but the lesson is bigger: Listen to everything.
Stereolab and the Arty Bachelor
In a weird way, some of the best precedents for In Search Of… are in exotica records from the late 1950s: Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Esquivel; hip, of-the-moment music for swingin’ bachelors whose sophistication never gets in the way of the greater goal of making out. While plenty of modern artists have quoted exotica in texture and mood (Air and Beck stand out), none have synthesized the style as comprehensively as the French band Stereolab, particularly 1997’s Dots and Loops. Pharrell is an avowed fan: In one interview from around the time In Search Of… came out, he offers a beat-by-beat description of the sex he’d like to have to “The Flower Called Nowhere” in real time. You can hear the influence on N.E.R.D’s music (the chintzy, easy-listening synths of “Tape You” and “Bobby James,” the French sci-fi groove of “Brain”), but it’s most pronounced in their overall aesthetic: a mix of frat-house antics and deep musical complexity, state-of-the-art electronics with strip-club sleaze, the high and the endlessly pleasurable low.
A Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongues Age
Pharrell once said that hearing A Tribe Called Quest was the first time he realized music could be art—a big statement, but it bears out. In the case of N.E.R.D, it’s not so much their sound—Tribe is smooth and low-key, N.E.R.D is jagged and brash—as it is their relationship to the culture around them: Like N.E.R.D (their trucker hats and skateboards, their rock-star poses), Tribe (along with their Native Tongue crewmates De La Soul) were outliers, artists obviously in love with the craft and tradition of hip-hop, but whose style—thoughtful, reflective, a little mystic—pushed against the prevailing trends of the time (the gangsta rap of Ice-T and N.W.A., the hardboiled militance of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions) and defied stereotypes of how hip-hop was supposed to look, sound, and feel. In short, they didn’t fit. But in embracing their difference, they helped lead a wave of like-minded artists—their Native Tongue brethren De La and Jungle Brothers, Brand Nubian, and Busta Rhymes’ Leaders of the New School among them—in expanding the parameters of their chosen medium. As good a definition of art as any.
No Doubt and the Rockstar Fetish
Part of the legend of In Search Of… is that they made an “electronic” version of it that they released in Europe before deciding to rerecord it with a live band—a decision inspired in part by The Neptunes’ work with No Doubt on 2001’s Rock Steady. The shift was conceptual—as hip-hop as N.E.R.D seemed, they were also “rock stars,” with all the snotty, anti-establishment attitude that implied—but, more importantly, musical as well: See the rhythmic jerkiness of “Brain” and “Lapdance,” the dissonant guitars of “Rock Star.” Not only were they aligning themselves with contemporary pop-punk artists like blink-182 and Good Charlotte, but older punk-funk hybrids like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Talking Heads, and even early Prince: artists that dissolved the walls between Black and white, commercial and underground, the braggadocio of rap and artiness of underground rock. It’s a move that later gave birth to a new generation of artists, from Lil Peep to Post Malone.
AFTER
There’s a wild argument to be made that blink-182 drummer Travis Barker is one of the most influential people in modern music. It’s not any single album he’s made so much as the world he’s helped carve out: a Venn diagram that includes skaters and rappers, the earnestness of emo kids and the flash of pop stars—a combination so familiar now you hardly notice it (see: Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Uzi Vert, the torment of Juice WRLD’s and rock-star sneer of Playboi Carti), but one that until the last decade or two would’ve never gone mainstream. And while rap’s biggest consumers have long been white kids from the suburbs, it wasn’t until Pharrell and N.E.R.D came along that traffic started to go both ways: not just rap-rock, but a seamless fusion where you couldn’t necessarily separate one from the other
Tyler, The Creator and the Hip-Hop Misfit
Tyler’s never been shy about his love for N.E.R.D: One lyric on 2015’s “DEATHCAMP” said In Search Of… meant more to him than Nas’s Illmatic, what some could consider a heresy on par with an astronomer saying they thought Galileo was overrated. The connection isn’t just in the music (the dense, jazzy chord progressions of Flower Boy and CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST) or attitude (the brash, adolescent wit of Goblin, the conceptual roleplay of IGOR), but in spirit. Tyler was a Black kid from a middle-class neighborhood whose interests bridged junk culture and high fashion, punk and hip-hop, rapping, producing, and extramusical entrepreneurship; Pharrell drew a similar constellation 20 years earlier; and both have become cottage industries unto themselves. In N.E.R.D, Tyler heard people who reminded him of himself: a transformative experience for any kid, but especially for ones who defy type.
From the DJ Tent to the Main Stage
Sometime in the early ‘00s, the sound of The Big Music Festival started to shift. Artists who once might’ve been relegated to the DJ tent took center stage (The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Tiësto), and pop stars like JAY-Z suddenly shared space with indie bands like Arcade Fire. Distinctions between ”mainstream” and “alternative,” already loose from the ‘90s, got looser, making space for hybrids like Major Lazer, M83, and Phoenix—all different artists, but ones who shared a core sense of eclecticism, mixing the live and the electronic, the pop and the progressive, underground style with mass appeal. To paraphrase onetime Coachella headliner LCD Soundsystem, bands were selling their turntables to buy guitars and selling their guitars to buy turntables—a move that N.E.R.D, who made In Search Of… once as an “electronic” album and once as a “rock” one, would’ve understood well.
BEFORE
Synthesizing the Classics With Daft Punk
When Pharrell joined Daft Punk on 2013’s Random Access Memories, it wasn’t just a meeting of marquee names, but a collaboration between artists whose music has always balanced progressivism with a deep, almost reverential love for the past. You wouldn’t call In Search Of… retro for the same reason you wouldn’t apply the word to Random Access Memories: In putting the past in conversation with the present, they make you look at both in new ways—the difference is between taking you somewhere specific and creating somewhere that never existed in the first place. And in that trick lies an argument about something more complex: Maybe the stuff that made us dance then is the same stuff that always makes us dance. Maybe the key to now is then.
100 gecs and the Hyperpop Buffet
There’s a messy , supersaturated quality to In Search Of…, a sense of disparate styles being jammed together and somehow still working. It’s a quality you can trace back to early hip-hop (the blocky collages of Steinski, the layered noise of Public Enemy) and the energy of ‘90s jock jams, but it also captures the cultural buffet of life in a digital age, where everything—art, movies, six-second videos of goats doing backflips, soft soul and hard noise—exists on the same frictionless plane. It’s not that the so-called hyperpop project 100 gecs sounds like N.E.R.D per se, but that they share the same boundless, democratic approach: Nothing is uncool if you like it, and everything belongs if you want it to—a quality that made In Search Of… seem strange at the time, but prescient in retrospect. They satisfy their love of music the best way they can: by making all of it at once.
