Pharrell Williams’s egotistical fantasy
Talent is not always original. Musician and hit-maker Pharrell Williams, best known for the songs “Happy,” “Get Lucky,” and “Blurred Lines,” felt it was time that his talent be recognized, so he authorized Piece by Piece, the documentary about his rise to success, by borrowing the same style of Lego toy pieces that worked so delightfully for familiar DC Comics figures in The Lego Movie from 2014.
At first, Piece by Piece seems a perfect match for Williams’s post-soul, post-hip-hop artistry that debuted in the mid 1990s. As a child of Virginia Beach, Va., raised on its lively housing-projects lifestyles juxtaposed with middle-class neighborhoods, Williams internalized the cultural divergence. (“I’m from the mud, next to fabled Atlantis.”) He soaked up the various differences between black folklore and the pop mainstream.
This all-American fusion rarely gets articulated, but it’s readily apparent in the marketplace — where consumers, especially youth, share enthusiasm for new music, new toys. The plasticene Lego pieces are graspable material proof. The brightly colored, inanimate pieces are adaptable across all class and ethnicity barriers, just like pop music. Piece by Piece uses cartoon fantasy to illustrate a one-man phenomenon who could snap elements of the American experience into place.
As long as Piece by Piece introduces us to this kaleidoscopic, playtime vision of America, it offers a thrilling proposition: black hit-machine Williams and his Filipino buddy Chad Hugo (a local savant) achieve the utopia that Coppola’s bewildered adults only prattle about in Megalopolis. But this toy-department memoir soon heads toward political dystopia.
As Lego Williams is interviewed by director Morgan Neville (everyone in this documentary is represented as a Lego cartoon creature), Piece by Piece invites viewers to enjoy his story as a fortunate kid’s fable. Williams explains his idiosyncrasy using the term “synesthesia” — “I was seeing colors” when listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Those Days.”
This gift enables Williams to enjoy black pop as a natural American essence. The fact that he isn’t fazed when passing his town’s big houses is partly the benefit of Wonder’s Motown Records legacy that successfully integrated America both culturally and spiritually. It is dreamlike, if not ideal, that the expensive homes that young Williams observes are presented like Lego sets. There’s affection and genius in this, similar to a palpably good tune and unlike the polarizing artifice of last year’s Barbie.
The early scenes of Piece by Piece take us back to the interracial advances of a Lego Soul Train and a Lego Star Trek TV series where everything in a child’s universe is cute, colorful, shiny, and safe.
Better than a conventional talking-heads and-then-I-wrote PBS history, this testament to American success avoids the dreadful “look like me” platitude that so many ethnic celebrities babble to appease the media. “I knew I was different,” Williams says, avoiding the complaints and recrimination that now overwhelm hip-hop and showbiz rhetoric.
When another young black musical wiz, Teddy Riley of the hip-hop group Guy and co-producer of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Dangerous album, comes to a recording studio in Virginia Beach, Williams gets his opportunity. Two black female policewomen (roly-poly Legos) confront Riley: “Do something for the community!” And this cultural extortion, rooted in naïve ghetto socialism — a perversion of the civil-rights heritage — plants a worrisome notion. Williams takes this perversion to be his purpose. “Why me?,” Williams asks, assuming that “no one saw propensity” in any of his peers. This is a tycoon’s ghetto guilt, and it has no place on this game-board-style cartoon.
Earlier, Lego Williams had explained, “My ambitions were more eclectic than anything we had previously done.” Neville prefers celebrities Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, and others who attest to Williams’s “affinity for the streets,” citing “two cultures’ collision.” In due course, the movie loses its inherent witty brightness (beats presented as jewels, profanity as emojis). Even the color palette changes to black-and-white news-footage simulation showing Lego figures in “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests, placards declaring, “We hate cops when they kill us for sho.”
Williams pontificates on racism: “You’re black in relation to the entire system. This is what we think about every day.” That’s far from what A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry told a civil-rights-era journalist: “I don’t think about being black 24 hours a day.”
The 2013 single “Happy” became Williams’s biggest global hit (Legos rejoice in Ukraine but not Russia). He even slights the contribution of the great Nile Rodgers on their Grammy-winning “Get Lucky.” Yet, despite this ultimate Lego transformation — his eyes become double dots when he cries — Williams fails to properly assess achievement. Something gets lost. He proclaims, “I am my own Lego.”