FEATURE:
Second Spin
N.E.R.D - Fly or Die
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IT is hard to beat…
a debut album as flawless as In Search of... N.E.R.D Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo and Shay Haley delivered a Hip-Hop masterclass in 2001. My favourite track from that, Rockstar, is one that I spin all of the time! Marrying great rapping and lines together with Rock guitars and big beats, it is both smooth and physically edgy. The album was released in Europe in 2001. On 12th March, 2002, In Search of... was released worldwide. The band recorded the second album, Fly or Die, during 2003. N.E.R.D taught themselves to play the instruments needed to perform the tunes live. It meant that they were more than singers, songwriters and producers – if that was not enough! Some feel that Fly or Die is a weak or less inspired version of the debut. Produced by The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo), there are some really strong songs on Fly or Die. The singles, She Wants to Move and Maybe are incredible! The album starts properly intently with Don’t Worry About It! The title track is awesome, whilst Drill Sergeant/Preservation is a fantastic way to end the album. Despite the odd weak track and nothing quite as electrifying as Rockstar, I think people should listen to Fly or Die. This was during a period where Alternative Rock and Rap Rock was, perhaps, not at its strongest and most prolific. They are genres that I associate with bands like Rage Against the Machine. Perhaps the last really suggest of great acts in these genres was when In Search of... was re-released in 2002.
2004 was an incredible year for albums. Alongside The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free and Kanye West’s The College Dropout, we had Green Day’s American Idiot and Eminem’s Encore. Perhaps Rap was a more prevalent and popular commodity - though Usher’s Confessions was an incredible R&B album. It is a shame that there were some mixed reviews for N.E.R.D’s Fly or Die. I will end with a positive review. This is what AllMusic noted in their assessment:
“Unlike In Search Of..., originally made primarily on N.E.R.D.'s various machines and then reconfigured with assistance from funk-rock band Spymob, Fly or Die is kept almost entirely in-house. The ridiculous cover, along with first single "She Wants to Move" -- and its accompanying video, including a literal translation of the line "Her ass is a spaceship I want to ride" -- thankfully provide little indication of the album's true makeup. And the moments where the Star Trak hand sign gets flipped to a set of devil horns are mercifully fleeting, though "Backseat Love" is undoubtedly problematic -- it plays Dumberer to "She Wants to Move"'s Dumber. ("Lapdance" was Dumb.) The rest of the album isn't just noteworthy for subject matter that skips through child-parent relationship sketches, ecological reveries, and protest songs; the bright, bold Neptunes glaze that normally coats their chart-aimed singles of all stripes is applied to material that will leave many people baffled. The album sees N.E.R.D. rummaging through parts of their record collection that don't normally bubble to the surface in their production work.
Most disarming of all is "Wonderful Place," a seven-minute trip divided into halves. The first shows a chipper Pharrell striding through a sunny meadow, marveling at the natural wonders of the planet in spite of its troubles; with a horn-punched chorus ("My soul's in my smile/Don't frown, just get up get up") and other subtle splashes of Baroque pop elements, it owes equally to Burt Bacharach and the Left Banke. This dissolves into a fading whistle, only to give rise to a dramatic, synthetically orchestral and acoustic-folk tale about a near-fatal family fishing trip. Any parent of the past, present, or near future will be stirred, especially once Pharrell goes falsetto to emphasize the relief of the nearly drowned baby being rescued by his mother. Instead of pausing for effect, the album goosesteps into "Drill Sergeant," yet another two-parter. Half power pop bounce and half tumbling, doomsday pummel, the song pulls no punches with antiwar sentiments that target the government and media, and when a teeth-clenched Pharrell talks about his fear of blowing up, you know he's not talking about fame. Despite the heavy subject matter in a third of the songs, the album nonetheless carries a lighthearted, fun-loving lilt. At face value, Fly or Die is a rather straightforward rock record. To N.E.R.D.'s credit, no one else could've made this particular rock record. Ideas come by the bushel, hooks arrive when least expected, embedded jokes get discovered like Easter eggs. Nobody can tie all of these things together and make them glow quite like this. Apart from a ploy to get some rotation at your local mall's Hot Topic (Good Charlotte's Madden brothers make an appearance), they didn't appear to make this record for anyone but themselves. So while Fly or Die is one of the most creative and ambitious moments of the Neptunes' career, it might also be their least understood”.
On Metacritic, Fly or Die holds a score of 68. There are some really positive reviews for the album, though some were on the fence. Wikipedia highlights a few reviews:
“Rolling Stone (4/15/04, p. 147) - 3 stars out of 5 - "It's fascinating to hear these rap geniuses go undercover as a bar band you might hear rocking Journey covers in a bowling alley."
Entertainment Weekly (4/2/04, p. 62) - "Fly or Die is craftier and more multilayered than its predecessor....[A] set of clever, complex, studio-crafted pop--complete with musicianly, smooth-jazz licks--that doesn't owe allegiance to any one genre." - Rating: A-
Uncut (p. 91) - 5 stars out of 5 - "N*E*R*D can replicate machine hypersyncopation at the drop of a hi-hat. Prog-pop album of year."
Uncut (p. 74) - Ranked #18 in Uncut's "Best Albums of 2004" - "[A]n object lesson in eclectic art-rock....[T]his prog-pop classic reveal further depths of detail with every repeated play."
Mojo (p. 106) - 4 stars out of 5 - "This is an enthusiastic hymn to the terminally uncool, an un-ironic celebration of nerd-culture....They make a party you want to be invited to".
Perhaps people were expecting an album similar to N.E.R.D.’s debut on the follow-up. I cannot really point to many faults at all. Fly or Die is a really solid album that is packed with terrific music and reliably solid production from The Neptunes!
I will end with NME’s. They were a lot more positive and jazzed than many critics with regards N.E.R.D’s Fly or Die:
“When Pharrell Williams once sang, "you can't be me, I'm a rock star" he seemed to be debunking the inherent ridiculousness and monomania that pop stardom brings, as much as he was celebrating it. Well, make no mistake about it - Pharrell is a capital-letters neon-lights Rock Star, quite possibly the finest, brashest, most balls-bared rock star we have at our disposal, and 'Fly Or Die' sees him trying on the title for size and finding that it fits just dandy.
This is still, more or less, a hip-hop record: the nuts and bolts are there, the hefty bass, the beats that thunder like rutting mastodons. But over and above the jeep beats, there is Williams and his wonderful world of whims and why-not?s, painting almost every track in glorious technicolour. He has clearly approached 'Fly Or Die' as the kind of project where the central aim is to show us all how clever he is, and as he flits from musical style to style like a hungry pop bee, you're pounded into submission because HE IS JUST SO GODDAMN GOOD AT EVERYTHING.
It starts as it means to go on - gigantically. 'Don't Worry About It' is truly awesome, a gigantic hard rock classic overladen with Williams' hysterical shrill funk vocals. Just as it reaches a full head of steam, it suddenly explodes into a rapturous, harmony-saturated break that Prince at his most Paisley Park would struggle to best.
‘Fly Or Die' is even more Big Rock, with the chaps slipping in sinuous G-funk breaks for good measure, but the fun really starts when 'Backseat Love' thunders into view. One part 'All Right Now' by Free, one part LL Cool J at his most swollen-bollocked, it is the best, by which we mean nastiest, slice of old skool lasciviousness allowable by law, and makes Har Mar Superstar sound like Cliff Richard. In fact, if Sir Cliff were ever to hear it, he'd cast off the V plates and fuck till his pods dried up. Allegedly.
The most amazing track on the album, though, is 'Drill Sergeant', for no other reason than that it is an absolutely fantastic guitar pop record. In fact, it sounds just like - I shit you not - the N.E.R.D at their most sunshined-up and effervescent and it WILL be a Number One. By way of a contrast, we then get the bludgeoning guitars of 'Preservation', the closest thing on here to 'Rock Star' with its monstrous slabs of fuzz and lyrical belligerence. Said guitar licks call to mind nobody more than everybody's favourite inquisitive smut bloodhound, Pete Townsend. And then by way of another contrast, we get 'Thrasher', which is the most straight-up hip-hop track on here with its unashamedly woofer-threatening thump-beats,were it not for the fact that it comes drenched with Sergeant Pepper-esque string arrangements. Elsewhere, Lenny Kravitz do ('Breakout', with its mosh-friendly chorus), a little more Prince, a little Curtis Mayfield…”.
I would advise everyone to listen to N.E.R.D’s music. If you have not heard Fly or Die, definitely give it a go. Songs She Wants to Move are played on the radio, though you do not really hear too much else from it. I love the album, and I feel it is a worthy follow-up to the remarkable In Search of… The fact Fly or Die reached the top-ten in the album charts in the U.S. and U.K. proves that there was demand for N.E.R.D’s brilliance. Seventeen years later, Fly or Die holds up. It is an album that you…
WILL want to play.