longish SFJ piece on Timba and Neps in NY Times Magazine

But here goes (apologies for formatting):

In 1966, the jangle of a 12-string Rickenbacker electric guitar or the resonating overtones of a sitar made clear that today had replaced yesterday. In 1978, a pumping 4/4 beat and squeaky strings watermarked the music. In 1985, a comically large snare drum told the time. What typifies Right Now in 2004 are the sharp beats of three producers from the Virginia Beach area: Timothy (Timbaland) Mosley, 32, and the Neptunes, a k a Pharrell Williams, 30, and Chad Hugo, 29. Turn on any pop radio station in America and you'll hear their work. The song may be nominally pop or R&B, but you'll hear a genetic link to hip-hop. The surface is shiny and the beats are proudly digital, articulated to the point of restlessness. The melodies are flecked with eruptions of the mechanical, as if NASA were hacking the signal. If it's not Timbaland or the Neptunes you're hearing, it's a knockoff.

Timbaland and the Neptunes found success in the late 90's with hip-hop tracks, but they are not strictly hip-hop artists. They use samples and drum machines to make music, but they write songs with bridges and key changes. They are producers who also make records as solo artists and appear in videos. They play instruments when they need to and work in song-based forms like R&B and pop, but they rarely write the bread-and-butter ballads that drive many pop careers. Timbaland is not a trained musician, yet his tracks pulse with complex syncopation and subtle harmonic information. The Neptunes are trained musicians, but some of their best productions are brutal and machinelike.

Rather than specializing in any single part of the songwriting process, the Virginians are creating their own idiosyncratic summations of everything that has worked in the last 20 years of pop. They're harvesters, not crop-burners, and their work is the product of lives lived through digital technology. If you can hear any music you want, all the time, chances are good you'll become an astute judge of what works and what doesn't. Digital technology also enables you to turn what you're hearing in your head into great recordings without waiting for humans, or history, to catch up with you.

After their names weren't submitted for last year's Grammy Awards -- an omission that no one can account for -- the Neptunes have been nominated for Producers of the Year, Nonclassical, this time around, with eight different records cited in the nomination. Timbaland has already won a special Impact Award from the New York branch of the Grammys. He is nominated as a co-writer in the Best Rap Song category for Missy Elliott's ''Work It'' and as one of the producers of her album ''Under Construction'' as well as Justin Timberlake's ''Justified,'' both nominated for Album of the Year. (The Neptunes also produced tracks on ''Justified.'') Tonight's Grammy Awards ceremony will, among other things, christen Virginia Beach as the birthplace of a certain sound, something like Detroit's claim to 60's pop-soul or Seattle's to 90's grunge.

Pop seeks transparency, a language that will read quickly and clearly everywhere. Over the last decade, hip-hop has become that common tongue for global pop, and what we might call Timbatunes are establishing how that language is spoken right now. The collapse of larger categories like pop, hip-hop and R&B is partly a result of their innovations, which are now the default moves for much of pop music. Neptunes and Timbaland tracks fit into D.J. sets alongside German techno, popular Jamaican dancehall and the Asian-British hybrid dance music bhangra. The biggest-selling rock band in America, Linkin Park, uses the kind of sampled beats and keyboards Timbaland and the Neptunes use. At the top of the food chain, the Rolling Stones hired the Neptunes to do a remixed version of ''Sympathy for the Devil.'' Jagger was an early adopter of country rock, disco and rap; his papal nod is, at the very least, an indication that something or someone is not going away.

Vah Beach, as some locals pronounce it, is split in two; a large suburb-filled interior flows out onto a long, thin waterfront. Away from the beach, it could be anywhere in America. The only remarkable feature I came across in the day I spent there was a stream of Navy officers coming and going at a waterfront seafood restaurant. ''There's a large military base in Norfolk,'' Chad Hugo told me. ''My dad was in the Navy. That's what brought him here from the Philippines. Lots of squids here -- that's what we call Navy guys.''

Heading out to the Neptunes' studio near Princess Anne Road, one of Virginia Beach's bigger arteries, you can't really tell which part of town does what. Is this the ''bad'' part of town? The ''good'' part? There are few tall buildings, and no particularly shiny centers of commerce or sin. ''Ain't nothing spectacular about it'' is how Timbaland described Virginia Beach to me. ''Ain't nothing going on out there, really.''

In Hugo's terminology, Virginia Beach is ''sort of suburban-slash-melting-pot-slash-conservative. We're on the northernmost part of the Bible Belt.''

Punk musicians funneled the boredom of suburban living into a potent language of teen frustration, and hip-hop artists from East New York to Compton have used place as a way to discuss disenfranchisement and systematic exclusion. Timbaland and the Neptunes have their own, less aggressive take on place. The space-age keyboards, weird noises and abstract sequences that mark their sound create a vivid fantasy world, a playground free of sticky agendas. Their music is hard but their own lyrics rarely are. In ''Straight Outta Virginia,'' a recent song with the local rapper Magoo, an old friend and collaborator, Timbaland brags about going to a high-school football game.

The rapper and singer Melissa (Missy) Elliott, 32, is another prominent Virginia Beach-area native, and among her many collaborations with Timbaland is the 2002 hit ''Work It'' (which introduced the phrase ''ga-donk ga-donk donk'' into everyday speech). To her, Virginia Beach almost defies description. ''There's nothing in particular there,'' she says. ''We'd sit on the beach, go in different stores. We didn't come from a place like New York or L.A., where there are big events in a club. A lot of music we made was just done in the house, and it kind of circulated through friends on the block, on tapes.''

Set aside their sonic qualities, and you'll find another reason Timbaland and the Neptunes have connected with so many listeners. They are a different generation of hip-hop -- not the pioneers who struck out to settle new lands, but the settlers who bought in and modified what they found. Like many of their listeners, they didn't grow up in cities. ''We're from the suburbs,'' Williams says, ''and the suburbs are pretty much the same everywhere you go, just like the projects are the same everywhere you go.''

Hugo and Williams met at summer camp for gifted kids. ''Pharrell was playing drums, and I was playing tenor saxophone,'' Hugo recalled recently. ''Have you seen that movie 'School of Rock'? That was us, except we played jazz standards like Herbie Hancock's 'Watermelon Man.' ''

In the early 90's, Williams and Hugo started a hip-hop group with a friend of Williams's from junior high school named D.J. Timmy Tim, later known as Timbaland. The group, which also included Magoo, was called Surrounded by Idiots, but they disbanded before recording anything. ''Tim was sick back then,'' Hugo said, which he meant as the highest praise. ''He was doing Anita Baker and Michael Jackson loops.''

Though Timbaland and the Neptunes sometimes sound like a bolt from the blue, their music is rooted in what came before; their sharp-edged funk is drawn from ''new jack swing'' of the 1980's, a more aggressive, almost mechanical form of R&B heard in songs like ''Groove Me,'' by the New York trio Guy. The man responsible for producing Guy and creating this style was Teddy Riley. In the late 1980's, Riley was considering a move out of his native Harlem. ''I came down to Virginia Beach on a day trip with a bunch of my friends from Harlem,'' Riley says. ''We chartered two buses and came down for a picnic. I said, 'If I wanted to move anywhere, it would be here.' It's so calm, the atmosphere. So I moved my whole operation down here in 1990.''

Riley set up his Future Recording Studios near the Princess Anne High School, and then held a talent show there. ''The Neptunes played -- they were a band then,'' Riley recalled when I met him. ''Chad was the D.J., the keyboard player and the saxophone player all at once. It was like R&B meets techno/new wave/hip-hop. It sounds the way they sound now.''

Impressed, Riley invited them to come by the studio. ''Pharrell went in and freestyled for him for like an hour, and then he wrote Teddy's verse on 'Rump Shaker,' '' Hugo says, referring to the 1992 hit by Wreckx-N-Effect. ''That's when we started writing for Teddy.''

Riley liked Williams and Hugo but wasn't quite sure how to use their talents. ''I tried to keep them as busy I could,'' he says. ''I didn't have time to put out a record on them, but I didn't want to disappoint them. I gave them stipends, just to keep them motivated.'' (Riley himself remains active -- he is talking to several major music companies about an executive role.)

According to Hugo, the nascent Neptunes tried their hand at making ''spacey, psychedelic R&B'' but soon gravitated to hip-hop, where there was more popular interest. Finally, in 1998, they hit it with ''Superthug,'' a song they produced for the rapper Noreaga. The beat was news all by itself, clearer and fiercer than anything around it, as if the Neptunes had simply boiled away all the eccentricities in hip-hop and revealed the DNA of rhythm and noise. For months, it was MTV's instrumental music of choice between videos. ''We were trying to blend hip-hop with rock, but we didn't know how to play guitars, so we made that sound on the keyboard,'' Hugo says.

When they first started making records, the Neptunes worked in New York. Now their base is Hovercraft Studios in Virginia Beach, located on a cul-de-sac. An oil painting of the planet Saturn takes up a whole wall. The studio was called Mastersound in the 90's, when Timbaland and the Neptunes sometimes worked simultaneously in the adjacent rooms. ''There was a great moment here,'' Andrew Coleman, the Neptunes' longtime chief engineer, recalled not long ago. ''It was 1999, and Missy and Tim were working on Missy's 'Da Real World.' Chad and Pharrell were working on Kelis, and they were doing 'Caught Out There.' ''

They especially liked the song's chorus, Coleman said. ''Tim and Missy could hear Kelis screaming, 'I hate you so much right now!' They had their ears right up to the door. They loved that song. Tim was like, 'That's crazy.' Then they went right back to work.''

The Neptunes bought Mastersound in 2002. When I visited last fall, a tour bus -- with a huge picture of Williams reclining among several young women painted on the outside -- was parked in front of the nondescript concrete studio. Inside, Hugo played me a track in progress from ''Fly or Die,'' the coming album from N.E.R.D., one of the Neptunes' side projects. The song I heard was ''Don't Worry About It,'' a one-chord vamp based on an organ that wouldn't be out of place on an old reggae record. Williams is screaming ''Ow!'' and ''Baby!'' like James Brown, then crooning ''Don't worry about it'' like a very young Michael Jackson. After two minutes, the song shifts radically into a long bridge, and Williams begins singing ''Ah,'' like the backing vocals from the Beatles' ''Magical Mystery Tour.'' As Williams sings, he quotes the rappers Mobb Deep: ''There's a war going on outside no man is safe from,'' a line from the well-respected 90's single ''Survival of the Fittest.''

What makes the sound new? It shows deep appreciation for 60's rock, but the rhythms are informed by hip-hop. When Williams strolls down Penny Lane, he's got Mobb Deep in his head. Hugo and Williams play well, but not necessarily well enough to play this song top to bottom in one take like studio musicians. ProTools, a program for recording and editing music directly on a computer hard drive, allows them to seamlessly stitch together the best bits they've played and make half-human/half-computer composites that sound as if they've been done by a live band.

''I want my live records to sound like they're programmed and my programmed records to sound like they're live,'' Williams says. ''Once you can label us as something, we want to get away from that. After we did 'Superthug,' everybody started making loud, left-wing, rambunctious records. You have to be brave enough to go: 'O.K. I'm gonna make a quiet record.' ''

That explains how the Neptunes came to work with Babyface, a skilled singer, songwriter and producer who specializes in polished love songs. In need of a fresh sound in 2001, he hired the rising Neptunes to produce a couple of tracks on his album ''Face 2 Face.'' The first single was ''There She Goes,'' a syncopated love song. The big, blocky shuffle is Neptunian, but the gorgeous chord changes in the chorus could have been XTC or another quirky British rock act. Williams sings all over the track, a brave move next to a controlled pro like Babyface. Yet Williams pulled it off.

Whoever the collaborator, the Neptunes have a fairly consistent way of working. ''Usually I start with some chords that move me and then a whole track goes around that,'' Williams says. ''I'll send it to Chad and he'll add a section or a sound.''

Hugo described his role modestly. ''I consider myself a musician for hire,'' he says. ''Pharrell writes all the songs and the ideas. Usually, he puts down a beat and a melody, writes a song, and then I'll fill in the blanks.''

Depending on the artist the Neptunes are producing, Hugo can get more involved. With Kenna Zemedkun, 28, a friend from high school who goes professionally by his first name alone, Hugo produced a juicy, florid album called ''New Sacred Cow,'' which came out last year. Imagine romantic rock bands of the 1980's like the Cure and U2 rewired with bigger beats -- that's the sound. Kenna and Hugo recorded most of the songs together in a rented house in California. Kenna played keyboards and sang, while Hugo played and programmed the rest. ''Chad is a living, breathing chord,'' Kenna says. ''He dreams and breathes in music.''

Complicating matters for the Neptunes these days is that Hugo and Williams are often not in the same place. ''Chad stays at home with his family a lot now, so we e-mail each other beats,'' Williams says. ''I did a lot of songs on my bus this year, when I was on tour with N.E.R.D.'' Williams also frequents studios in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Technology allows them to make music wherever they happen to be and handle many projects simultaneously -- when I saw Williams, he had started work on tracks for Gwen Stefani, the rapper Jadakiss and the pop superstar Beyonce, and he was finishing the Clipse and N.E.R.D. albums. For anyone trying to construct a theory of Virginia Beach, it bears remembering that while the sound may have come from there, it is no longer tied to the place.

It was almost 80 degrees in Aventura, Fla., and Timbaland was working inside the Hit Factory/Criteria Recording, a boxy white building where he spends more than half the year now. He was about to start LL Cool J's new record and would soon be heading to New York to produce an updated version of ''We Are the World,'' the charity single from the 1980's. He had just finished working on new albums by the R&B singer Brandy and the rapper Cee-Lo. ''It's crazy that these two boys from Virginia run the whole of New York,'' Timbaland said, referring to himself and Williams.

As I sat there, Timbaland was remixing ''White Flag'' by Dido, a soft-spoken English singer whose melancholy love songs fall between Sting's romantic odes and contemporary dance music. He was hired to overhaul the song so that it might connect with a different audience than the original did. (Dido herself was not present.) Unlike the Neptunes, Timbaland uses live instruments only occasionally. The body of his work is built from keyboard sounds and short samples, little crumbs of songs that only music nerds would recognize. Timbaland rarely borrows another song's melody or structure; instead he finds neglected moments of noise and excitement that fit into his larger web of keyboards. It's the way hip-hop producers often approach making beats and loops, but Timbaland does it to create entire pop songs.

The engineer, Demacio Castellon, played back ''White Flag'' at eye-wobbling volume. Timbaland is not tall, but he cast a large shadow in his Yankees jersey, black jeans and shower slippers worn over white tube socks. The Neptunes could be from anywhere in the country, but Timbaland reads quickly as Southern. He moves deliberately, and his speaking voice has a rich twang. Timbaland piles up sentence fragments quickly, reorganizing his thoughts as he goes. If there were a part for a grouchy, patriarchal bear in a Disney movie, Timbaland would be perfect. We met at 10 p.m., some eight hours after our scheduled appointment. Timbaland never mentioned it.

Most of Dido's original recording had been discarded, except for the vocal and string arrangement. Timbaland had filled the space around her voice with a huge drum beat and a simple bass line. As the song repeated, he quickly added and removed new elements. Timbaland tried each idea for a few minutes and then dialed up a new sound as if he was distracted, or simply testing his gear.

On Dido's album of the same name, ''White Flag'' is a strong song, but the lyric's elegant negotiation between guilt and surrender is neutered by the polite production. Timbaland's version turns the whine into a genuine ache. Isolated, Dido's voice is gorgeous, roughed-up but sweet: ''There will be no white flag above my door/I'm in love and always will be.'' Timbaland may have been hired simply to repackage Dido's music, but the song has been served. A man who has never studied an instrument is being paid many thousands of dollars to improve on the work of a busload of professional musicians. Pop opens many doors and this is one: a great record can knock any paradigm out of shape, if only for three minutes.

Timbaland has been doing the same thing for more than a decade now. Missy Elliott explained to me how the connections got made. ''The first time we met, he was doing something with his turntables, saying he did tracks,'' Elliott recalled. ''He started playing the tracks, I started singing -- he had a little microphone. I started writing, and I wrote my first record with Timbaland. It seemed like every day we'd end up over at his house.''

Elliott became part of an R&B group called Sista, and she started working closely with Timbaland. Before long, around 1991, they signed with DeVante Swing, a member of the popular R&B group Jodeci who also had his own production company.

Over the next couple of years, Swing transplanted the Virginians to New Jersey and then Baltimore to perfect their craft. Working with Swing and Timbaland, Elliott's group Sista made its debut album, ''4 All Da Sistas Around Da World.'' Sista released a single, ''Brand New,'' in 1994, but the album was distributed only in Europe. ''I was so bummed,'' Elliott says. ''I told everyone we had an album coming out, and it never did.'' But no one gave up. Swing moved the Virginians once again, this time to Rochester for nearly two years, to work some more. This is where the engineer and producer Jimmy Douglass met Timbaland. Douglass is a veteran of the music wars, an engineer and producer who has worked with the Rolling Stones, Hall and Oates and Gang of Four. ''It was a smart setup,'' Douglass says. ''DeVante had everybody working, writing songs and producing. A bunch of them lived in lofts together. Missy was staying with members of this R&B group Sugah, this group with Tweet. Ginuwine and Magoo lived upstairs and Tim lived in the basement of the studio.'' According to Timbaland: ''DeVante and Jodeci, that was my first thing. Being around them and learning from them was good.''

Elliott was the first to leave the Rochester camp, and Timbaland soon followed. The two started shopping their talents as songwriters and producers. Craig Kallman, co-president of Atlantic Records, was searching for people to produce a 17-year-old singer. ''We had signed Aaliyah and were looking for someone to produce her new album,'' Kallman says. ''Timbaland played me seven or eight beats on my couch. Each one sounded like a hit track.''

Elliott and Timbaland teamed up with Aaliyah to write and produce most of her second album, ''One in a Million.'' The first single was ''If Your Girl Only Knew,'' a sinuous tune easily mistaken for a Prince song. The next single, ''One in a Million,'' gave a taste of Timbaland's deep swing. The vocal harmonies are lush and unusual, and the beat punctures any moves toward conformity. The stuttering rhythm started a trend. Around the same time, Timbaland broke into the Top 10 for the first time with Ginuwine's ''Pony,'' an even more radical piece of sound. It's a sex tune, plain and simple (''My saddle's waiting, come and jump on it'') but the track undoes the smooth operating. A vocal sample -- someone saying a word that sounds like ''Bow!'' -- clumps down the stairs slowly. Huge blank spaces surround the voice and bass line. It's a sound that is both familiar and odd, like Dickens translated into Japanese and then back into English.

After ''Pony,'' Timbaland went on a superindustrious roll. Missy became the public ambassador for Timbaland's unadulterated style while Aaliyah became the blue-chip version, sleek and quiet. (Aaliyah was killed in a 2001 plane crash, and Elliott and Timbaland continue to eulogize her in song.) Timbaland struck up a relationship with the popular rapper Jay-Z, and the two subsequently made some of their best work together, including the 2000 Top 20 hit ''Big Pimpin'.''

''That's one of my biggest classics,'' Timbaland told me as we sat and talked in the studio. ''That record didn't sound like nothing else on the radio. I made about seven classics that you can still play to this day and still rock in the club. And I tell Pharrell, 'When you do that, that's when you get your veteran stripes.' I think he's got about three -- that Nelly song, ''Hot in Herre,'' Mystikal's ''Shake It Fast'' and Jay-Z's ''Give It to Me.'' I'm not talking about records that are hits, but records that still get played for years and years,'' Timbaland continued. ''I like to make it complex because that way, it stays around longer, and you can always listen to it. 'Are You That Somebody?' is still playing, 'Try Again' is still playing. Gotdang 'Cry Me a River' is phenomenal, wipes 'em out. 'Pony' I still hear, 'One in a Million' I still hear; they play it all day down here on the radio, all day radio airplay, 'Get Ur Freak On,' 'I Can't Stand the Rain,' they play 'Love 2 Love U,' that's the all-time classic. I could start naming, boy. I got title belts, you understand?''

Timbaland acknowledged his old bandmate and competitor with complicated praise. ''I love everything Pharrell does,'' he said. ''I like 'Clones' '' -- the album the Neptunes released last year under their own name -- ''but I did hear comments, people saying it's whack. I like that record no matter what, because I know all the hard work he put behind it.''

Timbaland professed to have a simple, unassailable philosophy. ''My thing is 'Who sold the most records?' '' he said. ''That's my friendly competition.'' And who sold the most records? ''Me. That's without a doubt. If you look at the charts, one year, I broke three artists, back to back, and they all sold at least 900,000 copies. Petey Pablo sold 900,000, 'Raise Up' was an anthem, and they still play it in the armies and over in Kuwait.''

When I told him Timbaland's theories, Williams shook his head vigorously. ''No way,'' he said. ''That's cancerous to my spirit. Knowing how many times a song got played on the radio? No. I'd much rather be in the studio, listening to a Burt Bacharach record, listening to chord progressions, studying them and teaching myself to go somewhere else. I want to pull energy from other worlds into my music. Life, love, science, religion, history, that's what I want to pull into my music. Let's face it -- you make a certain amount of money, and after that, no matter how much money you make, it all feels the same. The only real true joy that is new to me every day is discovering music. I don't know how Tim thinks about sales and then goes and makes a beat. That ain't my world. Tim's a genius, though.''

Timbaland's hyperbole is distracting, but his overall point isn't wrong. In more than eight years of making big-time music, he has lapped the field many times over. A few of his stray songs on soundtracks are better than other producers' entire oeuvres -- like the Lil' Kim song ''Money Talks'' from the 1997 soundtrack of the same name. The box-set format, for once, would be entirely appropriate to represent Timbaland.

He got to this point by working fast and furiously. ''Tim will start work for the day, and when he wraps up, at least two songs are mostly done,'' Douglass says. ''Very few songs take more than two days. 'Are You That Somebody?' was written, recorded and mixed in eight hours. Tim came up with the beat, gave it to Static'' -- the nickname for the collaborator Steve Garrett, who sometimes writes lyrics for Tim -- ''and then Aaliyah came in. And then it was done.''

''Are You That Somebody?'' captured the radio in 1998 and never let go. The song is full of huge stops and an uninvited baby, crying. The melody hugs to the bass line and the whole thing lurches about in a way that suggests some unspoken law of pop music is being broken.

It's also a good case study of who does what in this mode of production. Timbaland created what he'd call ''the beat,'' though it is made of more than rhythmic patterns and drum sounds. Timbaland's bass line and keyboards determine the key and the rhythmic inclinations of the tune, while Static's nimble lyrics and melody hew to Timbaland's grid. Aaliyah's soft-edged voice works within this structure to lighten the load and make it pop music.

The words to describe this process are hard to pin down, even when you're sitting in the studio with the creators. Songs are generally called ''records,'' but ''song'' is also used to mean the vocals and lyrics, and people like Static are often called ''songwriters,'' though they're working inside the parameters of the beat. This is how Timbaland described his process to me: ''I'm a one-man show. When I do a song, half the time I do a song, I write it myself or write the hook. Of course, I'm gonna work with Missy, because that's what we do, we tag-team. I use Static and another guy named Walter Millsap. He's a new writer; he wrote a lot of Brandy's stuff.''

Whatever his methods, the pace and volume of Timbaland's work over the last several years have taken their toll. He repeatedly voiced to me a frustration with pop music, particularly the hip-hop end of it. ''It's time for me to retire, because it ain't the same,'' he said. ''Music's almost becoming like damn near toys and cars. It's too easy. That's why I want to go over there to that rock side, but it ain't popping like it used to.''

I asked him what he likes.

'' 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' he quickly answered. ''I was at the Trump in New York, and my assistant Mike was cutting my hair. I was watching 'O Brother.' I was laughing my butt off. And the song came on -- 'I am a man of constant sorrow . . . ' -- and I was like, 'This song is hot.' Next thing you know, I bought the CD and I would bump it in my car just the way it was. People would look at me like, This dude gotta be crazy. No, I wasn't, because this record gonna sell about 10 million. And what happened? It sold 10 million!'' (It sold 6.6 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.)

''The best music right now is country music,'' he went on. ''The old country music, the old bluegrass stuff -- the lyrics in that stuff are incredible. And the damn melodies? Think about Bonnie Raitt. She's country, right? She made the illest song ever, 'I Can't Make You Love Me.' '' He sang me a line: ''Turn down the lights, turn down the bed/Turn down these voices inside my head.''

Timbaland also thinks Pat Benatar's ''Love Is a Battlefield'' is the ''illest song ever,'' and he adores old hits by Men at Work and the Human League. ''Eighties music is music to me,'' he said. ''Those are records that make you feel good, you know? I'm tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do. Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That's music. Norah Jones is music. I love real music that I can play and never get tired of. The stuff I don't get tired of is the stuff that's musical.''

The day after I met him in the studio, Timbaland flew to Atlanta to appear in the video for Cee-Lo's ''I'll Be Around,'' a song he produced. Our appointment for another interview vaporized, but I saw him again -- on TV, sitting next to Mike Tyson at the World Series. The day after I met Williams, he showed up on BET at an awards show. It would be easy to imagine that Timbaland and the Neptunes really do run pop music through some kind of Masonic brotherhood of funk.

Williams, though, is leery of the hype. ''The Neptunes are not the answer to everything at all,'' he told me. ''Some people treat us like that, and that's wrong. They're just going off of the charts, not the music. They make statements like: 'What's in the water down there? The Neptunes and Timbaland!' We're not Michael Jordan, and we don't think we are. We still look at ourselves as rookies trying to get drafted.''

Timbaland, in his way, agreed. ''I need somebody else to come out of Virginia to really see what it is,'' he said. ''Somebody else with a different sound, somebody else that wasn't affiliated with us, that Pharrell and I didn't even know from Adam and Eve.''

Virginia is still home, and every Thanksgiving, Timbaland returns to his old neighborhood, including a stop at Hovercraft Studios. ''Yeah, every Thanksgiving, Tim swings through,'' Coleman, the engineer, told me recently. ''It was real mellow this year. Pharrell and Tim were talking about these people in the Top 10. Pharrell would say, 'No, that record is whack,' and Tim would say: 'Yeah, but it's selling. They did it.' ''

Sasha Frere-Jones is the music critic for Slate.

OH DEAR GOD NO

Actually, when IS he going to produce Shania? Or has he?

This is my favorite part of Ben Ratliff's Norah Jones piece from yesterday: "The persona in her songs-let's not call it Ms.Jones herself, because her life couldn't be this dull-might have lived practically anywhere in the developed world, at any time during the last century."

i enjoyed both of those stories. especially the part where neil strauss talks about how he was asked to write courtney's obit a while back.

sorry for the off-topicness(kinda). didn't want to start a whole thread.

I don't understand this argument at all; for starters Pharrell's been going less time (?99), but it's always asserted rather than reasoned. What was Timbaland's first job?

Wasn't that what the Bubba Sparxxx album was all about?

Surely not?

I'd be mildly enthused.

I really liked the article and if I have anything resembling thoughts I may show up tomorrow. Though having said that, Tim may have some interesting avenues for the year if he can make his 'Kiley Dean is New Pop' gab amount to something (also including other pop sirens and so forth) and maybe some expansion on the Bubba country sound.

"Timbaland also thinks Pat Benatar's ''Love Is a Battlefield'' is the ''illest song ever,'' and he adores old hits by Men at Work and the Human League.
''Eighties music is music to me,'' he said. ''Those are records that make you feel good, you know? I'm tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do. Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That's music. Norah Jones is music. I love real music that I can play and never get tired of. The stuff I don't get tired of is the stuff that's musical.''

"Hugo described his role modestly. ''I consider myself a musician for hire,'' he says. ''Pharrell writes all the songs and the ideas. Usually, he puts down a beat and a melody, writes a song, and then I'll fill in the blanks.''"

Chad makes that shit sound GOOD!

This seems like a fairly even partnership to me.

You have considered that SFJ might not believe he's fallen off?

The ennui of a couple of burned-out multimillionaires as expressed in a couple of offhand quotes does not=rap's self-loathing reembrace of rock

Through the magic that is Babelfish, I bring you:

OLIVER TWIST: TO ITALY AND BACK
Between other public constructions in one determined city, from that for many reasons he will be prudent to abstain pointing out and which I will assign to no fictitious name, there is an ancient communal land to the greater part of the cities, large or small: to spirit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse it has been sopportato; a day and date that I do not have to disturb same in order to repeat, on since it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this phase of the commerce to all the events; the mortality article of which the name it is premised to the head of this understood it.

It's not just Tim who's checking for Coldplay. Virtually everyone was on Coldplay's dick at the MTV Music Awards - at the risk of sounding repetitive, it's basically the pop equivalent of rock bands worshipping Massive Attack right through the nineties. Bigging up someone who makes music entirely outside your own brief still allows you to be considered (and consider yourself) the best at what you do.

Point taken -- but oh, the pain in my head to even slightly consider "Unfinished Sympathy" and "In My Place" to be in the same universe, no matter how indirectly.

where is the comparable 2003 list?

bugged out: i did say 'supposed', i dont buy the reembrace of rock thing either. dunno if u were talking to me

yeah? bring it, mr 'best of b-boy records' comp

I recommend heartily the above mentioned double CD, anyone with access to Fopp. £3!!

what are we even talking about again?

Has Godard fallen off? HELL YEAH!

Not the Co-Ed remix featuring Pharrell from Goldmember, that was summer '02.

I remember there was a week in '02 when the Neps had 4 of the UK top 20 with "Rock Star", "Work It Out", "Boys" and "Hot In Herre". Has that ever been done before, or even close to that?

I'm still surprised that, "Pass That Dutch" aside (and it's such a measely malnourished example) Diwali hasn't had more influence on what the big-name producers are doing. More polyrhythmic percussive stuff would sound great right now (cf. "Pass That Dutch" - a bass pulse with some perfunctory handclaps - and no, the fact that it's minimalist does not automatically make it good!).

"Be r*al! If somebody else stepped up with the beat from Cee-Lo's "I'll Be Around" or Missy's "Wake Up" or Timbaland and Magoo's own "Indian Flute," you'd have a heart attack and start pitching features."

that should read "discussing how" rather than "about how"

But anyway do the math:

- in 2001 Tim had Miss E, "Hola Hovito", his & Magoo's "Roll Out" and "Drop", and his tracks on the first Bubba album and the last Aaliyah album to keep his stocks afloat.
- in 2002 there was the virtually all-killer no-filler Under Construction, "Oops Oh My", "2 Many Hoes", "Cry Me A River" and the best bits of the Ms Jade album
- in 2003 there was, um, a track or two from This Is Not A Test, some (admittedly brilliant) work on Deliverance and "I'll Be Around". That's like 8 great tracks, half as many as the previous year and about a third as many as 2001.

This suggests to me a steady tapering off - although between Bubba and Cee-Lo he's left room for a new regeneration.

Anybody feel like doing up a list of Timbaland's productions from year to year - or is that just to much work.

Still nice to see Finney writing regularly on a thread again.

The Neptunes, on the hand, seem pretty good at absorbing all sorts of neat ideas and even though I would agree that this was sort of a slow year for them they did release quite a few insane/inspired singles ("Bellydancer", "Milkshake", "Light Your Ass on Fire") and they seem to have their hands in more pies (even if their dancehall stuff is pretty hit or miss.) The N.E.R.D. album is probably gonna suck though, so they're gonna have to do a lot of neat stuff for other folks this year for it not to be called a slump.

The thing that depresses me the most is not the decline in quality by the Neptunes and Timbaland (they've had an increbile run), it's the noticeable lack of new talent. Where are new puppies everybody should be comparing Timbalands/Neptune's work with, in order to show how tired sounding the T&N's productions are sounding. Don't mention Kanye or Just Blaze, as while they might be in the DJ Premier league, I can't imagine them dominating like T&N did.

Well, there's no accounting for taste, but I'd add the rest of Test (it really does amuse me how overhyped "Work It" was compared to how underhyped Test is), "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," some of the stuff off Under Construction II, "Jump Off," etc. Shit, you might as well throw "Cry Me A River" in too given how that dominated 03.

I just think the guy's been too good for too long, and was good enough in 03, for anyone to be shouting "fell off"! Respect!

I ain't even gonna bother defending the Neptunes from all the hataz around here...

the whole "country-fried" schtick really has seemed to re-ignite tim somewhat, but i'm not exactly sure where he can GO with it. some tracks on the bubba album give me a shiver, but they could also be by any journeyman producer who hit upon an effective formula. (little of it SOUNDS like timbaland on first listen, and i can't decide if that's good or bad.)

So let me see...

"he now needs to reinvent himself every year"

"little of it SOUNDS like timbaland on first listen"

Doesn't B answer A?

I have to say, I hope I disagree with you, as Clipse were my big hope for the Neptunes.

they sound much "huskier" than on the debut.

x-posts:

anyway, yeah, i never said that the country-hop stuff WASNT tim's reinvention from last year (though, it's not...go listen to "bubba talk" from the first bubba album) (and i'd argue that the "darker" sound of the this is not a test singles and "the jump off" were actually the reinvention that snagged the publics attention.) (the idiots.) but for the most part the only bit of aesthetic unity to the country schtick is the samples...the beats could be anyone, and that's something you COULDNT say about tim between 96-early99. i guess the life and times of s. carter really was the turning point: four beats so different that you had to check the booklet to see who produced them.

I like the "here is this year's sound" aspect of Tim.

When I think of the 'Neptunes sound' I always think of the plastic ray-guns sound on Kaleidoscope even though they've not done anything like that for about 3 years :(

Deliverance isn't a full country-hop album?

It looks like I'll just have to wait for Clipse to come out - any tracks that actually did stand out?

X-Post x a lot

Agreed, about "Deliverance" - a lot of the love for it comes not from country hip-hop combine as people are saying - but just because it has the best melodies in a Timbaland production for a while (feel free to disagree).

andrew my timbaland shopping list would probably run:

- the first four missy albums (but esp. supa dupa fly and miss e)
- jay-z - volume 3: the life and times of s. carter
- aaliyah - one in a million and the s/t
- bubba - dark days, bright nights and deliverance
- timbaland and magoo - tim's bio: life from the bassment

these are (as far as i can remember, first thing in the morning) the only albums he's produced 1/4 or more of.

for the neps:

- kelis - kaelidoscope (!!!!) and wanderland
- clipse - lord willin
- nerd - in search of

(if you can slsk, there's also a two disc "best of the neptunes" bootleg floating about that has most of the big singles up until 2001 on it.)

Regardless, I'd put that on your Timbaland shopping list.

Feel like putting the tracklisting of your Timbaland singles on your blog - I've been meaning to do my own boxset for a while.

X-post x 4

Vol. 1
1. Aaliyah – Are You That Somebody?
2. Tim & Magoo – Clock Strikes 12
3. Ginuwine – Pony (Remix)
4. Aaliyah – Hot Like Fire
5. Ludacris – Fat Rabbit
6. Aaliyah – Try Again
7. Ginuwine – (Actually I forget which song I put on here.)
8. Tim & Magoo – Up Jumps Da Boogie
9. Tim & Magoo feat. Jay-Z – Lobster & Scrimp
10. Jay-Z – Nigga What, Nigga Who
11. Timbaland & Magoo - Roll Out
12. Aaliyah – One In A Million

Vol. 2
1. Missy – She’s A Bitch
2. The Lox – Ride or Die Chick
3. Ginuwine – Final Warning
4. Jay-Z – Snoopy Track
5. Memphis Bleek – Is That Yo Chick?
6. Missy – Hit Em Wit Da Hee (Remix)
7. Jay-Z – Big Pimpin
8. Nas – You Owe Me
9. Total – What the Dealio?
10. Tim & Magoo – Love To Love You
11. Playa – Don’t Stop The Music
12. Aaliyah – 4 Page Letter

Vol. 3
1. Bubba Sparxx – Twerk A Little
2. Jay-Z – Hola Hovito
3. Ludacris – Roll Out
4. Missy – Whatcha Gonna Do?
5. Bubba Sparxx – Bubba Talk
6. Tweet – Oops, Oh My
7. Missy – The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)
8. Jay-Z – It's Hot (Some Like It Hot)
9. Missy – Get Ur Freak On
10. Aaliyah - If Your Girl Only Knew
11. Tim & Mag – Indian Carpet
12. Aaliyah – More Than A Woman

here's what been added in the interim

Vol. 4
1. Bubba Sparxxx - Ugly
2. Missy Elliot - Work It
3. Timbaland & Magoo - Drop
4. Missy Elliot - 4 My People
5. Justin Timberlake - Cry Me A River
6. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance
7. Aaliyah - Are You That Somebody?
8. Missy Elliot feat. Ludacris - Gossip Folks
9. Miss Jade - Big Head
10. Jay-Z - Hey Papi
11. Lil Kim - The Jump Off
12. Mad Skillz - Together

Vol. 5

1. Missy Elliot feat. Jay-Z - Wake Up
2. Jay-Z - Dirt Off Your Shoulder
3. Cee-lo - I'll Be Around
4. Bubba Sparxxx - Jimmy Mathis
5. Jay-Z - 2 Many Hoes
6. Pastor Troy - Are We Cuttin?
7. Petey Pablo - Raise Up
8. Tim & Mag - Cop That Shit
9. Missy Elliot - Beep Me 911
10. Nicole Wray - Make It Hot
11. Bubba Sparxxx - Comin Round
12. Petey Pablo feat. Bubba Sparxxx - The Gun Line

I wonder is SFJ was able to get away with such a large article due to heavy guilt/catch up from big media. - but yes harass SFJ for the uncut twice as long essay to be put on his blog (or at least a comment on how many changes were made - and who initiated the article NYT or SFJ).

And "Good Girl" was good too.

The other great and almost exclusively Timbaland produced album is 100% Ginuwine, which is frequently amazing and is also a really nice summation of all of Tim's original bag of tricks.

Tim is otm in his Geir-like reference to melody (I'm just playin'). For me, '03 Tim was about the tracks he did for Bubba and Kiley, which prize melodies, instrumental touches, genre-jumping/blending and (in the latter artists's case) harmonies and singing skills (hell, even the 'Deliverance' hook is very cool), esp. over his beat weirdness and general flights of fancy - and let's be real, after the years he's put in, he can't suprise and/or interest with those forever. Obv the Missy record has some worthy stuff too, but he really meant it about giving the two Beat Clubbers some of his best work. He also still has that "one or two decent tracks with Magoo per album" mojo going - 'Indian Flute' is good - not earth-rocking, but still mondo enjoyable.

Also otm is the observation about the Neps' hit'n'miss ratio - last year I tallied about 6 Tim tracks to about 4 Neps in an imaginary top 82 singles I wrote at work - this sin't a big diff, but the Tim tracks were consistently high too - 'Gossip Folks' was 1= (the other was 'No Good Advice') and 'Cry Me A River' is still better than 'Rock Your Body'.

my opinion is that timbaland is an amazing producer... his unpredictable drum patterns have brought him success with the likes of aaliyah,missy, luda, and jay z. ( in the club is my favorite tim beat of all time).. i think that tim though, works best with certain people. ( the ones i just mentioned) its just like the magic quincy jones possessed when working with mj..

i just don't think that he is in anyway better than chad and pharrell though... their resume has a variety of artists in many genre's ( dancehall, hip hop, r&b, alternative, pop).. hell.. even the rolling stones...

yeah, tim has a bigger list of hits.. or classics at the moment... he did have at a headstart of at least 2 years...

i think the reason that i like the neptunes better... i prefer their simple minmalistic, yet bass-driven, catchy hook tracks, better than tims sometimes overshadowing beats which can make some of his produced-songs sound confusing...

another issue with tim... is that he isn't fully responsible for all his beats.. some of the songs you mentioned... cry me a river was co produced by scott storch.. a lot of the missy songs were co produced by her... the article even mentions static playing a role in the melody of Are you that somebody.. these songs are all amazing... but i don't think of cry me a river as a timbaland beat... it is a tim/storch beat ( storch plays the keyboard which is my favorite component of that particular beat).. yes the neptunes are 2 people but there are a lot of single producers who don't co produce ( swizz, premier, rockwilder, just blaze)..

there is a lot more points that i have.. but i hope that people can reply to my post.

What?! The best bit of that beat is the fact that it sounds like someone's brushing their teeth over the top.

P.S. Patrick P. im lookin for u man. we wont meet na but we surely will man