N.E.R.D.

Ok so I bought N.E.R.D. their first attempt at actually putting together an entire album, I loved every song on the Clipse record, and I even enjoyed listening to Tasty.

But what is it that makes their beats get under your skin? Every song has these synthesized sounds that are like, well arranged unlike anything you’ve ever heard any other producer do.

Then you get it, these self-proclaimed nerds are actually bringing eccentricity to music, something few other producers have done since Michael Jackson capitalized off of it back in the 1980s.

The Neptunes have a way of taking those unusual, meaningless, forgotten sequences, and punctuating them through heavily synthesized sounds and compiling them together into a new song.

Their sound is typically overly mellow, almost jazz-like syths disrupted through heavy, aggressive electronic percussion.

The only real problem with this pair is that their dedication to music often overshadows their business sense. Take Kelis’ album, for a change, Tasty was an album full of the musical idiosyncrasy that you have come to both love and hate from the Neptunes yet Kelis was only left with one true single on the record.

More people were interested in the fact that she was marrying Nas, than they were about listening to her record.

The Neptunes appear to be more interested in writing incredible songs for other solo artists, like Gwen Stefani, than they are at attending to their own artists.

The other problem is that their music tastes are so peculiar they can become rather divisive; take “Holla Back”, from Stefani, the sophomoric party atmosphere is so thick it often detracts from their signature sound.

While it is good to see that they have finally worked with an artist that can hold her own against their overpowering production, it is difficult indeed to figure out what people love, or hate about the song.

Or take Omarion’s new song, “Touch”, this is a song in which Omarion can more or less say whatever he wants to because the music appears to be the only redeeming quality here.

Only the future will tell, if the Neptunes continue to evolve or remain stagnant, refusing to change with the times. Perhaps I should have kept writing music and stayed true to the nerd that I am.