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Pharrell Williams · S1 E2
Atlantica
Growing up between the military base and the ocean
Atlantica Apartments, Virginia Beach, early 1980s. A seven-year-old Pharrell sits on the concrete steps outside his family's unit, watching older kids blast a boombox. A Stevie Wonder track bleeds across the parking lot, and he doesn't move until the tape runs out.
Superstition, Stevie Wonder (1972). One of the earliest songs Pharrell remembers stopping cold for. That clavinet riff, six notes, relentlessly circular, is the ancestor of every synth line Pharrell ever wrote. Listen to how tight the groove is. No wasted space.
Superstition -- Stevie Wonder (1972)
Key of E-flat minor, 100 BPM. That clavinet riff (played by Stevie himself) is one of the most sampled sounds in music history. The arrangement is built on rhythm first, melody second. The drums lock into the clavinet like they're the same instrument. This is the blueprint Pharrell carries into every Neptunes production: groove before everything else.
Between Two Worlds
Virginia Beach is split down an invisible line. On one side: the oceanfront, the tourists, the boardwalk. On the other: the neighborhoods where military families and working-class Black communities actually live. Pharrell grows up on the second side, close enough to smell the salt air, far enough to know it's someone else's paradise.
“Where I grew up, you heard everything. Go-go from D.C., gospel at church, whatever was on the radio. I didn't know genres. I just knew what made me feel something.”
— Pharrell Williams, Rolling Stone (2014)
TAP TO REVEAL: What skateboard culture taught Pharrell about music
Living for the City -- Stevie Wonder
The Stevie track that hit hardest in working-class Black America. Rawer and more political than Superstition, closer in spirit to the Atlantica Apartments than the boardwalk.
Which D.C.-born genre heavily influenced the Virginia Beach music scene where Pharrell grew up?
Next episode: a substitute teacher asks the class to write down what they want to be when they grow up. Pharrell writes one word. Plus, the Michael Jackson record that fundamentally rewired how he understood what music could be.
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