Pharrell Williams' Assault On Freedom

How the singer's latest track and its accompanying video combine to create an annihilation of meaning.

The video to 'Freedom' begins innocuously enough...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

A few short tracking shots of various cityscapes around the world. We can hear a generic urban clatter, and there in the background a choir of ever so slightly discordant voices humming the song’s (admittedly catchy) refrain. The effect is to suggest that there exists everywhere some kind of elemental human music; we just need Pharrell to help us hear it.

And right on cue, there he is...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

Pharrell Williams, dressed like a 5-year-plan era Chinese peasant (more on this later), straight faced, hands solemnly cupped over each other at his waist, ready to begin the sermon.

But hold on!

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

The shot cuts again now to a group of grubbily dressed, though far from malnourished, be-shovelled black men working on… I don’t know… Whatever it is that grubbily dressed be-shovelled black men are forced to work on these days. A gravel pit? A salt mine? I can’t see that it matters. Isn't it clear that they're engaged in that easy to recognise trope of incarcerated futility: breaking rocks with rocks? Why ask any more questions.

A few shots later...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

Paris (for some reason), a picture of a suspended chain and a whirling flock of birds (juxtaposition!), and a quarry -- we’re back with the miners.

Only now Pharrell's shown up too.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

He's still rocking the Chinese peasant look, still with that same straight-faced, oh-so-serious expression. He is very much not part of the crowd, more some invisible deity, saddened by the plight of his people but ready to do his best to save them through the medium of, well, song, I suppose.

Several more cuts follow.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

We’re watching fireworks crackle on an Indian (or Pakistani) skyline, we’re looking at a nautilus of people laying hands on one another, then there’s a woman in a headscarf with piercing green eyes, clearly meant to look like the famous National Geographic image, though not it. Indeed, almost every shot in the video is of the “motivational poster” genre.

You could freeze frame anywhere and emblazon the image with a voguish “inspiring” aphorism...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

Only, there are no words, just Pharrell. This leads us to assume that the pursued effect is a Pavlovian one: the images put us in mind of motivational phrases, they ready us for the song’s #motivational stance.

And here it comes!

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

We even hear Pharrell clear his throat, a reassurance that the words that follow are sure to be 'Capital I' important – heaven forbid his voice should crack even for a second, lest we miss one phoneme.

But who could predict that when they come they would carry such a needy message: “Hold on to me," Pharrell sings. "Don’t let me go. Who cares what they see? Who cares what they know?” One can only assume he's trying to tempt back the fans he lost thanks to that Prozac-substitute brain-worm otherwise known as...

Happy.

iamOTHER / Via youtube.com

"Yeah, people might look down on you for liking me," he's saying, "but in a complex, lonely world that ultimately tends towards atrophy and despair, what choice have you got?" Or he's just speaking non-sequiturs that rhyme.

Thankfully, this being a pop song, Pharrell does not take long to get to the crux of his message...

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The chorus explodes with a brave and unusual use of the 2nd person pronoun. This is brave and unusual as it’s starkly clear that the singer is not talking to some other “you”, one of his former lovers say, but rather that he means you: you sitting there enjoying your coffee, trying to read your French cultural theorists... Hold on, you say, but my name's Chris.

But Pharrell is not finished there...

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I wish that there were some clever, deliberate wordplay going on here: the conflation of the word “free” meaning free and “dom” as in short for dominated, implying the social and philosophical complications inherent in the concept of freedom, but alas, I doubt it. In fact, I more than doubt it; the lyric is nonsense.

Pharrell could have split any other two-syllable word...

... for all the relevance the split is intended to bestow. Only he didn’t, he split the word freedom, one of the touchstone concepts of Western Civilisation. And this is the first truly pernicious element I want to focus on about this song. In breaking up the word freedom into two parts Pharrell has drawn meaning from it like a vampire draws blood. It now signifies nothing of any intellectual value; rather it is reduced to an empty “halleluiah” for the Internet age.

Back to the video, and things are heating up in the quarry

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

A soldier is pointing a rifle at one of the workers. The worker grabs the barrel of said rifle, and the two men grimace at each other for a few seconds. Fine, I'm sure this kind of thing goes on… somewhere. But where exactly? The soldier is white, and his uniform suggests he is part of the apparatus of some South American communist regime. O…K… So are we meant to assume this quarry – worked on exclusively by men of colour – is in South America? Clearly not. It is a non-place, merely representative of some vaguely conceived of form of oppression. But worse, the quarry's main purpose, in the context of the video, seems simply to look good. It is slavery chic being used to sell the Pharrell Williams brand.

In the next few cuts things get really weird

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

There is a stop motion clip of the iconic Tiananmen Square student-tank confrontation rendered in Lego. In Lego!

You can imagine the Pharrell team (herein imagined as Phar & Rell) talking it through in pre-production...

Seriously... Lego!?

A couple of shots later we're treated to a brief cut of Mohamed Ali, because, um...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

I don't know. He's shadow boxing, weaving back and forth then...

Bang! We're back to Pharrell

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

And the pop star's weaving as well. Clearly we're meant to associate the two. Pharrell is a modern day Ali. So what that he's not a boxer? It's part of the video's mission to transform the singer into a kind of uber-symbol, representative of everything "positive" in the world.

"Hold on to me," Pharrell sings once more, "Don't let me go. Cheetahs need to eat, Run, antelope."

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

How did he come up with these lyrics? They're like something written by an A.I. machine. Has some programmer designed a Pharrell algorithm that specialises in sorting random "inspiring" words into (barely) comprehensible sentences? In fact, as the video continues, one could almost be mistaken for thinking that it too was conceived in much the same way. Its cuts tend towards an increasing randomness...

A school play...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

... a mermaid swimming through a living room...

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... an octogenarian female weightlifter with a fuchsia leotard and blue hair.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

What if the robot randomly generating these ideas is Pharrell himself?

djeevs / Via youtube.com

It'd certainly explain his famous inability to age.

Alright, let's try a different perspective... What if the video's very randomness is in itself a meta-commentary on freedom?

WikiCommons / Via commons.wikimedia.org

An astronaut space-walks across an urban intersection...

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...two women race, skinny-dipping toward sunrise...

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

...Pharrell walks through a science museum.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

Is Pharrell just attempting to articulate in images and song what sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster once said?

Via authors.simonandschuster.com

Finally, here we are with Pharrell in a sweat shop – another faked spectacle of suffering.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

The women working within it are all clothed in a similar blue to Pharrell's own Chinese peasant costume, and they are running more of the same cloth through their evenly spaced machines.

What is this but a factory that offers us all the means to clothe ourselves like the singer?

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

A factory that offers us freedom by way of conformity.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

A factory that offers us the freedom of letting pop culture doing our thinking for us?

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

A freedom that instructs us to celebrate itself and that is of course not freedom at all.

Via willyloman.wordpress.com

One of the last shots of the whole video involves all of the sweat-shop women mimicking Pharrell's actions, raising their index fingers to their collective temples.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com

I guess it's meant to be encouraging us to "think", but it could just as easily be mistaken for a mime of collective suicide.

PharrellWilliamsVEVO / Via youtube.com