The Neptunes: The Neptunes Present...Clones : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The best Neptunes tracks are slightly idiotic and almost totally idiot-proof. To a rapper in need of a hit, this must seem like a good thing: Just buy one of those brilliantly simple synthesizer riffs, add two and a half verses and watch your song climb the charts. They helped Mystikal go pop, helped P. Diddy stay pop and helped Justin Timberlake leave pop behind. It's true: Tracks produced by the Neptunes aren't cheap, but once you're on top, you won't need them anymore.

That's the idea, anyway. But if it's hard to ruin a Neptunes beat, it's also hard to disguise one -- listeners recognize it as soon as they hear that thin drum sound, that moaned chorus, that one-finger horn section. And so the rappers come to resemble the dope fiends they sneer at: They go crawling back to the place where they scored a hit last time and promise themselves there won't be a next time, even though they know there will be. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo have made themselves indispensable.

So now it's time to show off. The Neptunes Present . . . Clones is a sampler for their record label, Star Trak. With appearances from most of the big-name rappers and wall-to-wall Neptunes beats, this should be the world's greatest hip-hop compilation -- and much of the time it is. Busta Rhymes cackles his way through "Light Your Ass on Fire," a delirious course in gluteology delivered atop a beat that consists of almost nothing but percussion sounds. Snoop Dogg falls off the straight-edge wagon with "It Blows My Mind," a series of tightly written rhymes about chronic fatigue syndrome. Dirt McGirt (the Bastard formerly known as Ol' Dirty) bellows "Pop Shit" over a three-note track; Nelly borrows a few notes from "Hot in Herre" for "If." And on "Blaze of Glory," Clipse get handed a riotous track with a clattering backbeat punctuated by horn blasts -- the whole thing crackles and pops like bombs bursting in air. They murder it, and in the next few months, on mix tapes around the country, lots of other rappers probably will, too. Not surprisingly, the most memorable performance comes from Ludacris, who outdoes everyone by treating his Neptunes beat (which sounds like a chopped-up version of "Southern Hospitality") as a shiny new toy, playing with it until it just about breaks. The song is called "It Wasn't Us," and he uses the title as the punch line for a series of cautionary tales: "You can get your whole crew, even niggas that owe you and ain't paid you shit/You can drink some cold brews, and throw on them old shoes, and jump in the whip/You can come and find us, and be right behind us, and insert the clips/You hear something go, 'Clap! Clap! Clap!' -- somebody went down, but it wasn't us." iPod-enabled listeners will likely want to erase the two rock songs that appear in the middle. But the two Neptunes solo tracks are even more problematic, because they should be better. "Loser," by their alter ego N.E.R.D., welds a great, breezy riff to a lame chorus. And Pharrell's slow-jam-y "Frontin' " sounds more like an extended joke than a song, despite the Jay-Z verse. The Neptunes may be the greatest pushers around, but that doesn't mean they can do without their clients.

KELEFA SANNEH
(RS 930, September 4, 2003)