kel: The header for this one cracks me the fuck up every time.

lise: Hah! Pharrell's tinfoil. That joke was from one of the early conversations. Also: we agonized over the order in which to put these scenes. Agony, I'm telling you. It was painful. So this coming right after the subliminal message article seems like it should be a no-brainer, doesn't it? Not even a little bit.

Before, nobody actually came out and accused Pharrell Williams of fucking with people's heads. And certainly not after, not out loud. No one said the word "subliminal." But it buzzed around his head like a tattoo made of rhythm all the same.

Lance remembers when Justin started bringing Pharrell around. He thinks about it like that, like Pharrell was a girl that Justin brought home to meet the parents. But in some way all of them -- Lance, Joey, JC, Chris -- had a hand in trying to raise Justin up right. And Lance remembers, they were glad that Justin had made a friend who he hadn't known since he was in diapers or been singing with since he was fourteen.

Pharrell and Justin were a lot alike, Lance thinks, both of them still thirteen years old behind their cool exteriors, both passionate about music beyond measure and reason. Pharrell used to come out with them, sometimes, but he'd always end up in the corner at the end of the night, waving one hand around lazily, muttering about the power of the music, the message in the beat. Justin always stopped whatever he was doing to listen to Pharrell when he got like that, nodding in time like a drum machine regulated Greek chorus of one.

That's the part that Lance remembers. That, and the one time he saw Pharrell take off his stupid hat, the inside was lined with tin foil.

lise: You wrote this, Kel. anything to say?

kel: Pop culturally ignorant as I was at the time we were writing this story (when I first got into popslash, I had to have someone explain to me who Nelly was), I didn't really know much about Pharrell except in his relation to Justin. but while we were writing it, I would spend a lot of time watching MTV in the very early morning before I left for work and I saw a lot of the video for the Clipse, "When the Last Time." and there's that part where Pharrell is whispering into the chick's ear and the chick is lip-syncing Pharrell's lyrics -- so creepy! So subliminal!

Justin always stopped whatever he was doing to listen to Pharrell when he got like that, nodding in time like a drum machine regulated Greek chorus of one.

This is another one of those lines that I feel like I wrote while camping out in Lise's head.

lise: It's quite possible.
lise: It's also such a Beck shout-out. Anything with 'drum machine' is a Beck shoutout.

kel: Also, yes it is! Because when Beck and Tori Amos presented together at the MTV Video Awards, Beck did his human drum machine impersonation. Next.