Enough, Pharrell

Here’s the strange thing: I actually like Pharrell Williams. Happy should be destroyed and the servers that host it salted, but the man himself—the producer, the N.E.R.D.-era collaborator, the person behind some of the best beats of the last twenty years—is genuinely someone you’d want around. Easy company, good taste, access to everything.

But at some point in late 2014 he became inescapable in the particular way that only happens when the luxury and pop worlds discover someone simultaneously. He showed up in Gwen Stefani’s new video. He did a collab with Adidas that turned otherwise excellent sneakers into something confusing. He attached his name to a Moynat bag collection in what I can only describe as an act of aggressive brand promiscuity. Anyone with more than two hundred euros to spend apparently decided that Pharrell’s signature was the missing piece of their life, completely regardless of what the finished product actually looked like.

And then Karl Lagerfeld dressed him and Cara Delevingne in Sissi costumes and filmed them singing together, and something in me quietly gave up. Cara, for the record, I have genuine affection for—but she has the face of a guy I went to school with named Tobi, which makes the whole tableau even stranger. Pharrell, listen: you’re rich enough to say no. Take a year off. Watch the old N.E.R.D. videos. Come back when you want to, not when someone’s publicist calls. That’s the version of you worth waiting for.