Tyler, the Creator is roaming the streets of Barcelona, bypassing cheering fans, as he talks about recording his verse for “Cash In Cash Out,” the new Pharrell Williams single out today, which also features 21 Savage. “Some time back, he played me this 21 Savage song and I was like this is the hardest shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” Tyler recalls after logging on to a Zoom chat under the name “auntie daddy.” “The beat sounded like an alley. It sounded like the syringe that’s in the puddle near the trash can where sketchy shit goes down. Hearing 21 over something so left was awesome.”
He heard the song again while visiting Williams in Miami more than a year ago. Williams, who has been an inspiration to the Los Angeles rapper for decades, mentioned he was trying to figure out who else to add to the song. “In my head I’m like, man, let me take a fucking stab at it,” Tyler says. “But I didn’t really say anything.” Eventually, he texted Williams and asked him to send him an instrumental version; Tyler says he sent a voice memo containing his verse back within three days.
“[Pharrell] FaceTimed me instantly, just with this fucking weird face on. He didn’t even say anything. And then he just hung the fuck up.”
That’s how Tyler knew he’d made the cut.
When I relay Tyler’s description of the song to Williams, he looks a mixture of confused and amused. Wearing a red hoodie and speaking via Zoom, the producer says the song sounds like “electrically-charged black clouds,” adding “it’s aggressive and it’s urgent and it’s infectious.” The titular hook is delivered by 21 Savage, and Pharrell came up with the song while he was working on music for the East Atlanta rapper’s next album. But “Cash In Cash Out” was immediately something Williams wanted to keep for himself. “I was like, man, I want this one,” he recalls.
The beat cements Pharrell’s return to harder sounds after his work on Pusha T’s recent album. An East Coast guy at heart, he was living in Los Angeles in order to work on The Voice and care for newborn triplets. “It was a different frequency and I felt like I was asleep,” he says. “I was doing dark beats here and there, but right now it’s full-on navy shipyard blowtorch to the face. I know that I’m a mirror. I take the form of the spaces that I’m in. I’m like running water. That’s where my creativity comes from… I’m only as good as the people I’m standing next to, and that’s Tyler and 21, they give me something good to reflect.”
The innovative, Francis Rousselet-directed video, which features CGI claymation-like figures of all three artists, took “a year and change” to complete. It was inspired by the zoetrope, a 19th century circular device used to create the illusion of animation before animation proper was possible. For nearly four minutes, CGI versions of the rappers appear on the rotating set in an atmosphere of excess and flash: 21 Savage walks along a piano that’s being played by detached hands, iced out with jewelry; Tyler raps while walking along a road paved with money; Pharrell lounges on a bicycle.
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The video was created during the pandemic, and so “we needed to find a solution that we could do with computers, basically,” executive director Jules de Chateleux tells me via Zoom from a room overlooking the Eiffel Tower in Paris. All three artists made videos of themselves performing their verses so that the CGI team could mimic their mannerisms. “We studied each of them and their live shows,” George McKneally, who worked on the CGI animation team for the video, notes.
Tyler is clear on his favorite moment: “I look so hot as a lady in it. When I’m fucking like dancing with the hula hoop. I got some nice titties,” he says. When I ask Pharrell to tell me his, he just smirks: “All of it.”
The release of “Cash In Cash Out” is just one of a number of big moments for Williams this month. After a two year pandemic wait, he’ll finally attend the induction ceremony for the Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside Chad Hugo, the other half of storied songwriting-production duo The Neptunes. Williams is a unique talent whose songwriting and vocals have dominated pop, R&B and hip-hop for thirty years–he’s as well known now for his second career as the singer of the megahit “Happy” and the recently TikTok-rediscovered “Just a Cloud Away” from the Despicable Me soundtrack as for the boundary-busting hits he’s produced for Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”) Britney Spears (“I’m A Slave 4 U”) and Jay-Z (“Frontin” and “I Just Wanna Love U”).
Maybe that longevity can be attributed to his unwillingness to dwell on the past. “I don’t know how to really look back. I’m not so good at that,” he says when asked about his Neptunes work and the 20th anniversary of N.E.R.D’s genre-bending classic album In Search of… “I love leaning forward because I’m so curious,” he continues. “You can learn things from hindsight, but I love what’s on the other side of what we don’t know. That inspires me. I’m inspired by the stuff that does not exist.” How does it feel to be recognized by the Songwriters Hall of Fame? Honored. “I’m told there’s an overwhelming feeling when you get there,” he says.
The day after the ceremony, he’ll travel from New York to D.C. for the second edition of the Something in the Water music festival he founded back in 2019, where he’ll perform along with Calvin Harris, Dave Matthews Band, Lil Baby, Tyler the Creator, Usher, Ashanti & Ja Rule, and a host of surprise guests on four stages on Independence Avenue. Pharrell is proud of the symbolism of hosting the festival in the nation’s capital during Juneteenth weekend, but it will also be bittersweet: It’s been relocated from Williams’ hometown of Virginia Beach after local police killed his younger cousin, Donovon Lynch, in March last year.
Lynch’s family has told local media they believe the officer who shot Lynch was improperly trained. The city alleges Lynch entered an active shooting area while possessing a gun. In a letter to the city last year, Pharrell announced he’d be pulling the festival “until the gatekeepers and the powers-that-be consider the citizens and the consumer base, and no longer view the idea of human rights for all as a controversial idea…”
He echoed these sentiments during our chat, saying “I wish [city leaders] had that same energy about my cousin’s life” that, he says, they expressed to him about losing the festival. He’s not clear on if or when Something in the Water might return to Virginia Beach: “The local municipal government, they know how I feel about it. They know what they did. They know what they can do to fix it.”.
Will the festival include a debut live performance of “Cash In Cash Out”? “[There are] songs that are fucking smangers,” Tyler says, combining the words “smash” and “bangers.” “But sometimes some things don’t work live and I still haven’t figured out why. We’ll see. This might be awesome live or fucking terrible. I don’t think it’s any middle ground.”
As for the burning question of whether this is the first sample of a forthcoming album, Pharrell offers some elliptical hope: “Let’s just say I really miss the taste of blood, man. I’m ravenous for it.”
With reporting by Frazier Tharpe.
