Show Review: N.E.R.D. pack the stage with bro love

There’s nothing to pick up sullen spirits quite like a dance party, and that’s exactly what N.E.R.D. brought to a crowd of totally-bummed Pitt students in the Fitzgerald Fieldhouse Saturday night.

Local hip-hop powerhouse Formula 412 opened the show, sponsored by Pitt Program Council, to an audience slowly filtering in during the commercials of the basketball game. It’s a shame the two events coincided, too — the band plays the kind of juggernaut funk that’s best appreciated live. 412’s MC, Masai Turner, had a thumping, rhythmic flow that rode perfectly atop guitarist Nasty Nash’s jackhammer riffs and Young D’s impossibly tight percussion.

Rhythm is Formula 412’s strong suit, and like an more vicious version of The Roots, the band’s live set hit with machine gun precision. Definitely a local band to watch out for.

PPC beamed the last minutes of Pitt’s game against Villanova on the two jumbo screens in the Fieldhouse as the N.E.R.D. crew set up the show and the tension in the room was stifling. And with the last-second loss, the energy of the crowd deflated like a popped balloon.

Luckily, N.E.R.D. front man Pharrell Williams knows how to work a crowd. And the “F**k you ‘Nova” chant didn’t hurt either.

Led by Williams, MC Shay Haley and producer/synthesizer maestro Chad Hugo, N.E.R.D. hit the stage bolstered by a live band including two drummers, two keyboardists a guitarist and a bassist, making for a gigantic sound that immediately got the crowd shaking booties and all semblance of appendages.

“Brain,” a highlight of N.E.R.D.’s debut record In Search Of… was a full-on funk assault, the staccato guitar riff reverberating through the entire Fieldhouse and shaking up even the most depressed of Pitt kids.

In addition to controlling the bounce of the crowd, Williams also seemingly likes to control the crowd itself, laying down the rules of the show.

“Here are the rules. There are no more inhibitions tonight. You will totally let go,” commanded Williams. “Second, if you punch someone, you leave. Three, respect the security guards. And four, when you go back to class, you will tell everyone what the fuck they missed.”

Yes, sir.

After a punchy and energetic “Kill Joy,” Williams dove back in on the crowd instruction, actually attempting to teach the crowd proper crowd-surfing techniques. Teaching when he could’ve been busting out another funk blast, Williams’ insistence on hearing his own voice talk, not perform, was a bit of a kill joy.

Nonetheless, the music took center stage again with the smoothed out drug ballad “Provider” and the sublimely explosive “Sooner or Later,” easily two of the band’s best songs.

Though the lady-heavy audience often seemed there solely to be in the same room as Pharrell Williams (can’t blame them, dude is adorable), the front man wanted to play fair to both sexes. For the fuzz-bass blowout “Rock Star,” he invited a line of guys onstage to have their own rock star moment, resulting, predictably, in said guys jumping up and down, playing air guitar and generally wishing they were Pharrell Williams.

But the self-love didn’t stop there. For a six-minute slinky soul jam, the N.E.R.D. crew invited a veritable entire floor of Holland Hall onstage for Williams to dance with and sing to. The guy and girl stage overpopulation played more like an episode of the surely in the works MTV reality series “Who Wants to Fellate Pharrell?” than a hip-hop show.


Thankfully, all was not lost.

N.E.R.D. dove head first into the thumping coke workout “Everybody Nose” and the extraordinarily funky “She Wants to Move.” When the band spliced in the guitar riff of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out,” the show finally came full circle, ending with the infectious and intense energy it started on.

Pitt might not have won Saturday night, but for the few hundred students packed into the Fitzgerald Fieldhouse, N.E.R.D.’s show of wild and live hip-hop made the loss an easier pill to swallow.

Photos courtesy Chris Neverman