“When you’re hearing music, you’re seeing it in color.”
That’s how musical artist and producer Pharrell Williams described synesthesia, to National Public Radio in 2013. He says that people are born with their nerve endings “all melded together,” but they typically separate around the age of 1. But those who experience synesthesia, some of those nerves stay connected. In Williams’ case, sound takes on a “color” in his mind.
“If I tell everyone right now to picture a red truck, you’re gonna see one,” he told NPR. “But is there one in real life right there in front of you? No. That’s the power of the mind. People with synesthesia, we don’t really notice until someone brings it up and then someone else says, ‘Well, no, I don’t see colors when I hear music,’ and that’s when you realize something’s different.”
So perhaps it’s not so strange that when Williams decided to craft a documentary biopic of his life, he wanted to be filmed with LEGOs.
That’s right: Williams and all the other folks who appear in Piece by Piece—Jay Z, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg—are LEGO minifigures. Scenes from his life are built from countless digital LEGO bricks, making for a plastic, kaleidoscopic waterfall of color.
And the musical beats—the thumping, rasping, galloping beats that made him not just a superstar, but one of the most sought-after producers in the world—are in color, too. The clear, tinted color of stained glass and stoplights and Christmas bulbs.
“What if life is like a LEGO set?” LEGO Pharrell asks the movie’s LEGO director, Morgan Neville in Piece by Piece. And indeed, what if it is? What if life can be a riot of colors? What if it’s infinitely flexible? What if you could take all these disparate pieces and make something crazy? Beautiful? Inspiring?
In Piece by Piece, we see what Pharrell built through his own unique blueprint.
Piece by Piece takes us through Pharrell’s life, from his earliest days in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He depicts his neighborhood as a vibrant, colorful riot of music and community. “You couldn’t tell me that life wasn’t amazing,” he says.
But it wasn’t easy being a kid like Pharrell in that environment. He imagines that people walked by him and said, “’Oh, that’s an odd child. He’s odd.’ That crushed my spirit.” Sad? Yes indeed. But as we see throughout the rest of the film, Pharrell’s “oddities” helped propel him to what he would become—thus potentially serving as inspiration for kids in the audience who don’t feel like they fit.
We also see how Pharrell and his family flipped a negative to a positive. Pharrell hated school when he was in seventh grade—hated it so much that his grades just tanked. Even though he had enough credits to move on, his mother said no: He needed to repeat the grade and work this time around. But in the midst of that embarrassing, and literal, failure, Pharrell’s grandmother convinced him to join the band. That was his first real brush with music—and with his future musical partner, Chad Hugo—and it turned his life around.
That moment almost feels like a precursor to the rest of Pharrell’s story: He learns lessons in the midst of grinding disappointment. Failures serve as a springboard for change and growth. Yes, he suffers hardships along the way. Yes, he makes plenty of mistakes. But he comes to understand that, in his own words, “relevance is a drug.” And he was led astray by it. When the movie closes, we get the sense that Pharrell isn’t just a good musician; he’s grown into a pretty decent husband, father and friend, too.
But the one time when LEGO Pharrell gets a little misty-eyed is when he recalls the care and the support he received from family and friends along the way. “Forget the trophy,” he says, his LEGO eyes all glassy, and the voice behind the animation faltering. “The idea you want me to win?” That’s special.
Pharrell also talks about his hit “Happy,” speculating on the counterintuitive reason it became so big. He relates how people would come up to him and say the song helped them get through chemotherapy or some other difficult time. It resonated not because they had something to be happy about, but because they chose to be happy in the midst of those very difficult times.
Pharrell was deeply influenced by his experience growing up in church, according to Piece by Piece. When he first walks into the LEGO sanctuary, he’s struck by the towering stained glass windows and the glorious music coming from the singers on stage. His grandmother tells him, “God has given you a special gift. But to whom much is given, much is required.”
Later, when Pharrell felt as though his career had been squelched before it barely began, he visits his pastor. The pastor (Bishop Ezekiel Williams) encourages him by saying that when you’re standing at the foot of a mountain, you can’t see the other side—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. “What God has for you, no man can stand in the way of,” the pastor says.
“He said to trust God,” Pharrell recalls. “And I did.”
But Pharrell also draws a lot of inspiration from Carl Sagan, the famed astronomer and noted religious skeptic. In one sequence, the spirit of Sagan is treated as an almost angelic being, floating in space as light halos around his LEGO body. And there he offers some poetic but decidedly humanist encouragement, likely taken from his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves,” Sagan says, perhaps referring to God, perhaps to an alien race. “That will happen only if we do it.”
Pharrell also says that he was fascinated by water growing up, and he especially loved the idea of Neptune. We see several depictions of the Roman god of the ocean—including a LEGO version of a real-life statue found in Virginia Beach—and it’s a prime reason why Pharrell and his friends Chad Hugo and Shay Haley, formed the group The Neptunes.
Elsewhere, a LEGO version of Kendrick Lamar, singing his Pharrell-produced protest song “Alright,” stands on top of a stoplight with a crown of thorns on his head (in mimicry of the real-world music video). We hear a reference to praying to the universe.
Nudity is obviously not an issue in this PG LEGO production, but a few LEGO minifigs display some plastic “skin.”
LEGO Pharrell also kisses his LEGO wife, Helen. The two get married, and we see that they’re raising a son. (Though the film doesn’t go into this, the boy was born five years before Pharrell and Helen tied the knot.)
We hear snippets of several songs that Pharrell produced or participated in. The lyrics stay relatively tame, but we hear enough to know that many of these songs focus on lust, not love—and, of course, these song clips may encourage viewers to listen to the full song. (Kelis’ very suggestive song “Milkshake” earns a second or two, for instance.) We see someone wear a rainbow-bedecked jacket.
The “violence” we see is done in LEGOs, of course. So, what little of it there is doesn’t feel particularly jarring. Moreover, it’s almost entirely metaphorical.
For instance, when a friend listens to one of Pharrell’s latest beats, his LEGO head explodes off his LEGO torso and rolls around in the street (indicating, of course, that the beat was mind-blowing). A character struggles in a stormy LEGO sea before being sucked into a whirlpool. A few more minifigs are apparently gobbled up by a passing fish.
Lamar’s song “Alright” gets considerable time on screen, and it references the sky-high cultural tensions felt during the Black Lives Matter movement. We see a peaceful protest gathering that features at least one sign that reads, “Can’t breathe,” an allusion to George Floyd’s death.
There’s more profanity here than you’d think for a PG film. We hear three uncensored uses of the s-word. Another two are censored: We hear the “sh” sound, and then the offending LEGO mouths are covered by a poop emoji. We also hear “d–n,” “h—” and five misuses of God’s name. There’s one winking suggestion of the profanity “g-dd–n.”
We don’t hear a lot of profanity in Piece by Piece’s song clips. But if one was to queue up the original songs … boy howdy, some would be seriously problematic. Speaking of which …
When Pharrell and Chad work with Snoop Dogg, someone sprays “PG spray” over the scene—apparently a kid-friendly way to simulate the scene’s marijuana smoke. Pharrell says that the smoke was so thick that it kind of hovered above the floor. We see Pharrell and Chad enveloped in the haze as they start working on Snoop Dogg’s song “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” (Words such as “marijuana” or “weed” are never used.)
Shay, one of Pharrell’s former bandmates from The Neptunes, tells viewers that when his own solo career tanked, he landed back on the streets, “hustling.” We don’t see any drugs, of course, but we do see the guy exchange something for money.
After an awards show, Pharrell and Chad head home in the back of a limo, obviously impaired by something, but it’s unclear what. We see people pour and serve LEGO glasses of champagne and other forms of alcohol. We hear that Pharrell helped create a brand of liquor that someone describes as looking like Pepto Bismol.
“Drop It Like It’s Hot,” “Alright” and other songs contain lyrics expressing dislike or suspicion of the police. Pharrell admits that when he discovered music, he and his pals skipped a lot of school to jam. We hear that he spent his first $10,000 paycheck in a matter of days. And we learn that during his meeting with Pharrell, Snoop Dogg was surrounded by 15 gang members.
The Bible tells us to build our house upon the rock—not on the sand.
But what about building something on a nice, big, LEGO plate?
I don’t mean to be flippant: It really is something for families to consider with Piece by Piece.
Pharrell is, no question, a phenomenal artist. Piece by Piece is certainly the most creative musical documentary I’ve ever seen. And the inspiration that Pharrell offers here in the midst of his own career comes with a lot of positives. When industry-wide disinterest and foot-dragging seem to conspire to squash Pharrell’s gifts, he pushes on and perseveres. When his own ego nearly capsizes his career, he finds firmer footing in relationships, community and family.
As such, LEGO bricks serve as a fitting vehicle for what Pharrell has done his entire life: He’s taken the structures that other people have given him, torn them down brick by brick to rebuild something he likes better. Likewise, he examines his own work, too. And, when necessary, he tears it down himself. Pharrell is the master of his own handiwork. He can build and rebuild his life as he sees fit.
And that’s great—to a point. We all do and should do this.
But on a greater, deeper level—one that, given his time and experience in the Church, I think Pharrell would understand—we’re not ultimately the builders. We’re the bricks, set in place by a wiser, higher divine hand.
There’s an inherent tension between our own desire to create and our call to be used by our Creator. And I can’t say how well Pharrell is navigating that tension. But certainly, the film gives ample evidence that many of Pharrell’s own musical creations should give Christians pause.
The film winks at the skin and drugs found in the music industry—all skating to the very edge of Piece by Piece’s PG rating. (Indeed, the language alone seems like it’d be enough to push it beyond the PG boundary; perhaps the MPA was simply charmed by the movie’s LEGOs to give it much thought.)
But here’s the other thing parents should consider: Pharrell is a phenomenal artist. His music is very good. And that might push a young listener to go through the producer’s musical library—a library that, in its entirety, would push well beyond PG, past PG-13 and into the musical equivalent of an R rating.
In Piece by Piece, everything parents see on screen might feel “Happy.” But take it just one or two steps beyond—as, I’d wager, the film would love for you to do—and Moms and Dads might do well to drop it like it’s hot.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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