Ok, I’ll come right out and admit it. I just went to see Despicable Me 3, a few days ago. Of course, it was because I was in the company of a child who wanted to go, but the Despicable Me movies belong to the category of kids movies that adults can also endure. Luckily for a music blogger like me, there’s also a major supporting role for music in this movie.
The villain looks like he’s a raver from the 90s and early 00s, but fights his battles with lots of 80s hits, so Pharrell Williams has used this as a partial source of inspiration when he was asked to write the soundtrack for this movie.
“Yellow Light”, with its pixelated video, reminds me a little bit of early electronic music artists like Kraftwerk or Yello, but even though it’s a single, this is my least favorite song. There’s very little variation in the music. I can imagine why this was chosen as a single though. With its electronic sound it fits in the most with music today. In fact, today’s artists, like Lorde, don’t navigate too far away from aspects of this music in what they do.
Pharrell does depart from this sound completely with the other tracks for the movie. “Doowit” (which is my favorite), “Chuck Berry” and “Hug Me” bring a bit of 70s fluff. It’s got a bit of rock, soul and “Hug Me” even reminds me a little bit of ska (Madness, in particular) by the way it’s sung.
It’s a nice change from his funky “Happy” sound, but I’m a little disappointed that the songs all sound so much alike. I kind of get the feeling that he did a bit of a rush job on these songs. I thought it was because of his recent fatherhood of triplets, but as one blogger pointed out in her blog after seeing an interview with him, it doesn’t really sound like that was a distraction for him.
Because only snippets get used in the movie, it all seems to work fine there. It even ties certain scenes together, and in all fairness, that’s what it’s intended to do, probably, but it’s just not as strong as I would’ve expected from Pharrell.
Pharrell has recently shared the news that he is working on new, upcoming albums by Justin Timberlake (yeah!!) and Ariana Grande, so he’s keeping very busy and I expect that music will be better.
