After entering my 25th year in Iowa City — longer than anywhere I’ve ever resided, including my hometown — I’ve been thinking about how places can shape our lives. Those thoughts came into sharper focus while watching a compelling new documentary about musician Pharrell Williams, who grew up down the street from me.
“I’m from Virginia Beach,” he said at the start of Piece By Piece, an offbeat doc that is animated like a Lego movie. “The beach was less than a mile from Atlantis, a housing project where I grew up.”
When my parents divorced at the end of the 1970s, my dad moved into an apartment around the corner from Pharrell, who was a slender, quirky kid a couple years younger than me. Atlantis was a sprawling complex of two-story residential buildings that was known for drug dealing and the occasional shooting, though I don’t recall those things being a pronounced part of daily life when I was a kid. It was just another neighborhood that my mom and dad drifted through.
“The suburbs thought this was the hood,” Pharrell said, “but really this place was magical. You just witnessed music bouncing off the walls.”
His mom was a teacher, his dad worked as a handyman, and together they raised three Black children in a lilywhite Southern city where brazen racism was commonplace. Pharrell also didn’t fit into the Virginia Beach zeitgeist because he was a nerdy boy who loved science fiction, astronomy and comic books — all of which made one a target for ridicule back then, as I can personally attest.
“I wasn’t the best student, so I was in 7th grade twice,” Pharrell said. “I was detached and more in dreamland all the time because, oftentimes, all I had was my imagination. I wanted to escape.”
As for myself, I was a poor white latchkey kid whose alcoholic parents ran a chaotic household, so I also daydreamed my way through school and ended up having to repeat a grade. Back then, Virginia Beach public schools placed students in three starkly named tracks — Remedial, Average and Superior — so you can imagine how the racial and class hierarchies were sorted within this system.
Pharrell used music as a getaway vehicle, and after he entered a gifted program with other musically inclined outsiders, he realized that being different was not only OK, it was something one could aspire to. By this point, his parents had moved on up into the predominantly white suburb of Windsor Woods, where new worlds opened for him.
The stars began aligning when Pharrell attended a summer music camp at age 12, where he befriended a talented keyboardist and DJ named Chad Hugo. This lowkey Filipino kid landed in Virginia Beach because his father was in the military, and before long the dynamic duo began jamming every day after school.
Chad and Pharrell also hung out with Pusha T and his brother Malice when the aspiring rappers went to Salem High School, where Timbaland also was a classmate. “We all basically lived in the same neighborhood,” Pusha T recalled, “and we were kids, so it was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna ride our bikes to Mount Trashmore.”
The skateboard ramp at Trashmore’s recreational park was a haven for punks and other outcasts from the inland suburbs, and Pharrell found a second home there. I was a rail-thin theater dork who couldn’t skateboard or surf and therefore did not fit Virginia Beach’s platonic ideal, but at least I had a cool job slinging records and tapes during the second half of the 1980s. That’s how I started running into Pharrell again, at the seaside record shop where I worked, and we’d nerd out about music when he browsed the cassettes.
Cap’n Ben’s Records & Tapes was the only place on the Oceanfront that stocked the kind of left-of-the-dial music that was beloved by weirdo teens, which made it a misfit magnet. Our hometown didn’t have a college radio station or any other kind of alternative media outlet, so to fill the cultural vacuum I used the store’s inventory to make a multi-volume, genre-hopping cassette mixtape series, “Psycho Sessions,” that I handed out to friends like candy.
The shop was situated around the corner from a bar-filled strip on Atlantic Avenue that reeked of spilled beer, salty air and despair — a stone’s throw from Coney Island Parlor, a sad little ice cream shop that was on its last legs. Cap’n Ben’s was originally owned by an eccentric English gentleman named Benjamin Smith, who wore a big-buttoned overcoat and a sailing cap with a brass anchor (picture the Sea Captain from The Simpsons, with a dash of Comic Book Guy).
Work life grew more surreal after the shop was purchased by an 18-year-old minor media celebrity known as “The Teen Tycoon,” a fast-talking Yuppie type whose net worth was estimated to be $12.4 million by People magazine. After Coney Island Parlor went out of business in the summer of 1987, he moved our store into the defunct ice cream shop and rebranded it The Sound Company: a slick business name tailor-made for the shiny happy compact disc age. The world’s weirdest vanilla-scented record store exuded a loopy Clockwork Orange vibe with its brightly lit white ceiling, white counters and white walls.
Folks like Pharrell were lured in by the siren call of our Bose AM5 speaker system, which made bones rattle when we blasted LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer or New Order’s Substance. The Sound Company employed a motley assortment of teenaged punks, skaters and hip-hop heads, and I somehow became the manager of this absurd operation.
The owner was largely absentee, so I was left in charge while he was entangled in a variety of 1980s-style financial improprieties, such as a real estate scam that was aided and abetted by a black-clad savings and loan officer who cultivated a witchy woman look. In the end, the goth banker betrayed the teen tycoon by turning state’s evidence, and in 1992 the former was sentenced to a year in federal prison for investor and tax fraud.
All of this might seem a bit hard to believe — and even I wonder if it was all just a fever dream — but I still have my old Sound Company business card to remind me that truth is stranger than fiction. (Speaking of which, after he left prison, the former tycoon reinvented himself as a bestselling author of spy novels and conspiracy thrillers.)
Pharrell remained a semi-regular customer until the store was seized and padlocked by the feds at the end of 1989, by which point I was off to college. He and Chad named themselves the Neptunes around this time, an homage to a city that was known for its annual Neptune festival and a gigantic statue of King Neptune that loomed over the ocean.
Virginia Beach is an illuminating case study that demonstrates how hip hop circulated in the margins of the 1980s monoculture, often via word of mouth and traded tapes that were imported by Navy brats like Chad Hugo. I had friends in the Dam Neck Navy base who were from Philadelphia and New York, and they brought dubbed cassettes of rap radio shows to Virginia Beach that were played while we popped, locked and spun on refrigerator-sized cardboard mats.
With all pieces in place by the early 1990s, the key players in my hometown’s hip-hop scene formed like Voltron. After Pharrell and Chad befriended Timbaland, the high schoolers started a short-lived group named Surrounded by Idiots before everyone moved on to bigger things.
“We had Timbaland, who was known as DJ Timmy Tim,” Pharrell recalled. “We all kind of knew each other from school. That’s how I met Missy [Elliott], from Tim. At the time, we weren’t thinking, ‘We are going to be artists.’ We just loved doing music.”
As an alienated teenager living in a conservative Southern town, it would have been unfathomable for me to imagine that this Atlantis kid and a bunch of his friends from nearby high schools would go on to reshape the sound of popular music. And I wasn’t the only one.
“Remember, this is Virginia Beach, Virginia,” Pharrell said. “It was very Normal, USA. There’s no music industry there, at all. I couldn’t relate to it, and I thought, ‘Well, damn, how am I gonna make it out?’ And then out of nowhere, the biggest producer in the world at this time comes to Virginia Beach. I was looking at the future.”
He was referring to Future Recording Studios, which Teddy Riley opened in 1990 when he was making Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album and cranking out a steady stream of hit songs. “What’s the chances,” Pharrell remarked, “of the hottest producer moving within walking distance from your high school? I was in disbelief.”
After Riley caught the Neptunes’ act at a talent show, he invited them into the studio to work on Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker,” which earned Pharrell his first co-write on a Top 10 single.
Timbaland began collaborating with Missy Elliott during this period, which paved the way for her game-changing 1997 debut, and the Neptunes went on to produce hundreds of hits for music’s biggest stars. The Virginia Beach friends kept raising each other up, such as on one fateful evening in Chad’s attic studio when Pusha T jumped on a Neptunes track and took his first step towards becoming rap royalty.
Near the end of Piece By Piece, Pharrell reflected on his Atlantis origin story and wondered, “Why me? I grew up with kids that could do anything, but no one saw the propensity in them. All I saw was talent, beauty. Everybody has that.”
I count myself lucky, too. After navigating a rocky childhood, I left Virginia Beach to become a first-generation college student, and now I’m department chair of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa with a fancy-ass named professorship.
No, I didn’t become a multimillionaire artist like my former neighbor, but I feel privileged to make a living writing books, making documentaries and teaching classes about music and culture — powerful forces that can alter destinies, as I have learned firsthand.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2024 issue.
