Neptunes

“WHAT about an audiobook?” Pharrell Williams asked, sitting at the head of a conference table at the Park Avenue South offices of Rizzoli as he looked at the nearly finished galleys for an October release called “Pharrell: Places and Spaces I’ve Been.”

Here was a lavish coffee-table book filled with images of the many products he has designed in collaboration with other artists and fashion designers, and interviews between Mr. Williams and the likes of Jay-Z, Anna Wintour and Zaha Hadid, which do not exactly lend themselves to the narrative treatment. But why not?       

“It could be really interesting,” Mr. Williams said, “if I went out and hired Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover to read them.”

Or, as was pointed out by others in the room, it could be a little weird, if not uncool.

“An audiobook is not a good look,” said Loïc Villepontoux, sitting across the table. A calm, affable man, he is Mr. Williams’s longtime business associate, who oversees the licensing operations for his fashion labels.

“It’s like a lot of old women listening to the latest Richard Ford,” said Ian Luna, an editor of the book, looking a little nervous as he leafed through the galleys.

Helen Lasichanh, Mr. Williams’s fiancée, whose hair is dyed in chunks of pink, blond and brown like a block of Neapolitan ice cream, asked him smartly, “Have you ever bought an audiobook?”

“Let me ask you a question,” Mr. Williams said. “Has anyone of my persuasion ever done one? No. It could create a wave.”

They heard him out.

Read the entire article in the New York Times