This week, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, marked National Voter Registration Day in the US with a public service announcement declaring that “every voice matters” in the upcoming presidential election.
Pharrell Williams might be happier if they had just kept their mouths shut.
In an interview published the day after the September 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the multi-hyphenate musician told The Hollywood Reporter he was often “annoyed” by celebrity political endorsements.
“There are celebrities that I respect that have an opinion, but not all of them,” he said. “I’m one of them people [who says], ‘What the heck? Shut up. Nobody asked you.'”
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Pharrell made the comment amid several important election events.
Pharrell’s comments coincided with a week bookended by a pair of noteworthy Tuesdays: the former, the first presidential debate, and the latter, National Voter Registration Day. During that time, big music industry names, including Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish voiced their support for the Democrats’ Harris-Walz ticket and urged their fans — Taylor subtly, Billie not so much — to follow suit.
“The choice is clear,” Billie wrote Tuesday on Instagram.
The public won’t see that kind of messaging from Pharrell, who said he “doesn’t really do politics.” (He did concede, though, that he’d never vote “far right.”) I would rather stay out of the way,” he said, calling himself more of a “humanitarian” than an “activist.”
“I’m going to vote how I’m going to vote. I care about my people and I care about the country, but I feel there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and I’m really about the action,” he added. Pharrell is the founder of two equity-based nonprofit organizations — Yellow provides educational technology to marginalized youth while Black Ambition funds and offers mentorship to Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs with the mission to close the wealth gap. “I’m not an activist, but I believe in action,” Pharrell said.
Despite his comments, the “Get Lucky” singer openly supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign and appeared at one of her rallies alongside Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Politics is not my field of expertise,” he said at the time. “But I’m a human. I’m a human being with a family, a human being that shares this Earth with other human beings. This election is just too important. I couldn’t sit on the sidelines and just be quiet.”
Two years later, in 2018, Pharrell sent then-President Trump a cease-and-desist letter for playing his song “Happy” at a political event hours after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In the letter, Pharrell’s lawyer said there was “nothing ‘happy’ about the tragedy inflicted upon our country on Saturday and no permission was granted for your use of this song for this purpose.”
But whether Pharrell publicly endorses a candidate or not, production has wrapped on his Lego-animated biopic *Piece by Piece,* he told The Hollywood Reporter, and the movie is slated for an October 11 release. “When it was time to tell my story,” Pharrell told Los Angeles Times last week, he chose the Lego format because he “wanted to tell it in a way that, like, the kids could see it as well.”
—Malia Mendez, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
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