Rock Star

Album: In Search Of... (2001)
Charted: 15
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Songfacts®:

  • As The Neptunes, the team of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo produced tracks for Jay-Z ("I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)"), Ol' Dirty Bastard ("Got Your Money"), Britney Spears ("I'm A Slave 4 U"), and several other major artists. In 2002 they released an album of their own, In Search Of..., as N.E.R.D (No-one Ever Really Dies), with "Rock Star" their second single. Heavy on distortion and aggression, it merged nu-metal and rap in a sound that was distinctly 2002.
  • On this track, Williams and Hugo take aim at the posers, declaring that they are the real rock stars here. Rap artists have a long history of announcing their rock dominance; Run-D.M.C. planted their flag as "King of Rock" back in 1985. "Rock" is more of a state of mind in this context, rather than a genre.
  • Pharrell told Rolling Stone: "'Rock Star' is about power. In rap music, there's a lot of songs about fakes and wannabes, but there's not a lot of those songs in rock."
  • The term "Rock Star" was rarely used in song titles until the '00s. In 2007, Shop Boyz hit #2 US with "Party Like A Rock Star"; the same year, Nickelback took "Rockstar" to #6. Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) went to #81 the following year with "Rock Star," and Rihanna hit #64 in 2010 with "Rockstar 101." The biggest stars of them all were Post Malone, whose "Rockstar" was a #1 hit in 2017 and DaBaby whose "Rockstar" topped the charts in 2020. Note the various genres covered in these tracks - only Nickelback can claim an association with traditional rock, and some would dispute that.
  • In 2004, the Jason Nevins remix of "Rock Star" was used in commercials for Apple's iPod, the first popular portable device to hold digital music (before that, we played cassette tapes on the Sony Walkman). These commercials were groundbreaking, showing listeners in silhouette rocking out with the device (the headphones had cords back then). The exposure from these spots could break a song in America, as it did with "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" by the band Jet.

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