Earl Sweatshirt (Earlsweatshirt.com)

Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt—one of most popular crew members along with Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean (according to The New Yorker)—is getting ready to start laying down tracks on his next album. And the list of artists he plans on working with is very odd indeed.

According to FADER, most of OF's posse will appear on the album, which will be released via Tan Cressida, the Sony imprint he created. But it won't just be another infamous mixtape, as the lineup includes: "Tyler, the Creator, Domo Genesis, MellowHype, Frank Ocean ... Pharrell Williams, the Neptunes, the Alchemist and Vince Staples."

Below, Mr. Sweatshirt teams up with Donald Glover's Childish Gambino for a track called "Drop."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMGeuTAFWew&feature=related

Qream, get the money.

Hey, ladies who love flavored liqueurs -- good news! Pharrell Williams announced that he's releasing a vanilla-flavored spirit called Qream, and launched the female-friendly beverage at a giant Beverly Hills party last weekend. He doesn't explain the creative spelling, but he does give a bit of insight into why, as of late, he's focusing on making bottles for the club instead of bangers for the club. Sigh. Day jobs, don't leave them!

Rap-Up TV has brought us the scintillating details behind Qream. Pharrell, he's a markets guy. He knows what's missing from the spread.

“I looked at the market, I looked at the holes out there and it felt like 'indulgence' and 'women' were the two things that were being neglected," he said. "When you pour a glass of cream, it's significantly less calories. It's a thinner consistency, so a woman doesnt feel like she's gained ten pounds just by thinking about drinking it."

Pharrell then describes the delectibilty of the stuff.

"It's definitely in the ice cream world, in the shake world."

Perfect for summer! And it's 95 percent lactose free. So if you're a woman who feels shunned by a market that's ignored "indulgence," this drink is for you. Lactose intolerant women who indulge, you have no excuse.

Perhaps realizing that the odd ads featuring Mr. Seinfeld and Mr. Gates shopping for shoes and moving in with a suburban family because they "need to get in touch with the people" were entirely ineffective—the self-deprecating ads seemed to drive the point of Microsoft being "out of touch" only further—the company has now summoned Deepak Chopra, actress Eva Longoria and musician Pharrell Williams for the new ads.

This new phase will reportedly directly respond to the "Mac vs. PC" ads by featuring an engineer who will resemble the "PC" character, played by author John Hodgman, in Apple's ads. (The image of an open casting for Mr. Hodgman look-alikes on its own sort of trumps any clever ad ideas Microsoft is bound to come up with.)

But Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla denied that there was ever any misstep within the ad campaign, adding that the three ads featuring Mr. Seinfeld were always intended to be "teasers" for the larger campaign that is to come. Mr. Seinfeld was not dropped from the campaign, he insisted.

"The ads that feature Bill and Jerry have done exactly what they were designed to do," said Mr. Pilla. "Any suggestion otherwise is untrue."

“I’ve always wanted to work with Julian and I’m a big fan of The Strokes. Santogold is super-talented and she cares about music so much that it’s not just about sound, it’s a visual aesthetic,” said Mr. Williams in a statement. “Working together on original music that crossed all of our inspirations was completely refreshing and I love the track. As for partnering with Converse, I only wear and support the things that I like. The Chuck Taylor is the golden goose egg.”

Golden goose egg indeed! And that egg hatches today with the official release of “My Drive Thru,” which can be downloaded for free at converse.com. Today’s also the street date for Seeing Sounds, the third album from Mr. William’s alternate project, N.E.R.D. (that’s en-ee-arr-dee), which, according to Rolling Stone, dapples in hip hop, jazz, ‘60s soul and new wave.

Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing In the Line for the Bathroom) - N.E.R.D.

But alas, it’s a slow week for new releases, or good ones at least. And so we give you (albeit reluctantly) Alanis Morissette’s Flavors of Entanglement. We really haven’t heard much from Ms. Morissette since her angsty 1995 major label debut, Jagged Little Pill. But as the Observer’s Irina Aleksander points out, the former Nickelodeon kids’ show star is getting a bit of an A-list boost thanks to her break-up early last year with actor Ryan Reynolds, who’s now engaged to Scarlett Johansson. (Dare we say that’s a step up on his part?) Apparently, she sings all about their relationship gone sour on the new album, and the press is paying attention. Judging by her recent interview with the AP, she seems well recovered: “I have enough distance, so to be perfectly honest I’m not really that focused on it,” she told the newswire when asked how she felt about Mr. Reynolds moving on. “I wish anyone whom I love, whether I hang out with them or not, great success and love in their life.” How sweet! But really, we can’t poke too much fun of someone who was on You Can’t Do That on Television!

Underneath - Alanis Morissette

Finally, The Week in Music decided to go out on limb with this next group, The Fratellis, who release Here We Stand today. They’re from the U.K., which automatically gives them a few points. And they’re billed as being “ex-Wallflowers,” which would mean at least one of them was in a band with Bob Dylan’s son. Sort of cool? But really it was their name—which bears reference to the trio of villains in the classic ‘80s flick The Goonies—that sealed the deal. Best movie ever! Wait, members insist that the choice of band name is merely a coincidence? Sigh. But it’s OK—they kind of suck anyway.

Shameless - The Fratellis

Thanks to Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupre's infamous rendezvous, the Mayflower hotel's gift-shop has seen a major boost in sales due to people buying up souvenirs adorned with the hotel's logo. Thank you former Gov. Spitzer for boosting another city's economy. [NY Daily News]

Another day, another power-lunch. Barbara Walters and Judith Giuliani were seen lunching at the Four Saesons within feet of Anna Wintour, who was with Marie-Josée Kravis, Lachlan Murdoch, Leonard Lauder, Henry Kissinger, Vernon Jordan, Tommy Hilfiger, Pete Peterson and Jack Rudin. Meanwhile, this week's Saturday Night Live host, Christopher Walken was spotted with Lorne Michaels, Mayor Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, and Andrew Murstein in front of the Yankee Stadium. [P6]

A bloody fight allegedly broke out yesterday between two extras at a Pharrell Williams video shoot at the Madison Club in Chelsea. Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson--the two are featured in the video--showed up after the commotion. [P6]

Chloe Sevigny was a no-show at Nylon magazine's ninth-anniversary party that she was scheduled to host because she reportedly came down with a viral infection. [P6]

Heather Mills may be shopping for an apartment in New York after being awarded a hefty divorce settlement. [NY daily News]

Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson presided over a karaoke contest at Angels and Kings involving Lydia Hearst and Damien Fahey. [NY Daily News]

Zani Gugelmann, Maggie Betts, Alex Kramer, Lydia Fenet, and Karen Larrain attended a dinner at Bette hosted by Elle Decor after a Christie's auction preview. [Park Avenue Peerage]

On Tuesday, Meryl Streep, Liz Smith, Katie Couric, Graydon Carter, Candace Bushnell and others gathered at Lincoln Center to read a little poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. [NY Social Diary]

But more than just a studio Svengali, Pharrell the man-boy himself is a fascinating study in the power and limits of contradiction. A hip-hop mogul, he also appropriates the adolescent accoutrements of white suburbia: His affected rap braggadocio comes coupled with a self-identification as “Lil’ Skateboard P.” In a remarkable instance of cultural convergence, the 2003 video for his one-off single “Frontin’” famously featured Pharrell and Jay-Z sipping alcohol from red plastic cups at a languid house party—just as art-country stalwarts Wilco were canonizing middle-American “disposable Dixie cup drinking.” Outwardly, hip-hop remains, as always, fixated on high and low—crack and Cristal, murder and Maybachs—but Pharrell has given it, and all of pop, a new heart, both bourgeois and avant-garde.

So even though Pharrell’s long-delayed solo album In My Mind is a disappointment, it’s neither unimportant nor ignoble. Unlike his work with funk side-project N.E.R.D., it takes a legitimate stab at the mainstream. Sadly, the enticing tensions suggested by Pharrell’s patchwork of cultural alliances—skateboarding and hustling; music-geek nerds and womanizing alpha males—don’t deepen over the course of a full-length LP; instead, they dissipate into an uncertain middle-of-the-road anonymity, as promising Pharrell beats are neutered by blandly undifferentiated Pharrell vocals.

In My Mind makes clear—sometimes by example, more often by contrast—that successful Neptunes songs work by tapping into the zeitgeist appeal of incongruous juxtaposition: Like his rival Timbaland, Pharrell intuitively recognized the dissonant appeal that a cold, electronic counterpoint could add to the essentially organic, operatic art form of rap. At its most persuasive, the regime of incongruity extends to subtext as well, and that’s where Pharrell’s technically narrow but chameleon-like vocal contributions have proven most fruitful. His elementary rapping on the “Boys” remix added just the slightest danger to an otherwise chaste Britney Spears cut. At the other extreme, his off-key and off-kilter falsetto hooks brought welcome vulnerability to Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and Jay-Z’s “Change Clothes.”

No surprise, then, that the few winning moments on In My Mind coincide with guest appearances by artists who are both easier to pin down than Pharrell and less intriguing. Ms. Stefani is featured on the album opener and leadoff single, “Can I Have It Like That?”, and though her vocals are limited to the chorus refrain “You got it like that,” the presence of the erstwhile ska princess somehow adds legitimacy—even sex appeal—to the song’s conflicted fanboy couplets. “She like the way my hands use her body for hand warmers,” Pharrell awkwardly boasts, “and all our car doors go up like Transformers.” The effect, like last year’s “Hollaback Girl,” is more charming than it has any right to be.

“Young Girl”—far and away the album’s best song—finds our hero in another familiar position: playing wingman to Jay-Z (besides Bill Clinton, perhaps America’s most irrepressible semi-retiree). The trademark falsetto, wrapped around a single, scanty string loop, propels “Young Girl” with an ominous, minor-key urgency. But the track’s canniness is all about building anticipation for Hova’s arrival (he joins in after two and a half minutes)—and in the icon’s presence, Pharrell’s genius as a producer and relative smallness as a performer stand in sharp relief.

On his own—as he is on about half of In My Mind’s 15 tracks—Pharrell seems self-conscious, unnecessarily and aimlessly discursive. At its nadir, the album becomes an unwitting argument for the final untenability of the ghetto/skate park, marginal black youth/marginal white youth synthesis suggested by the Neptunes at their peak. On “You Can Do It Too,” Pharrell dictates a slow-jam letter to his fans, telling them that they too can beat the odds. But the odds in this case don’t seem particularly long: He’s never been bushwhacked by drugs or poverty or violence. Pharrell tells us, “I was in marching band / I was a skateboarder / Jesus made wine / I couldn’t make water.”

Skateboard P halfheartedly tries to explain himself to the world—a trick he can’t yet pull off. It’s worth noting that Kanye West, another producer turned performer and a man inordinately skilled at talking about himself, shows up on “Number One,” In My Mind’s obligatory toast-our-own-success R&B concoction. The track is a mess—Mr. West’s insistent, nasal preening clashes awfully with the production’s cool austerity—but nonetheless instructive. After all, Mr. West has also been interpreted as a bourgeois prophet, perched knowingly between the dorm room and the street. Nothing if not shrewd, he quickly turned genuine cultural hybridity into a lucrative and ludicrous gimmick: His collegiate-Gothic take on age-old hip-hop tropes is narcissistic, over the top and has, to date, produced two irresistible solo albums.

Pharrell’s own ambiguities seem more authentically ambiguous; his unresolved contradictions regarding music, class and race (it’s especially jarring to hear him speak of “my niggas”) appear to be an honest function of the relentless shifting and blurring and fronting that is the way we live now. A deep, as yet unrefined understanding of the times makes him the perfect all-purpose collaborator—and, for the time being, a cipher as a soloist. But if Pharrell Williams ever figures out how to put what’s really in his mind into words and music, watch out.