Before poptimism took over, Serious Music Aficionados liked to question the legitimacy of the idea that  knob-twiddling, synth-playing studio producers could ever be Real Bands. It’s a question that the Neptunes addressed with a bit of fence-straddling over the course of releasing their first album as N*E*R*D, which first dropped in Europe during the summer of ’01 before they decided to revamp the whole project with a live-band rerecording for its American version a year later. No slight to Spymob, but the serrated-edge weirdness of the original “electronic version” fits the material a bit better than the “rock” one, even if it put some technological constraints on the album’s ambitious eclecticism. Could be because Pharrell’s voice just harmonizes better with those tinny Triton riffs, could be because it’s funnier (and cooler) to call yourself a “Rock Star” over stripped-down beep-boop music actual rock stars would (foolishly) consider inauthentic, could be because even when things threaten to get maudlin (“Run to the Sun”; “Bobby James”) the “artificial” vibe gives enough distance from skepticism to make the emotion feel as legit as Pharrell’s almost naively delivered sincerity deserves. But it’s probably because the savory-sour funk of “Lapdance” and the dilated-pupil psychedelia of “Am I High” and the fucking-around-as-action-blockbuster oomph of “Truth or Dare” would still get embedded in your brain even if you played them on a Fisher-Price toy.