M.I.A. and Pharrell Williams Each Have Books by Rizzoli A couple of years ago M.I.A. and Pharrell Williams got into a tiff. In M.I.A."s telling, Mr. Williams, the hip-hop producer, fashion designer and bon vivant, told her she needed to spend more energy cultivating friends and less time antagonizing people. You get more flies with honey, he told her. Getting flies isn't the point, she insisted. This took place, naturally, at the Met Ball, the annual gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is the fief of Anna Wintour and has become the homecoming party of new society. That just goes to show that despite their wildly different approaches, M.I.A. and Mr. Williams often end up at the same places. Both have been signed to the same major record label, both have leapfrogged from musician to polyvalent brand, and both have new books from Rizzoli - catalogues raisonnés, more or less - that document this evolution. The books are beautiful and indulgent, more a record of fame than an analysis of it - none of Jay-Z's "Decoded"-style exegesis here. You'll learn a little about what motivates M.I.A., and almost nothing of why Mr. Williams loves the sounds he does. Both M.I.A. and Mr. Williams are now finding success in multiple arenas, and these books, while static, exist to capture it all, flatteringly. But that said, they couldn't be more different. Mr. Williams's, "Pharrell: Places and Spaces I've Been," is the product of open embrace, capturing someone moving ever forward, guided by curiosity and fame. "I am only as fast as the wind that's blown into my sails," he writes. By contrast, M.I.A."s self-titled book is a document of isolation and resistance, clearly the product of one person following an idiosyncratic path. Of her first album, "Arular," she writes, "It went from my bedroom to whoever was looking." This contrast can be partly traced to their beginnings in music: Mr. Williams started his career as one-half of the production duo the Neptunes, who in the early 2000s were the most desired collaborators in hip-hop, and as part of the band N.E.R.D. Though he would later have some success as a solo artist, he began by working with others. M.I.A."s career has always had more of a DIY feel, taking the materials and technologies at hand, creating something fast and dirty, then moving on to the next thing. Her book contains barely any text: M.I.A. has some words at the beginning of the work's sections, which coincide with each of her albums. Steve Loveridge, a longtime collaborator who is making a documentary about her, has more to say about her in his opening essay than she does throughout. But that's presuming that words are her best medium, which they very much aren't. The most vivid parts of this book have to do with image and politics. She has a keen grasp of iconography, a phenomenal color sense and a provocateur's instinct for hot buttons. Some of the most moving works here are stencils of Tamil fighters. M.I.A. made them from photographs taken of videotapes that were used by Tamil rebels to report on fighters who had died in the Sri Lankan civil war. M.I.A. is of Tamil heritage. Elsewhere she's playful with context, as in the graphic with a Chanel logo turned on its side, the opposing Cs used as the U and N in United Nations. During the past decade she's gone from handmade music and art to thinking harder about technology and its casualties. "Kala," her second album, was about "the digitizing of third-world taste and the cheap, gritty production of third-world goods for first-world consumption," she writes. Sometimes, but not often, she acknowledges her own privileged ability to move through multiple worlds, borrowing from and participating in other cultures; it's refreshing to hear, even briefly, about the price of these cultural exchanges. In a couple of places here M.I.A. talks about her shortcomings in self-merchandising. Even with such a facile gift for branding, she is almost comically bad at selling things. Maybe that's what Mr. Williams should have been haranguing her about at the Met. Mr. Williams's art is capitalist collaboration. There are sections of his book devoted to his design team-ups with Louis Vuitton and Moncler, and some of the sharpest layouts are of the stores that sell his Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream clothing lines - especially one in Hong Kong where images of the lunar surface cover some of the floor. Mr. Williams gives good picture, and isn't shy about including several photos of himself from editorial fashion shoots. But even still, this book doesn't feel vain. That's because of the interviews Mr. Williams conducts with his peers and heroes, often the same people. They're loose and haphazard and wide-ranging and occasionally hit pay dirt - Jay-Z talking about speaking with the Notorious B.I.G. the night he was killed, or Mr. Williams asking Zaha Hadid if she will collaborate with him on designing affordable prefab houses. Throughout is the sense of Mr. Williams as student. He speaks with Buzz Aldrin about the Drake equation, which is used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, and then turns and tries to get Kanye West to unpack his perfectionism. It doesn't all stick, but Mr. Williams displays bravura range, even if he comes off as someone who sold a book idea just for the chance to get some of his well-placed friends and colleagues in a room to talk; it's like his own personal Interview magazine. The notable exception is a conversation with Chad Hugo and Sheldon Haley, Mr. Williams's band mates in N.E.R.D. (Mr. Hugo is also the other half of the Neptunes), who are, bizarrely, interviewed by Mr. Williams's manager. But maybe that's because they represent Mr. Williams's past, and he faces only forward.