Book of Happy - Sidebar: The Cover Versions

In the modern age you know your song is breaking if it's on The X-Factor and people are covering it on Youtube.  The band Boyce Avenue has made their way in the world through a deft combination of original work, live touring, and well-done acoustic Youtube covers.  Here is how Happy sounds when they play it in kind of a rock/blues style:



I particularly like this one because Manzano omits some of Pharrell's vocal flourishes.  He knows the song sounds fine without them, and it's actually very hard to sing it the way Pharrell does without sounding silly.  Overall the more minimal treatment actually makes it a little easier to hear the rhythmic tension/release that makes the song so catchy.

There are lots of other covers, of course, and of course most are bad.  I've already stated my admiration for the Pomplamoose lounge-ish mashup, which in all candor is probably the closest approximation of my interior experience ever committed to digital video coding.

But I think the first cover I heard, and the one that got me interested in the song, is also the best.  These Detroit Elementary School kids do not need Auto-Tune:



It's not a happy song, it's a hymn.

Think I'll play it again.

Book of Happy - Chapter 2: The Song

There's no nice way to say this, happiness is dumb.  There's a reason we say people are "fat and happy."  Dumb.  It means they're dumb.

This is a happy song that is also dumb:




The odd thing about Happy is, it's not all that happy, either musically or in its lyrical content.  It is energetic, engaging, even defiant, but my contention is that Happy is not happy, at least not in the conventional sense of the world.  It has as little do with Herman's Hermits as the Bhagavad Gita does with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

Listen to the tone of the music:



In the ascension to the chorus, Pharrell sings "because I'm happy..." not in a major progression, but in a minor one, with a blueing whole step as the third note of the chord.  This sets up an immediate and disquieting tension between the ostensibly happy lyrics and the more ominous musical context.  The harmonies behind the chorus and the female "happy happy happy happy" background chant again are nowhere near a major key, and the voices themselves sounds strained, even anxious.

What prevents complete implosion is the positive call-and-response, in which Pharrell encourages us, through his masterful vocal performance, to clap along if...  If what?  Yeah, good question.  Here are Pharrell's koans, and you can tell me how happy they are:

• "Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof."  For me this implies ecstasy, not happiness, and with a specifically religious connotation.  Happy has strong gospel influences (more on this another time), and Pharrell looks upward as he sings.  He is saying:  clap along if you are consumed with religious ecstasy.  Are you?
• "Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth."  What, wait?  No one thinks that.  Keats said beauty was truth, and I thought that myself until I met some very untruthful beauties.  Socrates thought the truth arose from the acknowledgement of your own ignorance.  The Buddha thought the truth was always accessible, if one could set aside cravings and emotions (like happiness) to experience it.  But happiness is truth?  When I was in college we heard a girl say:  "my philosophy is to always be happy."  We laughed and laughed.
• "Clap along if you know what happiness is to you."  Why am I not clapping?  Well, because that's a hard question.  What is happiness?  Who are we?  Why are we here?  When should we feel happy?  This guy is throwing stuff into a pop song that belongs in a graduate seminar in phenomenology, and moving along like it ain't no thing.
• "Clap along if you feel like that's what you want to do."  Ok, that part I get.

So if Happy is not happy, what is it?  I believe Pharrell is singing about a state of mind far from conventional happiness, and he gives strong clues as to its nature in the second verse:

Here come bad news talking this and that, yeah,
Well, give me all you got, and don’t hold it back, yeah,
Well, I should probably warn you I’ll be just fine, yeah,
No offense to you, don’t waste your time

...and in the earnest, imploring break:

Bring me down, can't nothin'
Bring me down, my level's too high
Bring me down, can't nothin'
Bring me down...

Pharrell is describing a kind of joyous freedom, one in which adverse events cannot affect his equilibrium.  It is not intoxication or madness - he is fully in control of his faculties.  He has reached a place - real or imagined - in which he is suffused with joy and cannot touched by the dirt of everyday life.  The closest analog I can think of is the Tenth Bull of zen, a description of the highest state of enlightenment, in which the bodhisattva wanders in the world:

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world. My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful. I use no magic to extend my life; now, before me, the dead trees become alive.

The happiness of Happy is not giddy or lighthearted.  It is strong and defiant, but without anger or angst.  It is joyful in a serious way, not an insensible one.  It is happiness with eyes and heart open.  It is full of love, but informed by a deep sense that the world does not always offer love in return.

It is not happiness Pharrell is talking about, it is enlightenment.  It is love past reason.  The dissonance in the song mirrors the dissonance in our own lives, between the frustrations of our daily experience and that part of our soul that yearns to be unchained.

Think I'll listen to it again.

Addendum on Gangnam Style

The Atlantic had a nice article on the video a couple years ago, which is here. 

In my opinion, it is highly improbable that a crossdressing pot-smoking draft dodger would become South Korea's King of All Media, but imagine how the rest of the South Korean entertainment industry feels.  That guy?  That's the one the crosses over?

Yup.  A fine endorsement for the Berklee School of Music as well, even if he did drop out.

Book of Happy - Chapter 1: A Successful Commercial Product

I had a game this spring that I'd play whenever the family went on a drive together.  "I'd like to hear that Happy song," I'd announce, and started pressing buttons on the radio, scanning the FM dial.  Happy quickly came up perhaps 80% of the time.  My children, not sharing my enthusiasm for the song, wished it were otherwise.

As a friend once said of Madonna, Happy is not just ubiquitous, it's everywhere.  Six months after its release, the song still plays constantly on radio.  It is a format buster:  in April it stood atop an unprecedented six different Billboard charts.  Slate noted that Happy ended a 14-month drought - the longest in history - in which no lead black artist held the number one spot on the Billboard rankings.  "Thanks to its unabashed retro-pop friendliness, Happy may be the ultimate 2014 crossover record. Or, to put a finer point on it: This may turn out to be white people’s favorite hit by a black person in a decade."  (Remember Outkast?)

Happy is starting to slip down the Billboard Hot 100, now residing at number 8, although this should not comfort those who wish to displace it:  it has already been #1 in the UK on three separate occasions.

But it's no Gangnam Style.  The official Happy video has registered 305.6 million views on Youtube, which sounds like a lot.  But Happy is not even in the Top 30.  Gangnam Style holds the top spot with 2 billion views.  Think of Happy as the USA, and Gangnam Style as China.  Slackers around the world agree that Gangnam Style (not to mention Baby and On the Floor) is a better way to waste four minutes than Happy.  Happy is a hit, but not the biggest hit even of its era - in the context of its time, a highly successful commercial product.

Think I'll play it again.

Book of Happy - Prologue: A Crime in Teheran

All around the world people had been doing it.  From Bucharest to Bahrain to Beijing, people made "happy in..." videos, dancing in their local communities to Pharrell Williams' song, catching its infectious spirit and expressing a little bit of individualism, good humor, and even, in extreme cases, apparent existential joy.

Didn't have room for Berlin, but it's good too


Williams and the industry were caught by surprise.  Written on commission for the movie Despicable Me 2, "Happy" had no big commercial buildup, no media buy, no Twitter campaign.  Radio didn't want it.  It lost the Oscar to Disney's ponderous, anti-musical screed "Let it Go".

And then the videos blew up, and radio started playing it, and one thing led to another, and soon Pharrell found himself at the apex of the entertainment universe, crying on Oprah.  

Meanwhile, in Tehran, criminal proceedings were underway:

The women did not cover their heads with the required hijab. At times, the men and women danced together, which is forbidden and punishable under the law...  [T]he police found it offensive. Iran state media called it "vulgar."

For one tyrant, at least, this inoffensive pop ditty expresses something deeply wrong with the world.

Think I'll play it again.

Time-traveling band brings sound of the 80s to modern Los Angeles

And it's not at all bad.  I endorse Fitz and the Tantrums.  Two competent singers.  A band with horns.  Great hooks. And they're old - not as old as us, but old enough to understand they may not get another shot, so they'd better make the most of this one.  A little preachy sometimes, but musically their heart is in exactly the right place.  Screw it, I'm on board.

Supposedly the band was thrown together in about an afternoon, and Fitzpatrick was getting them  gigs after just a week of rehearsal.  If I were him and Noelle Scaggs walked in the door, I've have done the same, probably with less dilly-dallying.

The Current Hit is The Walker

Last Year's Hit was Out of My League


It Began with Moneygrabber