Happy
Harrison Gatlin
On your morning subway commute, you meet your mortal enemy. His grin is an affront to your peaceful solitude, his t-shirt proclaims that Life Is Good, and he is armed with a boombox. Before you have time to escape, non-consensual sound waves cross your ears’ canals to mount a full-scale invasion of your mind.
You dash into the next car and plug your ears with your AirPods Pro, but the damage is done. The first (and all) five notes of “Happy” by Pharrell Williams have entered your auditory cortex.
Because you’ve heard this song so many times before (although without choosing to) and because music has such a dominion over memory, the intro immediately conjures the entire song: every beat, every rise and fall of pitch, every repetitive lyric. To you, a professor of English Literature at a generally well-regarded for-profit university, these lyrics are asinine. You know that happiness does not equal truth. More often than not, happiness is a lie, built on shoddy principles. To you, happiness is a castle of intelligent thought, with baskets of flowers on the ramparts and a pristine, logical moat. To Pharrell, who is shouting melodically at your castle’s gates, happiness is a room without a roof. He wants to remove your castle’s roof by force, and he has already crossed your moat.
In a coordinated attack, Pharrell and his army of horns launch arrows over your ramparts, while his percussionists hammer the gates with a battering ram. They call it the snare drum.
Your castle is sturdy. Its walls were forged in the hot furnace of the Academy and laid upon a solid foundation of Bertolt Brecht: “To talk about trees is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors.” Yes, that was the first stone you laid, the anchoring principle in your, you thought, impenetrable castle. You queue up a cacophony of post-punk noise, hoping to drown the invaders in scalding oil, but you cannot stop their advance. The castle’s stones shake. The Great Hall echoes with predictable sounds. Clap along if you know what happiness is to you!
Of course you know what happiness is to you. It’s up to you. You won’t give into Pharrell’s peer pressure. You’ve worked hard to secure your castle’s roof. You’ll fight to defend it. You’ll outlast this band of marauders.
Though what frightens you most is not their weapons but the expressions on their faces. Are they enjoying this siege? With a maniacal twist of the lips, Pharrell exclaims: I’m a hot air balloon that could go to space!
The battering ram bursts through your gate. The band claps as a heap of stone crashes to the floor. The invaders pour into your Great Hall like a swarm of ants. Pharrell wastes no time in scrambling up a wall. He leaps from a rafter onto your chandelier, riding it with a menacing bounce. He’s on the cusp of something cult-like. His saccharine falsetto drips from your chandelier, flooding your Great Hall with an odd, syrupy substance.
And wait a minute, who’s that stomping on your dining table, drinking the last of your wine? Is that Cee Lo Green?
You play a track called “Meditative Sounds,” hoping to bore the intruders into leaving. Out of the mixture of ocean waves and human claps, an idea surfaces.
The structure of “Happy,” its simple, orderly engineering with its perfectly symmetrical ups and downs, might be unassailable. After all, the arch is the strongest form in any architecture, music’s included. Could it be that this simple song has a greater structural integrity than your castle of thought?
Worse than this is the fact that you are the only one not having fun. Through sheer enjoyment, the invaders are reducing your castle to rubble. And you, miserable, always defending. The number of times you’ve taken the air out of a room with that Brecht quote. And Pharrell is a hot air balloon? It all seems so wrong, yet, yet… so does Brecht. What’s so bad about trees? Or happiness? What if the very cornerstone of your castle was mislaid? What if there was never any need for a castle at all?
It is in this way that Pharrell and his band blow the roof off your Great Hall. It plunges into your moat with a splash.
Pharrell grins. He is happy.
Your train stops and you step off. A frigid Fall breeze hits you as you catch the expression on the boombox-carrier’s face. It’s at odds with the smiling face on his shirt. He is uncertain, perhaps even troubled. He has worries, fears, vague or inscrutable dreams, and still he invites you to share in his song.
You walk the remaining few blocks to your office on the fantastic grass of your university’s campus. At your desk, nine stories high, you look out on Manhattan. With a richness you have never experienced, you see the Empire State Building spearing a tangerine cloud, the towers around it throbbing like the bars of sound in an equalizer, the sun-spattered foliage of Central Park, the sleek profile of a plane and the entire miracle of flight, and the people, so many living, thinking beings who have chosen to guard their once-trembling hearts against the knives we all carry; in short, you see everything the way you want to see it: still and quiet but pulsing with its own inner glow, dancing in place.
At the same time, somewhere in Manhattan, a child spends her last ounce of energy digging through a dumpster for edible food, and finding none, curls up in the warm heap of trash to die.
You clap.
Harrison Gatlin
On your morning subway commute, you meet your mortal enemy. His grin is an affront to your peaceful solitude, his t-shirt proclaims that Life Is Good, and he is armed with a boombox. Before you have time to escape, non-consensual sound waves cross your ears’ canals to mount a full-scale invasion of your mind.
You dash into the next car and plug your ears with your AirPods Pro, but the damage is done. The first (and all) five notes of “Happy” by Pharrell Williams have entered your auditory cortex.
Because you’ve heard this song so many times before (although without choosing to) and because music has such a dominion over memory, the intro immediately conjures the entire song: every beat, every rise and fall of pitch, every repetitive lyric. To you, a professor of English Literature at a generally well-regarded for-profit university, these lyrics are asinine. You know that happiness does not equal truth. More often than not, happiness is a lie, built on shoddy principles. To you, happiness is a castle of intelligent thought, with baskets of flowers on the ramparts and a pristine, logical moat. To Pharrell, who is shouting melodically at your castle’s gates, happiness is a room without a roof. He wants to remove your castle’s roof by force, and he has already crossed your moat.
In a coordinated attack, Pharrell and his army of horns launch arrows over your ramparts, while his percussionists hammer the gates with a battering ram. They call it the snare drum.
Your castle is sturdy. Its walls were forged in the hot furnace of the Academy and laid upon a solid foundation of Bertolt Brecht: “To talk about trees is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors.” Yes, that was the first stone you laid, the anchoring principle in your, you thought, impenetrable castle. You queue up a cacophony of post-punk noise, hoping to drown the invaders in scalding oil, but you cannot stop their advance. The castle’s stones shake. The Great Hall echoes with predictable sounds. Clap along if you know what happiness is to you!
Of course you know what happiness is to you. It’s up to you. You won’t give into Pharrell’s peer pressure. You’ve worked hard to secure your castle’s roof. You’ll fight to defend it. You’ll outlast this band of marauders.
Though what frightens you most is not their weapons but the expressions on their faces. Are they enjoying this siege? With a maniacal twist of the lips, Pharrell exclaims: I’m a hot air balloon that could go to space!
The battering ram bursts through your gate. The band claps as a heap of stone crashes to the floor. The invaders pour into your Great Hall like a swarm of ants. Pharrell wastes no time in scrambling up a wall. He leaps from a rafter onto your chandelier, riding it with a menacing bounce. He’s on the cusp of something cult-like. His saccharine falsetto drips from your chandelier, flooding your Great Hall with an odd, syrupy substance.
And wait a minute, who’s that stomping on your dining table, drinking the last of your wine? Is that Cee Lo Green?
You play a track called “Meditative Sounds,” hoping to bore the intruders into leaving. Out of the mixture of ocean waves and human claps, an idea surfaces.
The structure of “Happy,” its simple, orderly engineering with its perfectly symmetrical ups and downs, might be unassailable. After all, the arch is the strongest form in any architecture, music’s included. Could it be that this simple song has a greater structural integrity than your castle of thought?
Worse than this is the fact that you are the only one not having fun. Through sheer enjoyment, the invaders are reducing your castle to rubble. And you, miserable, always defending. The number of times you’ve taken the air out of a room with that Brecht quote. And Pharrell is a hot air balloon? It all seems so wrong, yet, yet… so does Brecht. What’s so bad about trees? Or happiness? What if the very cornerstone of your castle was mislaid? What if there was never any need for a castle at all?
It is in this way that Pharrell and his band blow the roof off your Great Hall. It plunges into your moat with a splash.
Pharrell grins. He is happy.
Your train stops and you step off. A frigid Fall breeze hits you as you catch the expression on the boombox-carrier’s face. It’s at odds with the smiling face on his shirt. He is uncertain, perhaps even troubled. He has worries, fears, vague or inscrutable dreams, and still he invites you to share in his song.
You walk the remaining few blocks to your office on the fantastic grass of your university’s campus. At your desk, nine stories high, you look out on Manhattan. With a richness you have never experienced, you see the Empire State Building spearing a tangerine cloud, the towers around it throbbing like the bars of sound in an equalizer, the sun-spattered foliage of Central Park, the sleek profile of a plane and the entire miracle of flight, and the people, so many living, thinking beings who have chosen to guard their once-trembling hearts against the knives we all carry; in short, you see everything the way you want to see it: still and quiet but pulsing with its own inner glow, dancing in place.
At the same time, somewhere in Manhattan, a child spends her last ounce of energy digging through a dumpster for edible food, and finding none, curls up in the warm heap of trash to die.
You clap.