2 January 2014
The last time we saw family-friendly Pharrell here before this soundtrack hit from all-ages cartoon Despicable Me 2 was a mere six months earlier as randy player Pharrell on consent-bemoaning anthem ‘Blurred Lines’ with Robin Thicke, whose cartoon would be Despicable #MeToo. Here in 2024, I doubt we’d be so ready to let Pharrell off the hook on that one, let alone indulge a rebrand from nightclub sex pest to kiddies’ party entertainer.
However long a punt it would have seemed in mid-2013, it worked. Not only does ‘Happy’ drag Pharrell clear of the ‘Blurred Lines’ wreckage, but it also becomes a gargantuan mega-hit, spending ten weeks at the top of the US charts and a mind-bending 22 (twenty-two) weeks at number one in France, the latter a market where music for children has always been a chart-topping big-seller. Here in Ireland, ‘Happy’ first spends seven consecutive weeks at number one, then returns two more times to clock up twelve weeks in total; during 2014 it appears at number one in January, February, March and April. Clearly l’affaire ‘Blurred Lines’ didn’t damage Pharrell’s career the way it ruined Thicke’s. More likely, perhaps we just didn’t care about the fact that he performed on it, appeared in its repellent video, or—as emerged during the legal attentions of the Marvin Gaye estate—actually wrote the whole thing.
Anyway, what about ‘Happy’ itself? What made it such a mega-hit? Well, any song with a chorus of “clap along if you feel like a room without a roof” is clearly aimed at children, ‘Happy’ is marketing collateral for a kids’ film, and I’m only surprised that the “captive audience carful of school-run schoolkids listening to breakfast radio” demographic hadn’t been more ruthlessly targeted before. Musos among you may hear in Pharrell’s smooth-to-bland soulful falsetto the influence of Curtis Mayfield; it’s interesting to surmise that the legal team of Mayfield’s estate don’t share their Marvin Gaye counterpart’s vibes-based interpretation of music copyright, otherwise we’d have seen similar cross-examination footage of Pharrell beside a bleary-eyed Minion.
The adults actually buying this, though, were probably either parents of young Minion-likers or the type who go for blandness and inoffensiveness in their music: in other words, ‘Happy’ as a cross-generational children’s record for fans of Coldplay, which conjures up the appalling vista of fans of Coldplay having children. Still, this thing’s primary-coloured primary-school-age breeziness is easy on the ear. I’ve never sought it out to listen, but nor have I ever minded overhearing it.
‘Happy’ also provides a template for others looking to offset public controversy by pivoting to a more wholesome image. Previously known for some intrusively tasteless comments about former partner Britney Spears and for letting Janet Jackson take the fall for the “wardrobe malfunction” he caused to her on global live TV, Justin Timberlake tries it with ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’, tracking ‘Happy’ so closely as to have a video which begins with Uncle Justin eating blueberry pie in a typical US diner booth like any clean-cut all-American would. Later, he rocks up with a hit single from a Trolls movie in which he voice-acted. Has Robin Thicke ever considered making a children’s record?
