Happy People
Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 2020
Original album - Hotspot
Producer - Stuart Price
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)
According to Neil, this song is "a guy's inner monologue about having to leave his child behind and go off to work… and it's about the contrast between a happy life at home—or a personal life—and then the kind of nightmare of the outside world, as it sometimes feels." The music originated with an instrumental demo created by Chris in March 2017, which he titled "House Piano," an apt description of at least one aspect of its heavily house-influenced style. Intriguingly, the opening keyboard chords sound a little off-kilter, slightly out of tune. That's surely no accident, so what does that suggest? Could it be hinting at somewhat "off-kilter" lyrical content to follow?
The album's opening track, "Will-o-the-wisp," saw Neil once again employing his patented but, in recent years, largely underused "Brit-rap" vocal style (you know, the one that launched their success in such spectacular fashion roughly 35 years before with "West End Girls") for several lines. In "Happy People," however, all three verses are delivered in this manner, with only the refrain actually "sung":
Happy people
Living in a sad world
(repeat)
It's the jarring contrast, profound in its mundanity (or is that mundane in its profundity?), of billions of people needing to divide their time between the simple yet sublime pleasures of their private, personal lives—love and family—and the daily grind of having to earn a living in the workaday world:
The outside world demands me
And I have to say goodbye….
The sense of so much missing
When the world gets in the way
But that's the way it's always been, from time immemorial, "the rhythm of our history… the beat behind our lives." People have always had to carve out moments of happiness from the drudgery of having to earn a living.
As one might expect from a pair of experienced professional musicians, Neil and Chris summarize this dilemma, if you can call it that, in musical terms:
A blues would be in B flat
Pain defining wisdom
But the soul is in the high hat
Programmed in the system
In other words, the "souls" of our lives are found in those personal highlights that provide contrast with the "blues" of the more laborious aspects of our existence. It's what we've always done. It's part of who we are. It's what we do to survive.
Annotations
- "All this pomp and circumstance" – The phrase "pomp and circumstance" appears to have originated with Shakespeare, who used it in Othello as spoken by the title character in Act 3, Scene 3: "Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!" It gained even greater notoriety as the title of a famed 1901 work by the British composer Edward Elgar, "Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1," commonly played at graduation ceremonies in the United States, Canada, and certain other nations.
It's probably best known in the U.K. for serving as an additional "English national anthem" in public circumstances when the United Kingdom's national anthem, "God Save the Queen," alone is unsuitable, such as when English rugby teams play Scotland or Wales in Rugby Union.
- "A blues would be in B flat" – To be sure, not all blues numbers are in B flat. Not even most of them. But the key of B flat has acquired a distinct association with the blues both by being one of the most common and familiar blues scales and, as such, by appearing in the titles of a number of blues and jazz songs and instrumental pieces, such as "Blues in B Flat" by Hazel Scott and "B Flat Blues" by Fats Waller.
- "The soul is in the high hat" – A high hat (usually hyphenated as "high-hat" or spelled "hihat" or "hi-hat") is a musical instrument of the percussion family, consisting of two cymbals mounted on a metal stand and controlled by a foot pedal. It's often used by drummers to provide a steady, high-pitched, but somewhat muted component to a rhythm line or track. In pop/rock music, it's commonly heard either on every beat or every other beat. The reference to "soul" both parallels and contrasts with the preceding mention of another genre of music, the blues, and like the word "blues" has a much wider non-musical meaning. This line is therefore likely a musical metaphor suggesting that one's soul—the essence of one's being—is in the continuous, muted undercurrent of everyday life.
- "Happy People" concludes with an odd dissonant sound that's very similar to that which both opens and closes the album-closer, "Wedding in Berlin," only played at a different pitch. Shortly after the album's release, the Pet Shop Boys revealed that this "eerie sound… is the bells of the church of St. Matthias in Goltzstrasse, Berlin. Neil recorded them on his phone while crossing nearby Winterfeldtplatz." It was then digitally manipulated by Stuart Price to create the sounds heard on the album. It's been suggested to me that this distorted wedding bell-like sound indicates a "linkage" between the two songs, especially seeing as how one avowedly concerns married life and the other getting married in the first place.
Mixes/versions
Officially released- Mixer: Stuart Price
- Album version (3:51)
- Instrumental (3:51)
List cross-references
- PSB songs that have been used in films and "non-musical" TV shows
- What it's about: Neil's succinct statements on what a song is "about"
- Early titles for Pet Shop Boys songs
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