Open Happiness by Cee-Lo Green, Brendon Urie, Patrick Stump, Travie McCoy, Janelle Monae - 022
look past the cola commercialism
Hello Everyone! Welcome to Season 4 of . . .
M U S I C - A P P R E I C A T I O N - C L U B ! ! !
This season we are going to focus on the theme of emotion.
A bit of history on this one first. This song was actually a theme or a jingle that was purposefully produced for Coca Cola? There’s elements of it that are supposed to reference the fizzy beverage, but I feel that the happiness that coca-cola wanted to associate with their product is indeed it’s own thing. They tried to label their beverage as a happy thing, and instead, I just hear a happy song. Enjoy!
The SONG:
LYRICS:
Featured Emotion - HAPPINESS:
This song does a wonderful job of highlighting some of the cooler subtleties of Happiness. I particularly enjoy how it talks about happiness as something that is shareable and abundant. I feel in my perception of things nowadays, a lot of people seem to be getting more divisive or more tribal. It always feels like an A versus B, winner take all sort of thing. A pro-this, versus and anti-this. If one side is happy the other side is not. The side that is happy is taking away the happiness of the side that is not. However, I don’t think that is necessarily true and that such things as happiness are finite or even take-able in that way. This song is a definite reminder of this belief.
Some of my favorite lines:
“the first thing that I want to do, is make sure that you feel it to” - because happiness is something that can be shared and is something that is nicer when shared.
“smiling so hard, my mouth is like a capital U” - a clever and poetic line that brings in imagery through the fact that the english letter U looks like a smile :) . . . but even cooler, it’s this idea that we all know and share the idea of what a smile is and represents and can access it.
“I want to have some fun, I want all my friends to come” - happiness shared with friends is special.
Last WORDS:
The lyrics talk about bringing people together to share an experience. The imaginary event they’re trying to evoke is a bunch of friends hanging out with a cold case of soda. But there’s something larger than that at work. It’s cool on a meta-level because they brought together a bunch of artists to create this collaboration.
I am a huge fan of Panic! at the Disco (Brendon Urie), Fall Out Boy (Patrick Stump), and Gym Class Heroes (Travie McCoy). This song first popped up on my radar (back in ‘09) because one of those bands posted the video for it. I saw the song had three of my favorite bands featured on one track and I had to give it a listen. This song is like a personal We Are The World to me, but with far less people and far less famous people. It’s the We Are The World, but they’re doing a coca-cola commercial instead. Despite being a promotional thing, the song does convey happiness in such a nice way.
All in all, the song presents an idea of happiness that I really resonate with and like the lyrics suggest, it is a feeling that I simply want to share with you all. Music is a gift that keeps on giving and is one of those things that you can turn on and immediately feel picked up by. Hopefully in this season, you’ll acquire some songs that you can keep with you in your musical back pocket for some less happy days.
NEXT Week:
Submissions are open! Comment, Reply, E-Mail, Text, Etc! Please!
If not, I’ll probably do a rotation of emotion. We’re doing one shade of Happiness today which means next week we will do anything but this!
Until then . . . Have a HAPPY DAY!!!
MYKAAAAAA
BONUS:
I was going to do this song, but I feel that Open Happiness is a deeper cut (a less known song with a more novel trivia element to it).
This one also probably benefits from less words too. Sir Duke is just a happy song, it just gets in you. Give this one a play for the bonus happiness to start your weekend off right!