"Happiness is the Truth"

My new favorite song is Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” an ode to happiness, especially happiness in the face of “bad news,” which makes it a song about the only kind of happiness currently available. And I was listening to the last ten minutes of Fresh Air the other day, which has become my favorite part given that it features reviews of all the books, movies, TV shows, and musicians I have no time for amidst working full time, raising up three girls, staying happily married, and penning this blog. (Going Freud one better I have not just love and work, but love, work, and art, which to this sometimes-Freudian feels a little heretical, like adding a third item, let’s call it yong- Chinese for permanence, to yin and yang.) Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker came on and, miracle of miracles, he was reviewing Pharrell Williams’ new album GIRL, a review which opened with a sampling of “Happy.”

At the end of his review, Tucker mentioned that “Pharrell has come in for some criticism recently as being merely a glossy pop hit maker, for lacking edge.” (http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/78770019820/ken-tucker-reviews-pharrells-new-album) Immediately I was flashing back to 1988, when Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” climbed all the way to #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and 1989, when Public Enemy dropped “Fight the Power” for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a searing anthem of Black liberation that included the following lyrics:

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Was a number one jam
Damn if I say it you can slap me right here”

To borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Pharrell’s joyful smash hit and the sullen, shaming backlash, the contretemps between Bobby McFerrin and Public Enemy, all of it has me questioning the relationship and tension between happiness and injustice. And it is a questioning on unsteady ground; who am I to interject myself into a discourse between Black artists on the subject of, of all things, happiness? Of all White privileges, is any more galling than the act of gerrymandering the Other’s cultural narratives, erecting boundaries around what can and cannot be spoken? E.g. everyone knows that Rosa Parks refused to get up out of her seat on that bus, but almost no one knows that this was a planned, coordinated act of nonviolent resistance. Just so, if I were to opine on the if, when, where, and how of Black happiness, would it be substantively any different than repeating the official (White-washed) version of Rosa Parks, the story of the perhaps brave, but nevertheless isolated, impulsive act of a lone, tired woman? Wouldn’t the appropriate Black response be Ice Cube’s “Keep my name out your mouth”? And if I champion Pharrell and McFerrin, am I any different than George H. W. Bush, who co-opted McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as his 1988 presidential campaign’s official song (at least until McFerrin issued his own “Keep my name out your mouth” and flat out refused to perform the song for as long as Bush kept playing it).

But to avoid the question raised by, on one side, Pharrell and McFerrin, and, on the other, P.E. and the current arbiters of appropriate artistic expression, seems in the end little more than a copout. Because, reversing The Merchant of Venice, if you prick me do I not bleed? In other words, White privilege, while it may have its (unjust) perks, ultimately fails in its efforts to offload pain, suffering, and evil onto the Other. In a tragic yet just irony, the surfeit of pain, suffering, and evil dumped on the Other does nothing to spare White folk from the Buddha’s first noble truth that life is suffering. Making the question of the tension between happiness and suffering perhaps even more urgent for White people than anyone else, given our historical delusion that, much like the old bumper stickers announcing that “Virginia is for lovers”, suffering is for Others. (Re: “Virginia is for lovers,” I would be willing to bet that the Commonwealth of Virginia gave its advertising account to the same people who came up with Virginia Slims’ “You’ve come a long way, baby,” both slogans somehow evoking active lifestyles, sex, and retrograde patriarchy.) It’s time for White folks to take the red pill and get real about our suffering, own it, and, in the process, considerably lighten everybody else’s load.

Once we do so, we begin to realize that the pertinent questions here are even older than that abomination known as the Atlantic slave trade. They are at least as old as Job, whose third act opens the gap in which Pharrell, McFerrin, Public Enemy, you and me now find ourselves in freefall. Job, of course, lost everything via an act of God that we wouldn’t even hesitate to describe as evil if it were committed by anyone other than God (not, mind you, an isolated incident- see God asking Abraham to murder his son Isaac; the staying of Abraham’s hand at the last minute may have spared Isaac’s life, but still feels very much a day late and a dollar short given that Abraham had already emotionally committed to the unthinkable act). Job, courtesy God, is later rewarded with a second family for the loyalty he showed throughout all of his many trials. The question, which is the very question I believe Pharrell and McFerrin are answering differently than Public Enemy, is whether or not Job should be happy with his second family. Is it okay that the Lord taketh away, just because He also giveth? Stretching the question even further to wrap all the way around the issue of justice, is it okay that the Lord sends his rain on both the just and the unjust? Is it okay for Job, African American males, privileged White folks, any and all of us including even God Himself, to be happy?

As for Job and the African American males, I would suggest that the answer to the latter question is an unequivocal yes. Not, I should hasten to point out, to encourage victimization, at least of the passive variety. If Job and America’s twenty million Black men are to be victims, let them also be vindictive, and let them remember that happiness is the best revenge. So conceived, Job’s happiness is not out of fidelity to God, a fidelity which would, in its obscenity, strip Job of all remaining dignity, but an act of rebellion. And, understood as revenge, Pharrell and McFerrin’s happiness isn’t the obsequious shuffle Public Enemy paints it as, but a form of intentional, nonviolent resistance that would make Rosa Parks proud. (We should note, if only in passing, that Public Enemy’s confrontational approach to race relations, an approach from the “By any means necessary” side of the resistance continuum, also has much to recommend it, including the possibility of bringing things to a crisis point; as Chairman Mao liked to say, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

Happiness sans reconciliation between Job and God, and between Black and White Americans, is, however, fraught with danger. Which is why the very first thing Nelson Mandela did when taking the reins of power in South Africa was to establish a truth and reconciliation process. Mandela re-taught us that true happiness is never vindictive, always inclusive, and therefore radically revolutionary.

Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Talib’s brilliant The Bed of Procrustes, a collection of well over one hundred of Talib’s often provocative philosophical aphorisms (e.g. “In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.”), I have begun composing my own. So far I have seven, including the following: If the revolution is to succeed, it must be funny.

Humor, of course, is concentrated happiness; even the darkest humor is but the stitching of happiness into pain. Following William James’ “We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing,” I would argue that Pharrell, McFerrin, you, me, Job, God, even Public Enemy, shouldn’t be happy because things have changed, (they haven’t much,) but in order that they might.

We may never be able to change the fact that the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. But in unflagging, tender happiness we may finally learn to love Him anyway, just as He has always loved us, even given our considerable baggage, making our relationship with the Divine into that of a happy old married couple who not only recognize one another’s flaws, but love each other for them. Let’s sing the Song of Songs, and cast off the exhausted Father-Child symbology. It’s time we all grow up.

But even if we do, it is likely that God, suffering, and death will continue to confound. Job is constantly speaking to us. Nevertheless- Don’t worry, be happy. Love.