Time to redress the balance from all this wintry gloom
The Happy Song -Aliens
Overcome by Happiness - The Pernice Brothers
Happy - Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
Happy - Travis
Everybody's Happy Nowadays - The Buzzcocks
Fragile Happiness - Super Furry Animals
If It Makes You Happy - Sheryl Crow
Shiny Happy People - REM
Get Happy - Judy Garland
Stupidly Happy - XTC
Having cleared up the mysteries of time a few blogs back, now it's time for me to put happiness in its place ...
Happiness is indeed, one imagines, a possibility, though I guess best treated as a welcome occasional guest, rather than something to be aspired to and held on to.
It would appear that many of us have been able to move fairly successfully towards the absence of unhappiness through various means and tricks of fate and that should probably be deemed good enough.
I think it's pretty hard for songwriters to be anything but ironic about happiness or face ridicule (like REM) so from that point of view the XTC song is particularly good fun, being unironic, altogether cheerful but not in the slightest cringesome.
I'm so happy and i can't quite believe it
forty-five years of despair and now this?
If I'd known it would be so simple to achieve it
I'd have climbed so much sooner from my hellish abyss.
I'm so happy and I wish I could spread it
I haven't been so happy since this time last week
when, begging and pleading, I extended my credit
and used toilet paper to part-stem the leak.
I'm so happy like a fairground attendant
I've the best of each possible world and season
I'm a lottery winner with no clue how to spend it
I'm the reason you've lost your faith in reason.
I'm so happy and I wish I could share it
What I'd give for you to be happy like me
but i worry your weak mind couldn't quite bear it
and your eyes would be blinded by what they might see.
I'm as happy as an X-Factor contestant
who knows they'll make it 'cause they want it so bad
I'm as happy as the villain in the classic western
who reckons he's the beating of Alan Ladd.
I'm so happy and I wish you didn't doubt me
Is there something you've misread in my demeanour?
There's no way you'll ever be happy without me
Your grass may be green but mine's so much greener.
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