Twenty-four hours of Pharrell being right

Pharrell Williams put out a 24-hour music video for Happy and the correct response, given November’s particular flavor of grey misery, was to just leave it running. The concept was architecturally simple: different people—strangers, some celebrities, mostly just civilians—dancing through the same four minutes of song, looped across an entire day, one cast per hour, each finding their own way into the same basic motion.

What accumulates is harder to describe than the concept. At some point it stops feeling like a music video and starts feeling like an argument—all these people, hour after hour, visibly choosing to be in it. Rabea Weihser at Die Zeit called it a welcome therapy against November depression, which is not wrong. But it also undersells something about Pharrell specifically: he’s been making this argument without embarrassment since the mid-nineties, across Neptunes productions and N.E.R.D. albums and solo records, music that is relentlessly optimistic without tipping into saccharine. He just believes it. Whether that’s the most naïve position in mainstream pop or the bravest, I genuinely can’t decide. Maybe it’s both simultaneously, and that’s the whole point.

I had the tab open most of an afternoon. Didn’t close it. There are worse ways to spend a November day.