Photo by Nabil

Earlier this week, Owen Pallett wrote an essay in which he analyzed Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" using music theory. At the end, he noted that the analysis was a fairly easy task. "If I were going to talk about [Daft Punk's] 'Get Lucky' I’d probably have to start posting score," he wrote. "That is a complicated song." Now, he's followed through and written another such essay about "Get Lucky".

True to his word, he's provided musical notation for the song. The essay itself is a similar blend of vernacular—"It sounds off-balance and playful and sexy, like a foreign exchange student who might be a little drunk"—and compositional analysis, with a particular emphasis placed on the song's repetitive structure. As he writes:

There’s a delicious middle finger extended here, beyond the fact that the four-chord loop never alters: Pharrell’s vocal performances, and Nile’s guitar parts, are photocopied. The pre-choruses, the choruses, they are exactly identical, copy-pasted in GarageBand. It’s not even evident that Daft Punk asked its guests to do complete takes. This isn’t innovative, but it is egregious, a punkish move, sending a clear message: “This Is Pop, Where Repetition Is King, And Our Time Is More Valuable Than Yours.”

He also draws comparisons between the song and Phoenix's "If I Ever Feel Better", noting their similar abuse of the word "good":

First, this is a specifically Francophonic idiosyncrasy; native English speakers do not ask their lovers to remind them to spend “good time” with them, nor do they identify “good fun” as their motivation for staying up all night.

Secondly, the weighting is all wrong. Good is a word that needs to fall heavy, needs to be placed at the beginnings and endings of phrases. Remember Sir Paul McCartney’s placement of good in “Good Day, Sunshine”—always settling on heavy syllables. “GOOD day SUNshine.”  “I’m looking GOOD, you know she’s LOOKing fine.” Worlds away from its apostrophic weighting in “WE’RE up all night for good FUN.” For Daft Punk and Phoenix this little bit of language mangling works in their favor.

Watch Pallett's new video for "The Riverbed":