Daft Punks Get Lucky, explained using music theory. Slate Articles by Owen Pallett March 28, 2014

Daft Punk performs during the 56th Grammy Awards on Jan. 26, 2014, in Los

Angeles.

Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Katy Perry may have captured the worlds attention with her enormous eyeballs,

but as I argued earlier this week, the reason Teenage Dream went to No. 1 and

remains in radio rotation is that it is a textbook example of the excellence and

supremacy of the rules of Western music theory.

Today, with a hat tip to Rick Moody and Dean Wareham, well continue this not-

boring exercise with Daft Punks hit, Get Lucky.

First off, we should address this songs repetitiousness. Theres a delicious

middle finger extended here, beyond the fact that the four-chord loop never

alters: Pharrells vocal performances, and Niles guitar parts, are photocopied.

The pre-choruses, the choruses, they are exactly identical, copy-pasted in

GarageBand. Its not even evident that Daft Punk asked its guests to do complete

takes. This isnt 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.

For this reason, it is not surprising that Moody is frustrated by Get Lucky. This

sort of copypasta isnt exactly recommended by Walter Piston. Its almost as if

Daft Punk is baiting the musically knowledgeable people in the room to pull a

poo-face and retire to their dorm rooms to practice their Mendelssohn. Us nerds,

we have gone home, you lot can keep on dancing.

Another interesting feature about this endlessly repeating four-chord

progression: This song has an ambiguous tonality. Teenage Dream denied the

listeners the I chord to create weightlessness; in Get Lucky, it is aurally unclear

what the I chord even is!

See, the song can be heard in two different keys. Most of the time it sounds as if

its in the minor mode of A Aeolian*the scale goes A B C D E F Gessentially, a

form of A minor, which appears as the third of the four chords (Were up all

night for good fun).

But the first chord of the progression isnt A minor, its D minor. The song slides

smoothly back to it each time (Im up all night to get some). The insistence of

the D minor creates the aural illusion that the song could in fact be in the minor

mode of D DorianD E F G A B C. Note that the D Dorian scale contains all the

same notes as A Aeolian, all the same keys on the piano. The only difference is

what key you start on.

So, when the chord cycle comes back around to the beginning, the D minor, each

time, the ear is tricked for a moment into thinking that the song is in a different

key, a musical Tilt-a-Whirl. I am not going to lie: To my ears the song is clearly

identifiable as A minor, but on a Kinsey scale, Id rate it a 3.

This Tilt-a-Whirl ambiguity is easy for the ear to discern and also easy to

describe even without any musical background. Even untrained music writers

typically will use the word cyclical or spiraling to describe this type of

ambiguous progression. Two other songs with famously ambiguous key centers

are Radioheads Pyramid Song and Public Image Ltds Poptones. Do some

rigorous Googling and youll find that listeners are aware of the sensation, even if

they dont describe the mechanical specifics.

Third observation: Daft Punk pulls off a classic move in this song during the

bridge, at that moment when the chorus of robots breaks it down. The move?

They overlay the hook from the pre-chorus with the hook from the chorus,

getting them both going simultaneously. This is not an original device, but a

classic one in the world of Western music theory, subject and countersubject.

Two melodies that live separately but will join together in a climax of ecstatic

melodic copulation.

Below is a transcription of the hook (robots) and pre-chorus (Pharrell). See how

elegantly the rhythms counterbalance each other! One is busy and syncopated

and repetitious, the other is straight and simple and has a nice long arc to it. And

yet theyre both such strong hooks on their own! If these four bars appeared on a

counterpoint exam, it would get impressive marks.

For extra credit, for motet lovers, I did my best to simplify these melodies to fifth

species on staves 3 and 4 for easier visual analysis. Its not textbook perfect, but

even Jeppesen would begrudgingly give this example a passing grade.

(Deductions for an open fourth, two unresolved seconds, and for repetitiousness

of material? 6/10).

Id love to make mention of some other hit singles that climax with a coupling of

vocal hooks, but scanning through the past 10 years of Billboards No. 1s, Im

drawing blanks. Fiona Apples Hot Knife is an example that springs to mind,

and a weaker almost-example is Bill Withers Lean On Mebut I hope you fare

better than me in the comments.

Wrapping up, Id like to point out a key idiosyncrasy in the text setting of Get

Lucky. This English-language song, written by French speakers, shares an

identical beauty mark with another well-known French confection: Phoenixs If

I Ever Feel Better. Already Get Lucky sounds like vintage Phoenixlargely

because Phoenixs fabulous first album cribs so heavily from Nile Rodgersbut

let me draw your attention to the irresistible abuse of the word good: Were up

all night for good fun vs. Remind me to spend some good time with you.

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

McCartneys placement of good in Good Day, Sunshinealways settling on

heavy syllables. GOOD day SUNshine. Im looking GOOD, you know shes

LOOKing fine. Worlds away from its apostrophic weighting in WERE up all

night for good FUN. For Daft Punk and Phoenix this little bit of language

mangling works in their favor. It sounds off-balance and playful and sexy, like a

foreign exchange student who might be a little drunk.

Thanks for reading.

*N.B. this song is actually in F# Aeolian, not A Aeolian, but for casual readers, I

stuck with the white keys. Also, I deliberately omitted mentions of added-7s in

my chord descriptions because of an inconsistency in notational unity between

classiclers and jazzers, omitted also for irrelevance.