Multi-instrumentalist and occasional Arcade Fire member Owen Pallett has been doing the lord’s work on Slate this week, explaining the theoretical basis for the popularity of songs like Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” (It’s music theory, dummy!) Today, Pallett explores Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” which he says has become ubiquitous for fairly similar reasons. Pallett addresses the song’s copious amounts of repetition, which he says are a “delicious middle finger” to listeners. As Pallett notes, it’s like Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams, and Nile Rodgers are telling listeners, “This is pop, where repetition is king, and our time is more valuable than yours.”
He gets a little deeper into jargon when it comes to chord progression (“Most of the time it sounds as if it’s in the minor mode of A Aeolian… But the first chord of the progression isn’t A minor, it’s D minor”) and the group’s use of the motet (“I did my best to simplify these melodies to fifth species on staves 3 and 4 for easier visual analysis”). But he’s fairly plainspoken about the group’s semi-iffy control of the English language. As Pallett notes: