What is Making Me Happy: The Story Of

Following the model of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and, to a lesser extent, the Make Me Smart daily podcast, I want to remind myself that there are things that bring me joy. These posts are meant to be quick hits that identify and/or recommend things—usually artistic or cultural, sometimes culinary—that are making me happy in a given week. I am making this quick format a semi-regular feature.

This week: The Story Of

I recently burned through five short music documentaries produced by VICE and posted to Youtube, part of a series called The Story Of. Each video examines a single hit song, exploring the song’s origins, route to release, and what happened from that point. There are commonalities between each video, usually involving how the artists came to music and the behind the scenes of the recording industry, but each documentary goes in a rather different direction.

The Story of “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65, for instance, explores the unlikely path to collaboration that Eiffel 65 took, and their subsequent falling out. By contrast, The Story of “Last Resort,” by Papa Roach goes into how the singer Jacoby Shaddix, while still in high school, wrote the song about suicidal ideation about a friend he was living with at the time, only to later have it hit even closer to home. Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” touches both on his unusual singing style that he developed while serving in the Marine Corps and how the song very nearly flopped until a DJ in Hawaii downloaded the album from Napster and just started giving it airtime.

None of these songs are exactly my jam, but I know them all. I should — they came out when I was in middle or high school and they were all enormous hits. What I find so interesting about these documentaries is how they explore the uneven path songs take to release, let alone success. I am sure that the specific songs were chosen for their particularly compelling stories, to be sure, but there is something inspiring about the producer who just loves the song talk about going to bat for it at a time when no-one else in the company believes in it. The videos are a nice reminder that while one person might get credit for a song (or any another piece of art), they generally have a team of people working behind them.

I have also enjoyed the small touches that place this series squarely in the time of COVID. The Papa Roach video intermittently shows people masked. The most recent video, The Story of “A Thousand Miles,” by Vanessa Carlton interviews her living with her parents during the pandemic.