R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" is a song that will not stop smiling. It sounds like a children's television theme. Strings and a bouncing beat carry a chorus of happy people holding hands and laughing. The verses are instructions. Meet in the crowd. Throw your love around. Put it in your heart. Gold and silver shine. In one line the song says there is no time to cry.
That line is the giveaway. Joy that leaves no time for tears is joy on orders. There is no verse that admits a wound. The song only says that everyone is happy, over and over, and tells you to join them.
Here joy is announced instead of had. It is the joy of the poster and the parade, the smile required of everyone in the picture. Most of us have worn it. Scripture has seen it before, and it knows who usually demands it.
The Song and the Singers
R.E.M. released it in 1991 on Out of Time, the album that also gave them "Losing My Religion." Kate Pierson of the B-52's sang with Michael Stipe. It reached the top ten in America (Songfacts). Stipe has called it "a really fruity, kind of bubblegum song" (same source).
The usual story is darker. The title phrase is said to come from Chinese propaganda after the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, and the lyric to be a satirical translation of it (Wikipedia). On that reading the song is a smiling face painted over a killing ground.
Not everyone who made it remembers it that way. Pierson says no one discussed a darker meaning in the studio. To her it was meant to be shiny and happy (Girl Effect). She may be right. The story may have been added later. I will not try to settle it.
What is clear is that Stipe came to dislike it. On a cartoon talk show in 1995 he said flatly that he hated it (Wikipedia). Years later he softened that. He did not hate it, he said, but he did not want to sing it (American Songwriter).
If one song were sent into outer space to represent R.E.M., Stipe has said, he would not want it to be this one (WhatCulture). The band played it live only twice, both in the spring of 1991. Once was at the RTVE studios in Spain and once was on Saturday Night Live. Then they retired it (American Songwriter).
The dispute is itself the point. Listeners cannot tell whether the joy in this song is meant. Its own singer could not stand to keep performing it. That is how performed joy feels from the inside.
Sing Us One of the Songs of Zion
Scripture's clearest picture of required joy comes from Babylon. The exiles sat by its rivers with their harps hung in the willows. "For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion" (Psalm 137:3).
The captors wanted happy captives. A smiling face on the conquered makes the conquest look kind. It is the same logic as the poster in the R.E.M. story, whether or not that story is true.
The exiles refused. "How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?" (Psalm 137:4). They would not perform joy for the people who had burned their city. Their silence was more honest than any song they could have been made to sing.
Ezekiel saw the same thing done from the inside, by Israel's own prophets. They told the people all was well, and Ezekiel compared it to building a wall. "Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there was no peace; and one built up a wall, and, lo, others daubed it with untempered morter" (Ezekiel 13:10). Whitewash makes a cracked wall shine. God told him what would happen next. "Say unto them which daub it with untempered morter, that it shall fall" (Ezekiel 13:11).
Shiny is a surface word. It describes what light does when it hits something. It says nothing about what is underneath.
The Joy of the LORD Is Your Strength
The song says there is no time to cry. The Preacher disagrees. "A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance" (Ecclesiastes 3:4). Real joy has a season. It does not have to crowd out grief to exist.
Scripture's great day of joy begins with weeping. The exiles had come home and rebuilt Jerusalem's wall. On the first day of the seventh month, the day Jews still keep as Rosh Hashanah, Ezra stood on a wooden pulpit and read the law to the people from morning until midday. They understood it, and they broke down. "For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law" (Nehemiah 8:9).
Nehemiah and Ezra did tell them to stop weeping. On its face that sounds like the song. Listen to the reasons they gave. "Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10).
The tears came first, and no one called them wrong. The joy had a reason, and the reason was the holiness of the day. The joy also had a direction. It went out in portions to people who had nothing on their table. And the joy belonged to the LORD. It was his strength lent to them, something they did not have to produce.
The chapter ends with the people feasting "because they had understood the words that were declared unto them" (Nehemiah 8:12). Their joy came from understanding. The joy on a propaganda poster depends on nobody understanding anything.
Rejoice in the Lord Alway
The most joyful letter in the New Testament was written by a prisoner of an empire. Paul wrote to the Philippians in chains, and he says his bonds had become known "in all the palace" (Philippians 1:13). Rome required its subjects to honor Caesar. Paul's joy did not come from that requirement, and Rome could not order it out of him.
"Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice" (Philippians 4:4). He repeats it, the way the song repeats its chorus. The difference is the phrase in the middle. In the Lord. The joy has an object, and the object is not the state.
He is honest about its cost. "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound" (Philippians 4:11–12). Learned is the key word. This joy was taught to him through hunger and loss. It has room in it for tears.
Then, at the end of the letter, comes a small line with a large meaning. "All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar's household" (Philippians 4:22). Among the emperor's own servants there were people who had found a joy the emperor did not issue and could not take back. No poster had told them to smile. They were the real thing that the shiny happy people only imitate.