Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There
An Analysis of the Main Theme of Persona 5
Theme songs have special roles in the soundtracks they are written for. Oftentimes, they appear in the movie’s or game’s trailers, opening credits, at the highest point of action in the story, and ultimately, serve as musical interpretations of the themes within its accompanying story. Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There is no exception; this upbeat tune plays during the introductory sequence for the fantasy roleplaying video game, Persona 5. This analysis will look beyond the opening scene by diving into how this theme song captures the essence of the entire game, from its storyline, to its characters, to the ultimate messages and lessons that are passed on to the player. The paper will be divided into sections, each addressing a certain point of interest, starting with the background and context of the video game itself and then leading into specific musical questions about the theme song.
About Persona 5
Persona 5, or henceforth abbreviated as P5, is a third-person fantasy-action roleplaying video game developed by Atlus Studios and released in 2017. It is the fifth game in the Persona series. The gameplay is similar to other Japanese fantasy games – there is an “overworld,” an “underworld,” and a turn-based combat system. The overworld is the day-to-day life of the main character; the underworld is made up of the “dungeons” that the character must infiltrate; and the choices, skills, & relationships the character has in the overworld impact his fighting abilities in the underworld.
The main character, referred to interchangeably as the protagonist or as his codename Joker, is a high-school student who has been relocated from his home to Tokyo at the start of the game, following an incident where he attempted to stop a drunken man from assaulting a woman. The man, who was injured after the protagonist intervened, called the cops and pressed charges against the main character for assaulting him, even though it was the drunken man who was the assaulter; thus, the game is set in motion by a twisted form of justice enacted upon the protagonist by the law, even though he was seeking true justice when he stepped in to help the woman.
Once relocated to a new home, under the roof of a guardian caretaker, he is assigned to attend Shujin Academy. On the walk to school, he and another Shujin student, Ryuji, are sucked into an alternate dimension called the Metaverse, where people’s innermost desires and corrupted dreams materialize. People with very deep, distorted desires materialize large items in the Metaverse; these desires appear in the form of a place (somewhere that means a lot to that person) and a “treasure” (an object that was a driving factor behind why they became distorted). If the treasure is stolen from the palace in the Metaverse, the offender realizes their crimes in the real world and they repent. For example, the first villain in the game is the school’s gym teacher, an Olympic volleyball player named Kamoshida who sexually harasses and physically abuses his students. He views himself as the king of the school because he won a gold medal, and so in the Metaverse, the school materializes as a palace within which he rules and his treasure is the medal.
As the protagonist and Ryuji walk into the palace, they are taken prisoner by King Kamoshida. It is here that the characters undergo a transformation: their willpower to fight the king awakens their inner spirit of rebellion, which materializes into a physical avatar called a “persona.” Using their personas, Kamoshida and his henchmen are defeated, if only temporarily, as the protagonist and Ryuji escape.
As the story progresses, more characters and villains are introduced. Each character has been done wrong by a particular villain, and it is within their respective villain’s palace that the character awakens their persona. These characters form a vigilante group called The Phantom Thieves, and they make it their mission to infiltrate palaces, steal the treasure from the corrupted adults, and make them repent for their crimes.
There are two other aspects to the story that aren’t immediately connected to the main narrative, but eventually make a large impact on the direction of the game. The Velvet Room is a location where the player can upgrade or modify their personas. In the story, the protagonist’s mind is “trapped” in the Velvet Room, a prisoner to a fate decided by a higher power, and he is only freed when he exhibits the power to change his destiny by the end of the game. The other aspect is Mementos, which mainly offers the chance to do side missions to the main story. By the end of the game, Mementos is revealed to be the final palace that the protagonist must take down; however, instead of being the palace of a specific person, it is the palace of the general public. The ‘collective unconscious’ of society’s desires is stored here, ruled over by a false god that thrives on society’s unwillingness to change. This lack of will to change is an important point – each of the Phantom Thieves overcomes this to discover their true self, and it is what pushes them to find true justice for themselves and the world. This will be revisited during the lyrical analysis of Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There.
There are few open-ended questions that arise from the game and, as analysts of the music, we must ask ourselves in order to grasp the depth of the story’s connection to the music. The first is: Do you have the willpower to fight those causing injustice in the world? If we were the main character, we must ask: do we have the resolve to fight injustice we see in the world, or would we succumb to our laziness and resist change? How far would we go to find true justice? The second is: Does society as a whole have the willpower to change? Does it want to change? Do we want to break out, think for ourselves, change the way we interact with the world, or do we feel so comfortable in our routine, wearing what others wear, doing what others do, and living the lives that others have lived? The final question is: Is changing a corrupted person’s heart without their consent a good or bad thing? Are the methods of the Phantom Thieves good, or are they wrong for fighting on their terms? Is goodness limited to acts done with good intentions and good methods? Is it evil to break into someone’s heart and change them, without them or anyone else knowing what they did or how they did it?
This questions are a fine line to walk, a balance between good and evil, willpower and sloth, light and dark. This is the core of the game, this uncertainty that what we are doing is really working for the betterment of society, or if we are becoming twisted to changing those we don’t agree with.
About the Soundtrack
P5’s soundtrack is comprised of 110 songs, most of which are composed by the series’ sound designer Shoji Meguro. The style of music can be described as “acid jazz,” a genre that incorporates elements of jazz, funk, and disco. Meguro described P5 as different from its predecessors because the visuals had become more realistic, and so he wanted the music to sound more realistic as well [1]. This realism is punctuated by the instrumentation and the performances of the songs. Gone are the days of 8-bit MIDI samples in game music – Meguro has his music recorded by a studio ensemble made up of a synthesizer, saxophone, flute, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, guitar, bass, drums, organ, and a string section. The result is a funky, modernized jazz sound that captures nuanced emotional elements through the entire storyline. As mentioned before, the core of the game deals with the balance between good and evil; each song in the soundtrack commits to capturing a specific angle or interpretation of good or evil. The opening theme is unique in that it encapsulates the entire emotional spectrum of the game through its use of harmonies, modes, and lyricism.
A Primer on Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There
How does a song capture emotion? For many songwriters, lyrics are a primary source of emotional context. For Shoji Meguro, he uses lyrics as one piece of the puzzle. Certain songs, like the opening theme, have English lyrics that are sung by the Japanese vocalist Lyn. Meguro’s reasoning for using lyrics in English instead of Japanese was that the majority of the game’s players in Japan do not understand or are not fluent in English, so it would not distract them from the gameplay [1]. But if the majority of players do not understand English, then the lyrics cannot mean the same thing to them as it does to players who speak the language. Thus, Meguro must use other tools, such as nonconventional harmonies and mode mixture, to convey the same emotions written in the lyrics. The main questions for our analysis are ready to be addressed:
1) How does Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There capture the essence of Persona 5’s story, characters, and themes?
2) What happens in the music to complement the lyrics?
How the Key Signature Captures Good versus Evil
The first issue encountered is the question of what key we’re in. With two flats in the key signature, the impression is that the key is B flat major or G minor. In the piano reduction, a text note above the first bar says simply “Original Key: Bb.” However, consistently through the opening eight measures, an E natural appears in place of E flat. It forms the basis for this three-chord motif, or in Benjamin Given’s terminology from his paper “________,” this is Cell A.
So where does this E natural come from? Mode mixture is the first possibility that comes to mind. The Lydian mode has a raised fourth degree – in this case of B flat, the E flat would become E natural. But in the fourth measure, an F sharp appears in the bass line, pointing us away from Lydian. F sharp, in this key signature, would be the leading tone of G harmonic minor. There’s other evidence later on that hints that we may not be in B flat, but actually in a mode of G.
If we look at Rehearsal Mark A, the verse starts on a G major 7 chord. Despite this, it doesn’t appear that we are solidly in G Ionian. If the key was G Ionian, the B flat major 7 chord that immediately follows would be a B major 7. Additionally, the fact the key signature does not have an F sharp leads to the conclusion that we are borrowing that G major 7. Another section that starts on G is the chorus; however, this is a G minor 7. This chord is preceded by an implied D minor 7, creating an illusion of a dominant-to-tonic resolution and setting the feel of the chorus in G. Yet another example is the bridge, which uses a variation on Cell A: the bass outlines G in two octaves, further implying that G is the tonic by alternating between G7sus4 and C over G. A final example of the emphasis of G is that the last measure of the song is also a variation of Cell A, but voiced as G minor 7 to C over G.
This repeated emphasis of G is fascinating because there are different modes of G that used throughout. To identify exactly which mode we are centered in, we must return to the the original Cell A in the opening phrase. As discussed, the key could be B flat major or G minor. We could try to argue C Mixolydian as the key, because the B flat comes as the flattened seven; G minor would fall into this as well. However, there is an F sharp in the fourth measure, which in this case could be argued that it was borrowed from C Lydian, where the fourth scale degree F goes up to F sharp. While there is a lot of mode mixture in this piece, it would be surprising if it was as drastic as this. Because this F sharp is there, G harmonic minor is a possibility, but looking at the entire page, it is the only F sharp in these opening bars – the rest are F natural.
So the final conclusion is that F natural is really the flattened seven, B flat is the flattened three, and E natural is the neutral six. The only mode with a flat three and flat seven is Dorian. Because of these notes, it makes sense to say the key is truly in G Dorian and that at certain points, the song borrows from other modes in order to emphasize certain musical expressions. There is another reason that G Dorian makes sense in the context of Persona 5.
Modes can be described in many ways. The most common are “happy” and “sad,” which usually refer to the major and minor modes. But Ionian and Aeolian are only two flavors of mode, and the words “happy” and “sad” don’t fully capture the depth that the modes have to offer. An alternative understand of modes comes from the scale of brightness, ordering them from “lightest” to “darkest.” This semiotic description is definable through the altered scale degrees in each mode: the more pitches that are flattened in a mode, the darker the mode is. Oppositely, the more pitches that are raised, the lighter the mode. For example, Lydian is lighter than Ionian because the former has one pitch that is raised (the sharp 4). In fact, Lydian is the lightest of the seven modes because no other mode has more raised pitches than it. Conversely, Locrian is the darkest mode because no mode has more lowered pitches. It is darker than Aeolian because it contains two more flattened notes (the flat 2 and 5).
With this understanding of how light-to-darkness is measured in modes, we can list them out in descending order of brightness, as shown below in Table 1.
Table 1. List of Modern Western Modes in Order of Brightness
Order from Light to Dark
Mode
Altered Scale Degrees with Respect to Ionian
Stepwise
Example in G
1
Lydian
♯4
WWWhWWh
G, A, B, C♯, D, E, F♯
2
Ionian
–
WWhWWWh
G, A, B, C, D, E, F♯
3
Mixolydian
♭7
WWhWWhW
G, A, B, C, D, E, F
4
Dorian
♭3, ♭7
WhWWWhW
G, A, B♭, C, D, E, F
5
Aeolian
♭3, ♭6, ♭7
WhWWhWW
G, A, B♭, C, D, E♭, F
6
Phrygian
♭2, ♭3, ♭6, ♭7
hWWWhWW
G, A♭, B♭, C, D, E♭, F
7
Locrian
♭2, ♭3, ♭5, ♭6, ♭7
hWWhWWW
G, A♭, B♭, C, D♭, E♭, F
Returning to the point about the Dorian mode, it is in the center of this scale. Situated exactly halfway between the lightest and darkest modes, it is the most neutral mode. In the context of P5, this is especially curious. As mentioned, the game’s overarching theme is the balance of good and evil, or in this case, a balance between light and dark. Thus, the choice of G Dorian instead of B flat major or G minor fits with our understanding of P5 because it captures this theme that the game conveys. Just as the characters seek their true justice & their own middle ground that lies between happy and sad, the Dorian mode finds its middle ground between the happy and sad modes of major and minor. It also provides a strong point to switch to different modes. For example, going from Dorian to Aeolian is not as jarring as changing from Ionian to Aeolian because only one note needs to be flattened to reach Aeolian from Dorian, but three notes need to be flattened from Ionian. This makes modulation between modalities easier and more natural in the flow of the song, and as we’ll see in the following sections, this will allow certain motifs and lyrics to shine.
How One Note Reveals the Depth of the Protagonist
So far, Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There has shown how it exemplifies the inner themes of P5 by using the Dorian mode of G as its key signature. The next topic that will be looked at is how the song captures the morals and struggles of the protagonist through certain musical passages and lyrical choices. We will first dive into the music, specifically the string melody at the start of the song, and then later on a lyrical analysis will be done in context of the character and the story.
In the visuals accompanying the opening track, Joker and his fellow Phantom Thieves are illustrated leaping and dancing around the Shibuya district of Tokyo. When the violins enter on their strong upward “ti-do” gesture in Measure (M.) 8, a shot of Joker zooms into a close-up of his face on the top of a moving train. At the same moment he removes his mask, the violin melody becomes a descending motif, and as seen in the piano reduction, a D flat is briefly inserted into the riff. Where was this D flat borrowed from? And why is not written as its enharmonic C sharp? What is its purpose in this important part of the opening song?
First, the choice of D flat instead of C sharp is understandable from a compositional standpoint considering our key signature contains flats, not sharps – it would be questionable to use C sharp without clearly referencing a key in which C sharp is present. Next, we must find where the D flat originated from. Since mode mixture is prevalent in this piece, the D flat can be approached as a note from a related mode of G. In any G scale, D is the fifth, so in typical structure, its presence reaffirms our tonic. It also has an influence on how we perceive the tonic, since diminished and augmented fifths are significantly different from a perfect fifth in sonic quality and timbre. Specifically, a diminished fifth forms a dissonant tritone with the tonic and is shocking when heard prominently. In the P5 theme, however, it presence is very short and acts more like a momentary jolt, a brief captivation of our senses.
Locrian is the only one of the seven modes that features a flattened fifth and subsequently, as shown in Table 1, it is the darkest mode. No wonder then that Locrian is a popular choice for composers (like Shoji Meguro) who seek to capture the idea of “evil” in a song. Inserting a D flat into the melody is analogous to injecting a little bit of evil into the song. To put it in greater context, Dorian has been the only mode so far, so we have only felt a neutral tonality for the first eight bars. When the strings enter, their “ti-do” gesture is dramatic, triumphant, even heroic; but when they play the D flat, it adds a coloration that we may not expect otherwise, as if our heroism may be subtly flawed without our knowledge. Add to this the visuals of the Phantom Thieves, and we see the complexity and three-dimensional musical characterization of the protagonist.
From here out, the strings’ “ti-do” gesture and melody will be referred to as Cell B. This cell can be considered Joker’s motif; in the visuals, he appears on the screen for the first time at the very moment Cell B starts. The shorter “ti-do” repetitions in the melody coincide with him reaching for and pulling off his mask. As mentioned before, the gesture sounds dramatic, and it highlights the grab-and-pull of the mask which is illustrated to appear very dramatic as well. Most interestingly, however, is that the D flat occurs at the exact moment his face is shown for the first time. Lining up the borrowed “dark” note with the image of Joker’s face cannot be a coincidence – it imposes a taste of the darkness of Locrian without actually leaving the core Dorian. In this way, the use of D flat captures the depth of Joker and the Phantom Thieves’ mission: they must stick to finding true justice for their friends and society, but the method of breaking into and stealing people’s hearts is questionably evil. The D flat also interprets the protagonist’s own inner struggles. The opening section of this paper explains the Velvet Room, an extra-dimensional place which is literally and figuratively dark; it is essentially a prison in which the protagonist is trapped, and he can only escape when he uses his power to change his fate. This quickly-passing reference to Locrian also provides a subtle musical foreshadowing to the darkness of the Velvet Room.
It is curious that the D flat only occurs when the melody is descending. When the strings play the scale back up to “ti-do,” the spot where the D flat would occur is replaced by a rest. Musically, the D flat appears when we go into a lower a pitch register but disappears when we rise up; to put in terms of the game, it is as if the darkness only appears when we are going down into the depths of our mind and disappears when we climb back up to fight. In this sense, Cell B as a whole encompasses not only the darkness within the mission, but also the positive resolve that is needed in order to fight back. One note, that D flat, captures the depth of the protagonist; one melody illustrates his entire being.
How the Music Complements the Lyrics
One of the unique aspects of Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There is that it encapsulates emotions felt through the entire game in just one song. From uncertainty to happiness, despair to resolve, the music punctuates moments and lyrics in order to define the breadth of feeling present in the game. The full lyrics are shown below, with appropriate labels next to each section. Generally, each section has its own overarching modality that separates it from other sections. The reasoning behind each choice can be tied to the lyrics.
The first verse begins on a strong major-sounding tonality, but keeps the listener on their toes using seventh chords and other harmonies. The section has chord markings, telling the reader that structurally, the passage works like it is going from G major 7 to B flat major 7 back to G major 7 for two bars. Looking at the notes, however, the chords following the B flat major 7 appear to create inversions and extended chords of E minor and D major, each for one bar.
Other Forms of Analysis
Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There is structured similarly to many modern songs: Intro – Verse 1 – Pre-Chorus 1– Chorus 1 – Instrumental Bridge – Verse 2 – Pre-Chorus 2 – Chorus 2 – Chorus 3. This makes a Schenkerian analysis, at the very least, difficult, if not unnecessary. A formal descending line through the song will likely not reveal a special meaning because the melodic structure is not linked to a predictable harmonic progression that descends from 5 to 1; as discussed earlier, the main melody is linked to the lyrics, which are highlighted by harmonic choices. Neo-Riemannian and Transformational Theories may reveal loops or patterns between sections, but again, their connection to the themes of the game is not as strong as the harmonies that focus on mode mixture to convey semiotics. This is not to discount the value of these forms of analysis on other songs from the video game. With a soundtrack as large and varied as P5, there are opportunities to use these lenses on other songs to glean different meanings.
The analysis of jazz harmony may shed greater light on the piece, especially if looked at in context of the entire soundtrack. Acid jazz, while not strictly following a jazz form like big band or bebop, still contains elements from the overarching genre of jazz by inserting a level of improvisation into the song. Seventh chords, mode mixture, and harmonic form could all be compared to jazz standards or to other songs in the Persona series to understand how jazz theory captures elements and emotions from the video game.
In Conclusion
This paper has delved into the music behind the theme song of Persona 5 in order to understand how it captures the essence of the themes, characters, and story.
Bibliography
[1] Reggy. “Glixel: Interview with Composer Meguro and Artist Soejima About the Development of Persona 5.” Persona Central, Persona Central, 24 Nov. 2017, personacentral.com/glixel-interview-composer-meguro-artist-soejima-persona-5/. Collected background information about the soundtrack’s composition through an interview with Shoji Meguro, the sound designer and lead composer.