Another key moment for Rodgers was an argument he had with his jazz guitar teacher about the compositional merit of the Archies’ late-60s hit Sugar Sugar, which Rodgers ridiculed and resented having to play in a boogaloo covers band.
“Any song that sells and gets to the top 40 or top 10, any song is a great composition,” Rodgers recalled.
Sure, it’s manufactured schlock. And this is truly dreadful lip syncing.
It’s also artfully constructed and a rather good pop song.
Proper bubblegum music.
Nile Rodgers is one of those guys who you could go most of your life without knowing of if you don’t have a particular interest in music production, then one day you see a list of the records he has contributed to…http://www.songfacts.com/category-songs_produced_by_nile_rodgers.php
As a proud philistine, I like to think that the greatest compliment that can be paid a song or film is to say it is entertaining. Everything else is pretentious nonsense.
https://youtu.be/VwJ9dTLCd2I
Sakkarin of course gave us the definitive version.
If we are talking bubblegum, I always preferred “My Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers.
There are better examples
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWaQBxc0aI
We were having a similar discussion in the office the other day. I suggested that, for however much street cred ABBA may lack, they wrote bloody solid pop songs. Well-written, hooky and still able to fill a dance floor.
On the other hand:
‘All this machinery
Making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted
It’s really just a question
Of your honesty, yeah your honesty
‘One likes to believe
In the freedom of music
But glittering prizes
And endless compromises
Shatter the illusion
Of integrity, yeah’
Rush, ‘The Spirit of Radio,’ 1980
“Dancing Queen” may have added more to the sum of human happiness than any piece of music in history.
As a teenager, I was genuinely and thoroughly offended by it.
Miserable Dork.
Ah, yes, 1969 when Richard Nixon was our great hope for the future. I quote: “In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.” Ah well.
Good grief, is this where we’re going?
Okay, best bubblegum is:
https://secondhandsongs.com/work/119600
PS Tim is too young for bubblegum
Peter,
That was a good link – not for the song you linked to but on my browser in the sidebar was an original Norman Greenbaum Spirit In The Sky video. Happy memories of that one.