Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears
Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears
The truth behind the pop music we love most.
List Price: $ 19.95
Price: $ 11.95
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Yummy, yummy, yummy,
A pleasant surprise. I picked this up even though I thought it would be another disposable hoot at popular culture. It turns out, however, to be a thoughtful and intelligent, only-partly-tongue-in-cheek collection of biographies, essays, and analyses of “bubblegum” music (and related media). Lots of detail, critical discography, and a clear love of the form by its collective authors. Covers everything from 60s kid-pop through 70s/80s bubblegum-punk to 90s teen-pop, everyone from Steve Barri, P. F. Sloan, and Kasenatz-Katz to Lou Perlman, the Bugaloos to Vitamin C. A cover-to-cover read.
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|Won’t Stick To Your Face,
Why don’t you own this already? Don’t you want to know the connections between the Ramones and the Bay City Rollers, or the Beatles and the Backstreet Boys? At times frightening, often hilarious, and always illuminating, this collection of essays is written by people who clearly know music–not just the sub-genre known as Bubblegum Pop–backwards and forwards. This is a smart book, and a must for everyone from music criticism completists to closet Partridge Family fans.
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|SPLAT!,
The naked truth, indeed!
Editors Kim Cooper and David Smay have outdone themselves in producing the definitive work on the wildly popular yet strangely esoteric world of bubblegum rock, compiling dozens of essays written by some of the finest scribes of the underground press.
Case in point: “Looking for the Beagles” by Steve Mandich, the author of the fantastically comprehensive biography “Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel.” Here Mandich sheds a similarly swell light on the all-but forgotten rockin’ doggie duo the Beagles, who starred in their own short-lived late-’60s Saturday-morning cartoon series and released one gleeful pop album.
Other contributors include the comic world’s Peter Bagge (“Hate”) with a hilariously enthusiastic overview of his young daughter’s contemporary bubblegum CDs, Jake Austen (“Roctober”) deconstructs KISS, and, in the interest of fairness, Dennis Eichhorn (“Real Stuff”) bursts the bubble with “I Hate Bubblegum!”
Buy for its long-lasting flavor.
Splat!
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