Sugar pop, 2012

For people my age, (the manufactured pop group) the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" is the prototype for a certain kind of pop song: one so addictive, so innocently pretty, and, if you'll forgive the vulgar racial note, so white, that it can only be thought of as musical sugar. It takes a lot of behind-the-scenes skill and effort and production wizardry to produce such a song: like white sugar, sugar pop is highly processed.

2012 has produced a fine sugar pop ditty in Owl City's and Carly Rae Jepsen's collaboration "Good Time". The song itself is unbelievably catchy, and the video is a pitch-perfect accompaniment that maintains the song's youthfully innocent tone. Is there a performer who looks more girl-next-door than Carly Rae Jepsen? And there's something about the way she twice enunciates "down" in one verse — she slightly elongates the first part of the "ow" sound and then abruptly clips the whole word off to fit the rhythm, making it sound more like "daown" — that is distinctive and, to my ears, charming.

The high you get from sugar pop songs is fleeting; they can be overexposed to the point of triggering a backlash (I remember Hanson good-naturedly participating in a SNL takedown of their sugar pop ditty "Mmmbop"); and you will hate yourself six months later for having gone nuts over one (the analogue to the sugar high crash), but it's damnably difficult not to get caught up in them.

And you know what? I still like "Sugar, Sugar" all these years later.