In the spirit of Italian literary critic Franco Moretti and his practice of “distant reading,” Generation Bubble offers a series of essays devoted to our attempts to “unlisten” to pop past and present — to consider individual songs in light of how they helped structure everyday life in their moment.

Even though it borders on imbecilic, the 1968 song “Simon Says” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company (the band that essentially gave the bubblegum genre its name) has long counted me as a fan. To some, the term bubblegum is pejorative, denoting childish, throwaway music made by studio hacks who couldn’t make it as “serious artists.” After all, the heyday of bubblegum, the late 1960s, also marked the birth of art rock and psychedelic statement LPs like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which were meant to establish pop groups as the creative vanguard. Rock critics were then only beginning to come into being, and to establish their credibility they tended to denigrate bubblegum hits as facile guilty pleasures not worth serious attention or comment. Bubblegum tunes were simply an unfortunate feature of the cultural backdrop against which alleged masterworks like, say,  Music From Big Pink could stand out.

But as years have passed, another school of thought has come to see bubblegum as the distilled quintessence of the pop-song form. I marvel at the restraint the studio musicians must exercise to adhere to the risible premises of bubblegum songs and how this restraint translates almost into a high formalist art. By these lights, “Simple Simon” is a pop-music Rothko.

Bubblegum at its best offers a carefully calibrated calculus of hooks and universally accessible lyrics — simple-mindedness elevated to kind of austere minimalism by egoless professionals who eschew personal recognition in order to make something limited and perfect, something that, if nothing else, apotheosizes the culture-industry commodity. They synthesize the familiar with the needlessly new and let us experience aesthetic joy in pure disposability. In these songs, formulas become sublime. We deny their appeal at our own peril, as they exemplify how consumerist ideology gets translated into uncomplicated, seemingly apolitical aural pleasure. They stick in our heads despite — or because — of their apparent shallowness, and the fun of being stuck on them becomes compulsory, like the pleasures of consumerism in general.

“Simple Simon” is a pop-music Rothko.

Bubblegum songs epitomize the ways in which consumerism manages to inflict pleasure on us, the ways in which enjoyment becomes a command imposed on us from without rather than our subjective response to experience. By reverse-engineering them, we can better understand how they attempt to program us. And a closer look at “Simon Says” — prima facie a song about the fun of following orders — seems as good a place as any to start.

The first thing worth noting about “Simon Says” is how directly it presents its subject matter, utterly straightforward and without figure. Lots of bubblegum songs employ pretty obvious double entendre: “Chewy, Chewy” and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy”; “Wig Wam Bam” and “Little Willie” — even prepubescents can probably decode these. But Simple Simon in “Simon Says” is not ostensibly a symbol for anything. The song is just about playing Simple Simon, and it gives you the directions. The lyrics seem to resist interpretation. Instead, they hearken back to a time before the pain of metaphor, which is always a way of inscribing absence. This allows “Simple Simon” to paint a nostalgic view of childhood as a hermeneutics-free time of transparent messages, as opposed to a time when the inextricable complexity of all communication was merely veiled from us:

I’d like to play a game
That is so much fun,
And it’s not so very hard to do.
The name of the game is Simple Simon says,
And I would like for you to play it too.

Put your hands in the air,
Shake them all about,
Do it when Simon says,
And you will never be out.

Now that you have learned
To play this game with me,
You can see its not so hard to do.
Lets try it once again,
This time more carefully,
And I hope the winner will be you.

By avoiding any kind of metaphoric possibility, “Simple Simon” wants to absolve listeners of any experience of ambiguity, any chance of misinterpretation. No decoding is required. The orders are simple and unmistakable, the rules of the game impossible to misunderstand. It configures conformity not as an anxiety-inducing guessing game that requires one to have the cultural capital to figure out who and what to follow, but as a game that is “fun” because it is “not so very hard” to play.

In the world of the song there is no space between desire and action for anxiety to develop. This suits the subject matter of the song perfectly, as it’s about a game that rewards blind, immediate obedience to authority. It structures our own actions as the product of someone else’s desire, thus resolving us of responsibility. It promises a world of perfect order, in which one’s responses can be completely controlled, in which nothing is involuntary.

The refrain “Simple Simon says,” then, is about that simple pleasure of total submission, which makes it far kinkier than “I’ve got love in my tummy.” Taking a cue from French theorist Gilles Deleuze’s essay on masochism, “Coldness and Cruelty,” “Simon Says” present its game’s winner as the person who submits most perfectly, not the person issuing the orders, who in this arrangement is deprived of all possibility for joy and reduced to performing rote bureaucratic functions. “Do it when Simon says and you will never be out” — does this extend the promise of jouissance to the perfect masochist? (Perhaps I need to rethink “1, 2, 3 Red Light” along these lines as well.)

The formulas of bubblegum, then, are like the elaborate contracts preferred by masochists that Deleuze details. The punishment — the repetition and simplicity and regressive nature of songs like “Simon Says” — precedes the pleasure, activates it, allows it to elude the censoring conscience, which has already been placated. These are also the pleasures of consumerism, permitted because they have already been massified and neutered. We invest ourselves in the superficial differences but are comforted by the underlying sameness.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

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