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Jerry Kasenetz, Producer of Bubblegum Hits, Dies


I think the best recording he ever produced was the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus' "Quick Joey Small (Run, Joey Run)" single that was a minor chart hit in the fall of 1968. In a year where most social comment songs were about antiwar and racism, this definitely stood out as to where the nation would be headed in the 1980s.
 
What would we consider bubblegum music today? Teen pop?
I don't think there is really an equivalent in today's music. It was a sub-genre of pop music, that (IMHO) lasted roughly from 1967 to the early 70s, with the Osmonds and the DeFranco Family being more or less the last real bubblegum artists.

Bubblegum was not just a pop phenomenon, as the genre also ventured into the rock world with groups like Music Explosion and Crazy Elephant (both Kasenetz-Katz productions).

The opening of the Cars' "Just What I Needed" was inspired by the opening line of The Ohio Express tune "Yummy Yummy Yummy."

It could easily be argued that Kasenetz and Katz were thee major players in that genre.
 
What about K-Pop? When you consider the level of fandom around the Korean boy bands, it rivals the bubblegum of the 60s.
Fair enough. Yeah you could argue that there are similarities in the fandom, but I was referring to the style of the music.

And I was going to mention Backstreet Boys and N'Sync, but @Don CT just beat me to it, as I'm typing this.
 
The K-Pop and boy bands phenomena come close, but a lot of bubblegum rock seemed to be aimed specifically at children, who aren't the target demographic of any genre being played on mainstream FM formats today, mainly because advertisers aren't selling to them,
 
What about K-Pop? When you consider the level of fandom around the Korean boy bands, it rivals the bubblegum of the 60s.

When I think of "Bubblegum Music" groups, I think of a group of unknown studio musicians that put some songs together and came up with a catchy name. Then you had the likes of Joey Levine, Tony Burrows and Ron Dante who were the lead singer(s) who pretty much were the singers for all of these bubblegum groups. I don't remember if many of these groups that performed publicly used the same studio personnel.

Much of the Bubblegum songs could've been played during the chase or music segments in Saturday Morning cartoons of the time (Scooby Doo, Josie & The Pussycats, Archies, etc... and would've fit right in).

There were a few exceptions, though.
 
Much of the Bubblegum songs could've been played during the chase or music segments in Saturday Morning cartoons of the time (Scooby Doo, Josie & The Pussycats, Archies, etc... and would've fit right in).
And, for the record, both Josie and the Pussycats and the Archies had singles released under their names though they were only cartoon characters (Josie) or cartoon and comic strip characters (The Archies). The Archies had the biggest bubble gum hit ever in 1969 when they took "Sugar, Sugar," all the way to #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, and it ultimately became the #1 song of the year 1969 in the U.S. per Billboard magazine.

It was noted in an earlier comment that these songs were aimed at the preteen set. While that is true, it should also be noted that when both Radio Disney and Radio Aahs (the two satellite syndicated children's networks from the 1990s and early 2000s) came to putting together their on-air playlists, they chose to ignore many of the 1960s-era bubble gum songs due to (from the networks' perspectives) questionable (i.e. sexually suggestive) lyrics. Of course, back in the 1990s and 2000s, most families had access to cable TV and not all preteens kept their televisions glued to Nickelodeon.
 


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