Salt Water Taffy - Loop De Loop

"Loop De Loop" by Salt Water Taffy has almost all the ingredients necessary to be a great bubblegum pop single: Catchy, repetitive chorus? Check. Simple three-chord structure? Check. References to children's nursery rhymes? Check. The only ingredient that is missing is the leering, borderline inappropriate, sexual innuendo disguised through double entendres that made so many of the great bubblegum songs great.

Beyond the "here we go loop de loop" chorus, the band references Little Miss Muffett and the cow jumping over the moon, but one never gets the sense that they're doing anything naughty. They really should have gotten some help from Joey Levine on that. Most nursery rhymes have some sort of psychosexual subtext to them anyway. I mean was Little Miss Muffett really just a little girl who was afraid of arachnids, or did the spider represent something altogether more sinister?

Anyway, the absence of sexual innuendo in this song doesn't seem to bother my four-year old son--he's been dancing around our house singing this recently. It's pretty catchy.

Salt Water Taffy

Another shot fired in the bubblegum revolution, another crippling blow to "serious" serious rock music. Take that Emerson, Lake and Palmer!

"Finders Keepers" by Salt Water Taffy is similar to the big hits of the 1910 Fruitgum Company in which a children's game or rhyme is transformed into mild sexual innuendo ("1,2,3 Red Light," "Simon Says," "May I Take A Giant Step (Into Your Heart)," "Goody Goody Gumdrops," etc.). This song only scraped the bottom of the charts, and the band did little else of note (and unlike many bubblegum acts this was a real band, not just a name Kazenetz and Katz dreamed up). Nevertheless, this is a really, really catchy song, and one of the better minor bubblegum hits.