What "Sugar, Sugar" offers is a complete escape from reality, sticky-sweet feel-good music so blatantly commercial and artificial it wasn't even attributed to three-dimensional performers - coming at a time when counterculture credibility meant seemingly everything, it would be almost tempting to call the Archies revolutionary if that didn't defeat the entire purpose of what they were all about. The Archies were perhaps the most popular animated band in the late '60s, with a cartoon that aired every Saturday morning and one chart-topping single, 'Sugar, Sugar.' With songs written by big shots like Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, the smooth vocals of Ron Dante, and a cadre of talented studio musicians helping guide the way, the Archies weren. Produced by Jeff Barry, the song was originally released on the album. It’s a beautifully engineered ballistic missile of a pop song, a towering. It was a four-week 1969 number-one hit single by fictional characters The Archies. The song is the very essence of simplicity, a classically constructed pop record with an undeniably infectious melody and charmingly inane puppy-love lyrics nothing revelatory and nothing earth-shattering, which is precisely the point - as the "bubblegum" appellation suggests, it's total ear candy, and lord knows it struck a chord, selling over six million copies. Sugar, Sugar, the one Archies single to hit 1, is both the biggest and the best thing to come out of bubblegum. Their most successful song, Sugar, Sugar. Conceived by producer Don Kirshner following his firing by another pre-fab (albeit flesh-and-blood) group, the Monkees, and inspired by the long-running Archie comic book line and subsequent animated series, the cartoon band was in reality a group of session musicians including vocalists Ron Dante, Ellie Greenwich, Andy Kim, and Toni Wine Kim co-authored "Sugar, Sugar" with Jeff Barry, Greenwich's husband and longtime songwriting partner. recorded by session musicians featuring Ron Dante on vocals and released as a series of singles and albums. For better or worse, "Sugar, Sugar" and the countless bubblegum records which came before and after didn't reflect their times, but rejected them - escapist fare at its purest and most palatable. With the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar," pop music moved 180 degrees away from the overtly political, consciousness-expanding aesthetic which emerged during the Summer of Love toward a calculated simplicity and innocence not heard since the years prior to the British Invasion. In fact, it wasn't even the work of a real band at all. Genres: Bubblegum, Pop Rock, Sunshine Pop. In spite of (or, more likely, because of) the momentous cultural turning points which stretched across 1969 - among them, Woodstock, Vietnam, the moon landing, and the beginning of the Nixon presidency - the biggest-selling pop single of the year was not the product of a generational torch bearer like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan. The Archies discography and songs: Music profile for The Archies, formed 1968.
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