Blood And Love Tastes So Sweet

10,000 Maniacs “Candy Everybody Wants”

“Candy Everybody Wants” is an essentially condescending song, but when I was a teenager, I slightly misheard some key lyrics in a way that made it much more so. Each time Natalie Merchant sang “so their minds” I heard “southern minds,” so it turned into this song about how everyone in the south is a hateful rube, and being a New Yorker listening to a band of New Yorkers, I just rolled with that. Thankfully, I was wrong about that.

The song is, in fact, a cheerful parody of cynicism, in which Natalie Merchant sings about a culture that thrives on indulging vice. The main hook is a shrug: “Hey! Give ‘em what they want.” The quasi-Motown arrangement makes it all sound fun and breezy, like the song could literally just be about candy. To further hammer it home, “Candy Everybody Wants” is structured so that it’s basically three different chorus hooks in rotation, because people like hooks, and hey, give ‘em what they want, right?

It’s hard to imagine a song like this being a hit now, or anyone even a little bit like Natalie Merchant being a pop star in this era. Even in a period when the internet media is full of think pieces informed by social justice rhetoric, anyone as Pollyanna-ish, prim, and politically didactic as 10,000 Maniacs-era Merchant would have trouble catching on in the indie world, much less crossing over to the mainstream. (The intro to the video of this song actually includes the phrases “marginalized member of a spectator democracy” and “manufactured consent.”) But I think this song is very relevant right now, as this “hey, let’s shamelessly indulge the worst in people” has become the guiding principle of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and if we’re being honest, most of the internet economy. Merchant is asking the listener to consider who benefits from vice, and everyone being distracted from the incredibly boring important things in society. But asking is all she’s doing. Everything else is just giving you what you want.

Buy it from Amazon.