#13 - Sex and Candy - Marcy Playground

One of the great aspects of mixtape trading is discovering new music and certainly that is the case with this track which came up as a spotify recommendation.

Featuring a sound reminisant of Nirvana this would be the band's only hit song thanks largely to heavy radioplay though clearly not here in the UK were we didn't get our first alternative station until the early 00's having to scape by on four hours of "specialist programing" each week thrown onto the late night schedule of Radio 1. It was here that you'd also find the legendry John Peel whose drive to push new music was never truly recognised by the station until his crushing passing from a heart attack in 2004. To this date no other DJ with perhaps of Jo Whiley has discovered as many bands as he did thanks to his attitude of just playing anything he thought sounded good.  

Taking it's title from a phrase uttered by lead singer John Wozniak's college girlfriend's roommate after she walked in on them having sex remarking that the room smelt like Sex and Candy but then this is a song which features such phrases as double cherry pie, disco superfly, disco lemonade and platform double-suede none of which I have any clue what they are, but then when you have droning vocals mixed with some catchy rifts you can get away with alot.

The video directed by Jamie Caliri who also directed Eels, "Your Lucky Day in Hell and Cypress Hill's "Boom Biddy Bye Bye (Fugees Remix)" who he would also provide the cover art for "Temples of Boom". His work can also be found in the credits sequences for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and the much underappricated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

On a fun side note Wozniak's father, a developmental psychologist, analyzed the video in Freudian term which he saw as a representation of a wet dream. Adding to this cited that the hole Wozniak's head was in represented the womb, the spider Wozniak's loss of innocence (which he is both afraid of and drawn to), and the puddle at the end of the video to be a symbol for semen.....personally the idea of spiders crawling towards my head is just a whole lot of nightmare fuel, while I guess the guys harassing the dresser are just really clumsy movers. 

Follow the Mixtape