By 1968, radio couldn’t get enough catchy sunshine pop songs that went ba-ba-bomb-ba-ba-ba-bomb-ba-ba. By the end of the year, though, songs in the style of the Turtles’ “Happy Together” and the Association’s “Never My Love” broke the sound barrier in how fast they went out of style. The sunshine pop sound gets relegated to bubblegum acts that were studio creations and not really bands (such as The Archies and Ohio Express).
1968 was also a messed up transition year, wracked with political violence and a country seemingly coming apart exasperated by a perceived generation gap.
It’s also a year when dark comedy movies flourished, with Weekend and Wild in the Streets as prime examples. Another example is Candy — a movie based on a book written with twisted comedy in mind by satirist Terry Southern. The movie’s sexual politics are possibly the opposite of Terry Southern and the filmmakers (including screenwriter Buck Henry and director Christian Marquand) thought they were, as the movie simultaneously appropriates feminism while nesting it inside the patriarchy.
All that aside, what makes the movie is music (including original songs by the Byrds) and the imagery. Perhaps the most compelling example of this comes at the movie’s epilogue, when Candy walks numb and alone on a windy day through a park filled with dozens of colorful flags representing countries that don’t exist. She also passes the characters she’s encountered over the course of the movie engaging with a crowd in various forms of darkly comic merry making.
The song playing over the scene, “Ascension to Virginity,” does that stinging 1968 na-na-na-naaa-na-na-na-na-na-na thing — it has no other lyrics — though it’s only half sunshine pop. The other half is taunting and sarcastic — nasally French sounding — a fitting way to end a dark comedy.
Possibly lifted from the band Mc Squared and a song called “Bornatzätt,” the fetching song that closes down Candy is not from a real band, but rather from the prolific film score creator Dave Grusin and likely a group of session musicians. The song and scene are a terrific way to end a mostly forgettable film, and “Ascension to Virginity” stands alone as an excellent piece of music. It’s also the final nail in the coffin for sunshine pop songs and all its ba-ba-ba’s.
