Candy Everybody Wants- 10,000 Maniacs

The official music video (linked here) starts with a narration:

Living in Eden has its advantages. As a marginalized member of a spectator democracy, you choose your own dependencies. Lust. Hate. Blood. Love. Don’t think of it as manufactured consent. Think of it as the candy everybody wants.

I guess that pretty much summarizes the song. Lust, hate, blood, and love were all mentioned in the lyrics and they are seen as “candy everybody wants.” And since everybody wants candy, we give them want they want. By “we” I think the songwriters were referring to the media and the messages they “manufacture” and make public via mass channels. Perhaps more so via television, as hinted in the introduction’s “spectator democracy.”

Oh why bother with the deconstruction. It’s a catchy song, plain and simple. The first time I listened to it I didn’t even catch the social commentary in the words. All I remember hearing was Natalie Merchant’s hey, hey, give them what they want.

Incidentally, there’s a book of the same title by author Josh Kilmer-Purcell. I don’t know if the book makes any reference to the song.

Anyway, this song has also been my soundtrack of the week (along with Texas’s In Demand). I used it in the birthday video we prepared for Candy, who turned 24 yesterday. I tried looking for a karaoke version to make the audio editing easier on my part, but I couldn’t find one. Instead, I was led to the official music video, which I saw for the first time last week.