‘It’s Getting Better’: the song Cass Elliot compared to Chinese food
Despite dying prematurely at the age of just 32, ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot was undoubtedly the voice of sunshine pop during the 1960s. As one of the founding members of The Mamas and the Papas alongside Denny Doherty and married couple John and Michelle Phillips, she made her stamp on the joyous pop explosion of the period that also birthed acts such as the Monkees, the Association and the 5th Dimension.
While the genre is most commonly associated with its upbeat and buoyant blend of easy listening, tight vocal harmonies and simplistic folk tunes, there were occasional tracks within the movement that presented some melancholic undertones. The Mamas and the Papas were responsible for one of the most notable examples of this in ‘California Dreaming’, a song that yearns for the sunshine of the West Coast while surrounded by a wintry scene of brown leaves and grey skies, while the Zombies would come up with a darker twist on sunshine pop with ‘Care of Cell 44’, which sees the protagonist of the song write to their incarcerated lover and long for their release.
While sunshine pop had proven itself to not be as happy as it seemed at all times, there was a much more saccharine variant that emerged alongside it that would go on to be known as ‘bubblegum pop’. If there was ever a nomenclature within music that screamed ‘excessively sweet’ and ‘easy to stick but hard to get rid of’, bubblegum pop was it, and it would regularly choose to follow these descriptions as though they were principles to live by.
Whether she wanted to follow this trajectory or not, Elliot was herded from the world of sunshine pop following her departure from the group and thrust into bubblegum pop’s throes. As an artist looking to resist being pigeonholed, this transition wasn’t exactly a welcome one for her, and she expressed many reservations about being asked to perform songs in this style once she had embarked on her solo career.
One particular song Elliot had more than a grievance with was ‘It’s Getting Better’, the lead single from her second solo album, Bubble Gum, Lemonade and Something For Mama, in 1969. While she was pleased that people were beginning to recognise her talents as an artist in her own right, separately from her work with The Mamas and the Papas, it wasn’t quite scratching the itch that she had to perform songs about heavier and more serious topics.
“It’s a good recording for what it is,” she would tell Melody Maker. “But you wouldn’t exactly call it social commentary, and musically, it’s not very complicated.” She would then go on to further berate bubblegum pop as a genre, calling it “pleasant to listen to…but it’s like they say about Chinese food: half an hour after tasting it, you are hungry again.”
Elliot was clearly referring to the fact that the genre doesn’t provide anything of substance, as it was clear from this statement that she did not possess a hunger for performing in this style. That said, she would also go on to provide a more balanced assessment of why she was so frequently given these kinds of songs to work with, claiming that her “voice is very light…I just can’t sing heavy material”.
