What was the first electro pop song to hit the charts in 1972?
It took a while for electronic music to finally shake hands with the pop world.
Too esoteric, avant-garde, or academic to ever tempt anyone outside the musical underground or university campuses, electronic music’s genesis from the 1950s’ tape collages and oscillator emissions would only find a pop cultural presence as the eerie whines in a B-movie picture or TV sci-fi. Otherwise, such unnatural sounds stayed firmly in the select record collections of chin strokers and artistic radicals.
However, rock’s bloom into the psychedelic age triggered a hunger for new sonic terrain to let loose all their lysergic ideas. Soon enough, the Mellotron would wash its wistful flutters on the baroque end of the 1960s pop scene, and The Beatles would throw all the Karlheinz Stockhausen they could muster on the likes of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’s surrealistic carnival ride.
It was the Moog that changed everything. A hefty modular unit that would enjoy its more widespread mini successor a few years later, Dr Robert Moog’s namesake synthesiser would truly usher in the age of electronic music, thrust that bit closer to the pop scene, with everybody from The Beatles, The Doors, and The Monkees eager to get their hands on the mysterious blocks of wires and patches.
Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach in 1968 would show that there was a mainstream audience to be had: the entire album of Bach pieces interpreted via the Moog. But it took one maddeningly infectious pop tune to establish electronic music as a real chart-topper.
So, what was the first electro song to hit the charts in 1972?
The song was originally a somewhat novel play around by German-American composer Gershon Kingsley. Crafting a light and fluffy instrumental jaunt on his Moog, the charming ‘Popcorn’ would first see life as far back as 1969 on his Music to Moog By, the fun little sketch’s chirpiness not lost on Kingsley, who supposedly named the piece as a portmanteau of ‘pop music’ and ‘corn’, as in kitsch.
‘Popcorn’ would spread around the world in three short years. Kingsley had already rearranged his kitschy number with the First Moog Quartet, but fellow member Stan Free decided to have a go himself for his own band hustle, Hot Butter. With his group name nailed, Free cut an uptempo version of ‘Popcorn’ backed with a proto-disco bounce that first saw spins on Parisian dancefloors and topped the country’s charts.
Hot Butter’s debut single would pop corn all over the world, its twinkling synths and oscillator basslines grabbing number one in several countries and breaking the top ten in the US. So influential, Jean-Michel Jarre cut his teeth early on creating his own take on the ‘Popcorn’ hit under a pseudonym and laced some of its rhythmic bubbles on ‘Oxygène (Part IV)’.
France clearly loved Kingsley and Hot Butter’s electronic ode to puffed-up maize. In 2005, the Crazy Frog ringtone irritance whipped out ‘Popcorn’ for a cheap remix and wound up topping the nation’s charts once again.
