Bubblegum.

Music has many landscapes, some you never admit exploring unless you are in the privacy of your own home. Bubblegum music was such a landscape because it was a guilty pleasure of catchy choruses, infectious riffs, addictive melodies and goofy lyrics. No one ever admitted liking bubblegum music because it didn't have the cache of the starving artist honing their skills in the subways of New York or the underground of London, think "Clapton is god" scrawled across the tiles at Islington station in 1967. No one talked openly about the Archies, the Monkees or The Partridge Family, let alone the 1910 Fruitgum Company and this continues today, through to Hanson and The Backstreet Boys. Yet someone had to be listening, the Beatles were outsold by the Monkees in 1967, the year of the epiphanous Sgt Pepper and again in 1969 by the Archies, after Abbey Road and Let it Be were released. By 1997 Hanson with "In an mmm bop they're gone, Mmm bop, ba duba dop" had again fooled the music cognoscente by becoming a worldwide hit that know one owned up to listening to or owning.

Those guilty pleasures of singing bubblegum in the shower have today been taken over by furtive glances at the the iPhone or the tablet waiting for your time penalty to finish so that you can attempt the next level of Candy Crush or better still hurl an Angry Bird at a bunch of farm animals. Yes bubblegum has gone online and no matter what people say about the inanity of Fruit Ninjas, Bejewelled, Doodlejump or Berserker Stickman, millions of people are playing the games. In the privacy of their homes, in lunch breaks, while waiting for the bus, whenever there is a break in meetings, in the toilets but no one admits it. Angry Birds was the most downloaded APP on the web for nearly two years, more than Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Maps, and when you take in the various iterations like Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Seasons, the top ten looked not unlike the pop charts whenever a bubblegum song hit number one.

When the Monkees and The Partridge Family hit the small screen and Hanson hit MTV with the boys being pushed around in shopping trolleys, it wasn't about competing with the established music scene, it was about escape, smiling at their antics and leaving your credibility at the door. For how else were you meant to sing the choruses without guilt, why else would you spend your hard earned cash, if not to eat that most delicious of chocolates without worrying about the diet. For a three minute singalong or a fifteen minute diversion, depending on you skill level on Tetris, you can leave behind everything else and where you once had to just sit and daydream to lose yourself, some developer is now working on your next escape. Daydreams and delicious treats, you know are not good for you, have always been, in the end, good for you. "Hey hey, we're the Monkees".