Sex and Candy
by Marcy Playground
- 81
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 67
- Danceability
- 24
- Acousticness
The Marcy Playground album drew little notice until a radio station in San Diego began playing "Sex and Candy." The song went to radio the week of September 15, 1997, and climbed to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 2 in Canada and No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, where it stayed a then-record 15 weeks. It is the band's only hit.
John Wozniak took the title from a remark made in the late 1980s, in his girlfriend's dormitory room at Bryn Mawr College, where his father taught. Another young woman walked in and said the room smelled like sex and candy. The phrase struck him as weird and cool. Years later, in 1992 or 1993, he wrote the song in under an hour in his bedroom at 4 a.m., pairing the phrase with disco-era references he made up.
His account of the meaning changed. In 1997 he called it an unorthodox love song. In 2015 he said he did not know. Jamie Caliri directed the video, which shows Wozniak's head sticking out of a hole in a mountain beside a crawling spider. Maroon 5 and Slothrust have covered the song.
Sex and Candy runs at 81 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.96 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 741 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.