With “Sex And Candy,” Marcy Playground turned disco gibberish into alternative gold

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Marcy Playground’s “Sex And Candy,” which spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Track in 1997.
Nothing exemplifies the weirdness of ’90s music like Marcy Playground’s “Sex And Candy.” The song was so ubiquitous on modern rock radio in 1997 that most people in their mid-30s should be able to effortlessly karaoke along to it even if the name of the group has since faded into a cultural haze. Written by the band’s frontman John Wozniak, its lyrics were so seemingly nonsensical that listeners dug deep to find the metaphoric meaning behind phrases like “disco lemonade” and “double cherry pie.” Spoiler alert: Maybe you dug too deep.
Wozniak revealed the song title’s origins in an interview:
I was dating a girl and she was going to Bryn Mawr College… We were in her dorm room, and her roommate came in and she saw us there, and she was like, “Oh, it smells like sex and candy in here.” And I always remembered that… Then when I was writing the song and I was coming up with all these weird disco-era references that I was making up, “platform double suede” and all that business, I was like, hey, let’s just throw in that phrase that’s been sticking in my head for the last five years or whatever.