By Anita Malhotra
In 1972, a unique-sounding pop tune hit the airwaves.
The bouncy and quirky single, titled “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, soared up the charts, selling over two million records worldwide. It reached no. 1 in France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia and charted in the US, Canada and the UK, among other countries.
It’s easy to understand why it was such a hit: it was simple and catchy, and its futuristic sound was unlike anything else on pop radio at the time.
Despite seemingly coming out of nowhere, the tune was not an original, but an arrangement of an electronic novelty piece first recorded in 1969 by a German-American composer named Gershon Kingsley.
Born in Germany in 1922, Kingsley, who was half-Jewish, left the country as a teen in the 1930s due to the rise of the Nazis. He moved first to Palestine and then to the United States. There he became a conductor, arranger, composer and Broadway musical director.
In 1969, he met the engineer Robert Moog, who had invented the Moog synthesizer five years earlier. Kingsley fell in love with the Moog and its sound. Buying one for $3,500, a huge sum of money at the time, he put together the album Music to Moog By, mainly arrangements of existing songs like Fur Elise, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Nowhere Man by the Beatles.
Hidden away as the fifth track on the album is “Pop Corn.” Kingsley hit upon the melody by improvising and has said that it took him only five minutes to compose the melody.
Shortly after, Kingsley formed the First Moog Quartet, the first group ever to perform electronic music at Carnegie Hall. The quartet went on to release an album of live Moog concerts as well an updated version of “Pop Corn.”
It was one of the quartet members, jazz musician Stan Free, who turned the First Moog Quartet’s version into a hit, re-recording it in 1972 with his aptly-named band Hot Butter.
The hit version is bubblier and more danceable than the original, tweaks the main melody slightly, and adds a back beat and bridge section.
The popularity of “Pop Corn” led to countless covers, including by Jean Michel Jarre, who recorded it in 1972 under the pseudonym Pop Corn Orchestra and Jammie Jefferson. He would later use part of Popcorn’s main theme as inspiration for his hit “Oxygène Part IV” (1987), which was remixed two years later for the music video “The Penguins Return.”
The tune was even used in the video game Pengo as well as numerous ads (including for popcorn). And some notable covers include those by M & H Band (1987), the Boomtang Boys (1998), Aphex Twin (2002), Crazy Frog (2005) and Muse (2010). And in 2022, Tove Lo sampled it and added lyrics to it in her song “2 Die 4.”
Kingsley died in 2019 at the age of 97, but “Popcorn” is still going strong, enshrined in its various incarnations, for better and for worse…
For more about “Popcorn,” check out this Wikipedia article or this comprehensive list of all versions.