Synth pioneer and maker of ‘Popcorn’, Gershon Kingsley (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Synth pioneer and maker of ‘Popcorn’, Gershon Kingsley (2019)

djmag.com

69 pointssusam29 comments

My first encounter with Popcorn was via the computer game named Digger. This game plays a variant of the Popcorn instrumental as the background music. Here is an audio/video capture of the game: https://susam.net/files/blog/dosbox-digger.mp4

The original PC booter version of the game can be played here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Digger_1983_1983

There used to be a website dedicated to this instrumental. That website is now gone but there is an archived copy of the website available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202102000/http://www.popcor...

And here is a direct link to an MP3 on that archived website: https://web.archive.org/web/20000903025158/http://www.popcor...

Same here! I played many hours of Digger.

See also the Muppets' interpretation, "Pöpcørn": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UmUX68KtE

I was gonna post the Muppets version too.

For more fun turn on the closed captions!

Same for me, it will always be "the digger song". It was one of the three games I initially had, pirated, like everything except for that mouse driver disc that I dared not touch because it had a printed label (how can you trust a disk without a hand-written label, so confusing!). I wonder if I'd love the Hot Butter version even remotely as much as I do if I had never played digger?

Surprisingly, despite having been a bit of a synth nerd for a few years I never consciously heard that Gershon King version. Hearing it for the first time now it was a bit disappointing compared to the Hot Butter, quite a few weak parts that I feel tempted to call beginner mistakes in terms of arrangement/mix. But then they were all beginners at the time, adds an interesting "relatable" angle to the whole thing. And then in the finale, the perhaps (or seemingly!) naive "maximalism" just works, totally blown away!

Interesting. Apparently Digger was 1983. I first heard it on another DOS game, Popcorn, a 1988 French clone of Breakout/Arkanoid. https://dosgames.com/game/popcorn/#dosbox-div Anyway, RIP that guy! His version has a lot more going on than most of the latter electronic versions, one could say it was perhaps more modern, pre-empting a more complex / orchestral era of electronica. Another influential German Jew who wound up in the US.

It was also the background music of the Sega arcade game "Pengo": https://youtu.be/6q3bNHvj92c?t=126

For me it was Trollie Wallie on the C64, watching my dad play: https://youtu.be/wUYFslnvT6k?t=162

A survival from the silver age of the internet is this list of every* cover version of Popcorn:

https://www.popcorn-song.com/versions.php

I think the cover by Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet is how i discovered surf rock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7GZHL31YBw

* YMMV

The article and several earlier comments claim that this song was famously covered by Jean Michelle Jarre. Most of the versions on YouTube that you get when you search for "Jean Michelle Jarre popcorn" are actually the M&H band version. Official video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-q5UrokgW4

Some are the Hot Butter version, which is probably the most popular one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc

Jean Michelle Jarre is not in this collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTUM8gFyLqo

I'm not sure Jean Michelle Jarre ever covered it at all - if he did, it wasn't a big hit of his, or a well known version of Popcorn.

P.s. Even if he has made a version, I doubt it can be anywhere near as good as The Swedish Chef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UmUX68KtE

I also suspect that Jean-Michel Jarre never made a cover of Popcorn. Despite Jarre's pop status, he's an original composer, not a cover artist.

His father Maurice Jarre was a composer who wrote the score to the movie "Lawrence of Arabia", so he grew up in a privileged cultural milieu. J-M Jarre has discussed the impact that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring had on his art. Making a Popcorn cover just seems completely out of character.

I suspect the misattribution happened early in the MP3 era, around 1996-99, because I vaguely recall seeing Popcorn drifting on Napster as a J-M Jarre title... Jarre was quite popular among the early adopters who traded MP3s back then, so I'm guessing anything "early synth pop" got assigned to him.

(I still regularly listen to Jarre's "Zoolook" album from 1984. Brilliant use of the legendary Fairlight sampler-synthesizer.)

Jean-Michel Jarre did cover it, under the fake band name "Pop Corn Orchestra" and fake name "Jammie Jefferson", in 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSkKlZi3Yd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP7aNuqp_YU https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/45181/versions https://www.discogs.com/master/267596-Pop-Corn-Orchestra-Pop...

It was eclipsed by the version released by Hot Butter that same year.

However, yes, a lot of people mistakenly think the M&H Band (in reality: French sound engineer Mark Haliday) cover released in 1987 was made by Jarre

The most popular version is the one from "Hot Butter" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc

This is the version my Dad used to play when I was a kid as it was a popular "single" back in the day.

Some songs are more successful as covers, like Pulstar from Vangelis by Hypnosis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvyzI8g4NUc

I always thought that Popcorn was created by Jean Michel Jarre. Nice to learn the background history of it. RIP.

I remember someone saying that Oxygene is basically Popcorn at half speed with wind noises, so I see where you're coming from.

Well, playing it at 0.25x on YouTube, the main riff is the same/transposed with slight changes of timing!

Jarre's version was good, but this is the GOAT cover: https://youtu.be/B7UmUX68KtE?t=72

I've heard so many demoscene/8-bit covers of it at this point that I forgot the earlier versions had acoustic drums!

Some examples from scene.org: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2010/aaa10/music/13_pop... https://files.scene.org/view/music/groups/fusion_music_crew/...

a friend introduced me to Gershon one afternoon at his midtown apartment where we enjoyed a conversation about audio synthesis ... I explained to him an ongoing software coding project where my code moves 3D objects in an imaginary volume of space which bounces ~molecules~ of air to propagate waves outward from this movement ... in the volume I introduced the notion of an ear to listen to these waves by counting the number of ~molecules~ moving inward minus number moving outward ... Gershon was comfortable imagining audio at this level of abstraction and felt such was a natural progression from his body of work ...

I first heard of Gershon Kingsley when I looked up the samples on RJD2's first(?) album and discovered just how much the RJD2 song The Horror [1] (which I loved) was based on Kingsley's Hey Hey [2]. I had definitely heard Popcorn a lot before that, but did not know it was a Kingsley song... until now!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McQNT2bfSbM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_rwb9NgHR8

Somehow ended up loving this version the most:

https://youtu.be/dZWfywvuHt0

Not often I get goosebumps from a Hacker news reply. Thank you.

The "Top of the Pops" video of kids dancing to it in 1969 feels surreal, like the precursor to raves that wouldn't begin until almost 20 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjT7ECeCKO0

As a long time electronic music fan, if they only knew of what was this was the harbringer!

I'm sorry I saw this article!

Popcorn rattled around between my ears for about 6 months after it was released. Talk about an earworm. Since I saw the link, it's come back.

[Edit] It's come back with echoes of the Eightsome Reel. Does any other Scots Country Dancer hear a distinct similarity between the music of the Eightsome Reel and Popcorn?

I was fortunate to come across Fresh Cream's version on a 45RPM record in the 1970's. I thought it was great, until I heard the second side, a brilliant number called "Cap Horn" by Guy Boyer [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/v6Hv_91FFzc

> Synth pioneer and maker of ‘Popcorn’

Interesting how the track is so "light" and the background beat is emulation of some brass instrument... and how from there we got the modern "fat beat".

Popcorn in 13 versions (chronological evolution)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTUM8gFyLqo

I always thought it was interesting that the original version of Popcorn sounds so much better and more full than the Hot Butter cover which sounds extremely beepy.

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