Bubblegum, as it's name suggests and entails, is all about superficiality. But while your eyes glaze over as you read this text, ready to abandon thoughts of pursuing such a flavor, you must realize that it's superficiality is not derived from vanity. Quite the opposite. The whole concept of bubblegum is to sardonically remark upon the effervescent and non-fluid nature that culture derives. Bubblegum is the taste of an existential crisis... a pure and heartfelt reflection upon the willingness for a 'complex' ice cream, something society as a whole yearns for, begging beneath the stars for some grand allusion to the core ideas of existence. Alas, such begging is fruitless and foolhardy, and entails a deeper disillusion.
What distinguishes bubblegum from the rest of it's modern peers is a sense of craft located in the sweet spot between willful amateurism masking incompetence and not gumming things up with bells and whistles. It's immediate and substantial, but initially, it can seem distracting that the flavor is built more for sweetness than complexity. Yet this isn't a concept that needs anchors-- as much as the sweetness allows the flavor to play counterpoint to modern concepts of ice cream, it's held back by this goal as well. Overall, the gist of the flavor is appropriately unaffected, working in tastes that almost feel like 45-degree angles-- exact, acute, and just right. Because this style of taste doesn't attempt to align itself with any others it creates a new vista, taking an already strong slant to a higher plateau.
But as with any conceptual idealism towards adroitness, one wonders if the idealism outweighs the actual material, or if they are equal. Take, for instance, Duchamp's Fountain. The same ideas are in play here, is the fact that the ice cream itself is a overly sweet and trite mess antecedent to the transcendental metaphor of society being as trite as the flavor aims to convey? Or worse, would it be accepted not as a metaphor or statement but the ideal in and unto itself?
As I sit here, fingers softly brushing across the keys, I stare out my window, rain softly glazing the ground as a fresh steam awakens from a cold and dead earth. It is the same with Bubblegum, it is not a creation, but a byproduct of hubris unknown. The rain is picking up as I sip my tea with honey, feeling safe inside my home. If you close your eyes, the storm can carry you with it, and make you realize how truly you are nothing compared to it. But the truth of the matter is that the storm will pass, and you will remain... but the same you does not remain, you are forever marked with the change brought by the sweeping of the dark storm across the brittle and uncaring sky. I watch the pine trees darken with the sky. I realize this: that bubblegum is the storm, it changes you, makes you realize what ice cream truly means... but can be so easily ignored as many would choose. However, there will always be those who understand what storms and bubblegum truly are, and this ineffable truth cannot be corrupted.
