What’s the deal with this year’s Song of the Summer? Where is it?
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
Summertime: when the weather, activities, emotions and music coalesce to make memories, for better or worse.
I, for example, am still triggered by Heat of the Moment by Asia, which was big during the summer of 1982, during which I suffered a very bad breakup. Even today, a few notes are enough to bring back that university-era hurt. Anything from Green Day’s Dookie immediately transports me to the summer of 1994. You’re probably thinking of your own personal songs of summers gone by.
There’s another level to this. Each year, there are one or two songs released in May or June that rise to the level of universal ubiquity by midsummer. It’s the earworm with the contagiousness of the measles. It’s an inescapable hit that no one is capable of avoiding. If you’re not listening, you’re at least hearing it enough that it becomes indelibly imprinted on your brain. You may not like the song, but it’s everywhere. Resistance is futile, and before long, its existence is connected to a specific few months on the calendar.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we were aware of most of the popular songs of the moment, including the ones we hated, even to the point of knowing most of the words. Summer songs were that powerful.
There’s a portion of the music industry (and thus the general public) that remains obsessed with declaring who has the official Song of the Summer (yes, they capitalize it). It’s all marketing bumf, of course, a chance to goose streams of priority acts so they blast up the charts, creating even more hype. Last year, for example, it was all about Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso battling it out with Beautiful Things by Benson Boone. In 2023, we were pointed at Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire. A year earlier, it was As It Was by Harry Styles.
