The quest for the Song of the Summer
Our search for what will feel important in the future.
Hey readers, welcome back!
Last week, we examined our innate desire for more and more information and how our media consumption is unlikely to yield beneficial results if not critically explored.
This week, we wander over to a lighter topic: the song of the summer.
I have for many years been fascinated with the song of the summer. In my mind, I think it’s been a way for me to try and understand pop culture. We’ve talked about music before, but today, I’m more interested in the way we think about music.
Typically, around late May/early June, I start doing my Google searches for “song of the summer.” I don’t know how many years I’ve been doing this, but I always find it interesting to try to figure out what the song of the summer will be ahead of time.
This summer, for example, here are just a few of the articles I read early on:
Around the beginning of July, the NPR show Pop Culture Happy Hour was even helpful enough to put together a playlist of “Our Songs Of Summer For 2021."
(for those of you in Apple Music world like me, you can click here to view)
So clearly, it’s not just me that’s low-key obsessed with figuring out the answer to the question: what is the song of the summer? I think ultimately, this points to our search for something bigger. I think we are trying to figure out what’s important about our current moment–what will last.
And as it turns out, that’s a very tricky business.
Another background element for this is some excellent reporting from The Pudding in their series "How Music Is Remembered.” Part 1 of their three-part series is an interactive test to identify generational gaps in music memory (it’s very cool, you should take it).
In Part two, they dig into the question: “Which song is more likely to be recognized by future generations?” In the article, they use several charts like this to look at different songs decay rates:
I highlighted Shania in this chart as an example of a specific song that I remember from my childhood (thanks, Tennessee!). The chart shows how her song “You’re Still The One” has not fared particularly well, even though 12-years-olds when the song was released almost universally know it. Here’s that song for some context:
In their reporting, they touch on the song of the summer question, looking at a song of the summer from 1999: Will Smith’s Wild Wild West:
Here’s their chart of that song’s recall profile:
Knowledge of the song has not fared well. The article authors note:
In 1999, “Wild Wild West” was the song of the summer. Yet it is fading far faster than any other ’90s hit with comparable starting popularity. Twenty years ago, it was inescapable. Maybe Millennials are still too sick of it, even for nostalgia rotation. Perhaps it wasn’t even that great of a song to begin with, artificially inflated by Smith’s celebrity and cross-promotion with the film Wild Wild West.
Perhaps. But the point worth identifying is that it’s not even so much a song’s popularity at the moment that can drive at a song’s “song of the summer”-ness. So what does all this tell us about our striving to figure out what’s important about our current moment?
What have we learned so far:
A lot of people are very interested in figuring out what the song of the summer is.
A song’s popularity in a given moment doesn’t necessarily mean that it will become memorable for me.
I think a few things are at play here:
Much like we talked about last week, we have a cultural bias for the new. We are always looking for what’s on the horizon, and we tend to assume that what is new is better.
Even while we may subconsciously believe new is better, we also subconsciously striving to relive a past feeling as new again. Nostalgia for times gone by lives right alongside our desire for new.
A recent episode of Switched on Pop brought this to light for me towards the end of their examination of Lorde’s new song Solar Power. Starting at about 25:55, guest contributor Hanif Abdurraqib notes:
The song of the summer is such a trick of nostalgia for me… I just made a playlist that is songs that… I love, and that remind me of summer nights, specifically. And so many are from an era when I was younger; you know, the summer I got my first car, and I could control what I listened to with my windows down, or, the summer when I was 13 and got to buy my records for the first time… and I don’t know if I’m as interested in forming new memories in the immediate present with a song….
I sometimes think that the best song of the summer argument is, “What’s the music that hovered without you thinking about it?”1
The hosts dub it “The Retroactive Song of Summer Theory” and note that typically, there is “a lot of ink spilled” thinking about what will be (in the future) the song of the summer…
And yet, it’s not always something you can predict or even understand in the moment, it’s only in retrospect that you go, oh yeah, that was that moment in my life, that season, and it was defined by this song, and I could only see this clearly now with the benefit of maybe years of hindsight. 2
A bit later, around the 28:20 mark, Abdurraqib adds,
I’m glad you said happened to us… how music lives through seasons because it is a “happening,” and I think, when I, the music I’m listening to right now, I don’t know if I’ll return to it all summer, but if I do, I think I will do it based on an impulse that’s almost beyond myself, right? It’s like a decision-making process that’s already happened, and there are scenes that require songs in my mind. If I’m driving down the main street in my city towards the skyline at sunset, there’s a song that I think serves that, and that decision has already been made for me because I’m looking to evoke an emotion that was already planted the first time I heard that song in that scenario, so I’m returning to it to recreate the feeling I had once, right? To me, that’s that something that has happened to you, and if you’re lucky, can be a little outside your control, and you maybe don’t realize it until September or October when you look back, and you think, “well, this song doesn’t hit the same now that the sun sets a little earlier…” But, that’s… the thing right, these things are not defined in the moment, but are defined by the shifting of the moments to come.3
So what does all this mean for our quest to figure out the song of the summer, and perhaps for life more broadly?
At any given moment, it will be hard to know what will matter later. For all our thinking about songs of the summer, there is generally very little correlation between what feels essential now and what will be remembered as necessary later.
When we sacrifice our experience of the moment for the sake of trying to make a better memory for later, that will almost inevitably be a futile effort. I think this comes down to expectations and trying to create memorable moments. When I try to force myself to like a song because it is significant at any given moment, there is a more than likely chance that it will be a futile effort. I am better off moving on quickly from something I don’t enjoy that is very new, as the likelihood of that particular thing being memorable is very low.
Our future selves will not remember our current moment as we are experiencing it now but through the lens of everything that happens between now and then. I think this is one of the hardest things to keep in mind. Songs (or happenings) that seem so important now will not be experienced in the future as we experience them now, but with the weight and context of everything else that happened between now and that future point. Another common experience of this from pop culture might be how the ending of a TV series ruins the experience of enjoying the middle part of the narrative. I think about The Office and how the final couple of seasons of it at the time felt like they were ruining the story. Now, upon rewatching again with some more life context and experiences behind me, I feel like they have grown on me.
We should be kind to our past selves. It’s effortless to look back on our past selves and think, what were you thinking? The critical thing to keep in mind is: you can’t ever get back to that mental state again.
We shouldn’t take things too seriously. While there are many serious things in the world, I think the knowledge that we don’t know how today’s actions will turn out in the future should help us realize the limits of our ability. Things that seem calamitous now turn out to be nothing later, and the minor things no one is paying attention to change the world. We feel like if we pay attention well enough, we can figure out what’s important and what’s not. In reality, we only get worked up about things that we don’t remember five years from now.
So we may have jumped a bit beyond thinking about songs of the summer in the end, but our search for and memory of songs of the summer services as a good stand in for how we deal with a lot of content and context of our cultural world. Hopefully, next year, we can approach our search for the song of the summer a bit differently.
With that, see you next week.
Notes and Further Reading
I had this in my narrative and removed it (and may come back and write something on it later?), but in some cool reporting by the New York Times, they show that we peak in our absorption of music and musical taste around the ages of 13-14 on average. So the music of our youth will be, on the whole, the music we strive to relive the rest of our lives.