It’s been officially summer for a while now. Months have passed since you had your “first iced coffee of the season,” the condensation pooling on your iPhone screen as you excitedly snapped a photo of the brown liquid. The 4th of July has come and gone, our celebration of grilled meats as ephemeral as the flash of fireworks on our Instagram feeds. And as we creep past the I-hope-my-co-workers-don’t-notice-these-pit-stains phase into the I-hate-everything-literally-when-is-winter? period of the season, we are still, somehow, without a Song of Summer.
It is more than halfway through July, and the whirring of your piece-of-crap, window-unit air conditioner is probably a better contender for Song of Summer than anything we’ve heard so far. Although perhaps ambient noise is a better option than what we got last year: a song from an Australian woman pretending to be from the American south and trying to con us into thinking she was the “realest.”
Is the Song of Summer dead? Could it be that the advent of streaming services and decline of the once omnipresent radio have shifted to dilute the possibility of the anthem which has defined the season since the 1910s? Is everything is just terrible?
We are flailing around like one of those blow-up tube men outside of a car dealership, desperate for a sense of direction.
One thing is for certain: We are desperate for a song of this summer. In May, Billboard posted a poll, and One Direction’s “No Control” won by a landslide after a guerilla effort by The Teenagers to add it to the list pushed it into the lead by a 76% margin. In June, Ryan Seacrest held a “song of summer competition,” during which he presumably asked a few people and also Giuliana Rancic for their opinion, ultimately naming “Pretty Girls” the winner. Vulture and Entertainment Weekly have since published their own lists of 2015’s contenders, which contain precisely neither of those songs and have no songs in common to boot.
We are flailing around like one of those blow-up tube men outside of a car dealership, desperate for a sense of direction (possibly led by One Direction). What will define the zeitgeist of this pop culture season beyond a newly racist Atticus Finch and more disgusting news about Bill Cosby? Most importantly, what are we supposed to listen to while day-drinking?
We can’t wait any longer. We have to pick a song of summer or this summer will be lost in the blackhole of history, as forgettable as that time you went to brunch without your cellphone. Your options are below, America. Vote for one of these crap choices or the Song of Summer will die like Tinkerbell in productions of “Peter Pan” where the audience doesn’t clap hard enough.
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