When I started writing about the Song of Summer, it was because I disagreed with it. On Labor Day 2006, that year’s winner was widely said to be Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.” I was happy for Carey’s comeback, but the song didn’t tick enough of the boxes for me — not fun, not uptempo, not particularly summery or breezy or tropical or galvanizing.
The next year, I was happy to choose “Promiscuous” over “SexyBack” — a little controversial at the time – and happy to have two better choices. Billboard didn’t officially declare Songs of Summer until 2010, at which point it also went back retroactively through Hot 100 history. When it did, it anointed both “We Belong Together” and “Promiscuous” for their respective years.
I heard “We Belong Together” yesterday on Adult R&B WHUR Washington. I didn’t mind sitting through it, but I can tell you that it brought back absolutely no summer memories. In fact, it brought back no place memories at all, except for sitting at my Edison Research desk in Somerville, N.J., in 2006 and thinking that it was not the Song of the Summer, no matter how much it had dominated the charts.
By contrast, I have very specific summer memories of “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy. The station was WABC New York, then mostly undiminished as an AM Top 40 powerhouse. I was on a bus full of kids on a school trip barreling through the interchange of I-95 and Rt. 34 as we entered New Haven, Conn., where some of us would use our personal time to go to Cutler’s, one of the all-time great record stores. It’s just one of many summer song memories that involve rockin’ down the highway, as it happens.
“The Boys Are Back in Town” was not the Summer Song of 1976 — it was too far down in the pile in a summer filled with contenders. But when I was asked by a podcaster for my archetypical summer song, it was an answer that surprised them. It was fun, bouncy, uptempo, a little edgy, and with summer built in to the lyric. It is certainly the song by which I fondly remember the summer of 1976 an adult lifetime later.
On recent episodes of his Hit Parade podcast, Slate’s Chris Molanphy, a longtime friend of this column, believes that the Billboard chart winner should be as officially binding as the UK’s Christmas No. 1 single — Song of Summer’s nearest counterpart. He also revisits the question of whether professing to have a personal song of the summer is an oxymoron. Is Song of Summer is too tied to shared experience for anybody to have their own?
When I asked Facebook friends for their favorite summer-song memories, however, there was no shortage of them. (You can see their answers here.) Many of their summer-song anecdotes are songs for which I have pretty distinctive place memories too. At least one involves hearing the same song on the same station that I associate with it, too. (“One of These Nights” by the Eagles on WRKO Boston, specifically.)
SiriusXM is currently counting down Billboard’s “Top 500 Summer Hits,” and I have pretty specific memories for most of the songs I heard on a recent stretch. “I Was Made to Love Her” was while visiting grandparents in Chicago right around the time I discovered Top 40. “Don’t You Want Me” was the first song I played on my first radio job. “Invisible Touch” was the 1986 World’s Fair in Vancouver. Eminem’s “Without Me” was from the stunting period before WNEW New York became the short-lived Blink 102.7.
The only songs without place memories were, as it happens, ballads, like the Simply Red version of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” or Carey’s version of “I’ll Be There,” that don’t work as “summer songs” for me anyway. (The Jackson 5’s “The Love You Save” and “Maybe Tomorrow” are, however, both family-vacation songs in their respective summers.)
One could, if they really insisted, ask people to make a distinction between “my personal ‘Song of Summer 1976’” and “my favorite song of summer 1976,” but I hope it won’t be necessary to get the attorneys involved. That said, the larger “Song of Summer” dialogue is more than chart geekery. It returns us to the ongoing question of radio and streaming’s role in setting the cultural agenda, and what exactly the charts mean now.
It also comes as Edison Research releases its 10th anniversary Share of Ear data, showing broadcast radio’s percentage of audio time down from 51% in 2014 to 36%, while streaming music is up from 11% to 20%. The stats confirm how many of us in the business would already characterize radio — diminished but not demolished, still larger than any other single piece of listening, but also too leveraged/squeezed/depressed to be its best self, or enjoy being “not as big, but still big.” You can see that at play as well.
What I will give you about the Billboard Hot 100 overall is that it is always, definitively, the Billboard chart. It always has its controversies, whether that’s the revolving door at No. 1 in 1974 or whether Taylor Swift really had the top 10 singles of the week in 2022. At least the arguments now are over whether the formula is correct and not the integrity of the chart itself. I would be interested in knowing how, say, “Rapper’s Delight” would have done in 1979 if there had been more accurate sales data, but it wouldn’t change the historical document. So I can go as far as allowing that the Billboard Song of Summer is, officially, well, the Billboard Song of Summer.
But if the Song of Summer is all about finding a moment of monoculture in a world increasingly disinclined to one, the Hot 100 that helps determine it sometimes steers us exactly away. “Life Goes On” by BTS and “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony Music, both Hot 100 No. 1s driven by streaming, were both clearly pop-culture moments of some sort, but they were definingly not monoculture. “Lies Lies Lies” by Morgan Wallen was No. 7 in its first Hot 100 week last month. I do not feel that most Americans experienced it as the No. 7 song. (That song is now climbing the Country charts and has just passed its first week peak of No. 28.)
That said, the Hot 100 and radio are more in alignment these days. Five weeks ago, I wrote about “The Best Billboard Top 10 in Ages” – all radio songs, no LP cuts or streaming outliers of the sort that confound radio. Since then, the Wallen song has been the only one not receiving some sort of pop airplay. Some of that is because radio knows what to do with a “Million Dollar Baby” or “Not Like Us” faster than it once did. Also, major CHRs like WHTZ (Z100) New York and KIIS Los Angeles have rebounded and thus have more audience and more chart impact than they did a year ago.
At this moment, it really takes both radio and streaming to make for any sort of monoculture. Wallen is the artist most inexorably linked to the power of streaming, but If Post Malone & Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” is the Song of Summer 2024, it will have a specific radio-related place memory as well, albeit from satellite radio. We were picking our daughter up from college; I heard it for the first time on SiriusXM Hits1 just outside of Mystic, Conn. Notably, that song went to radio a day before streaming, even though it didn’t have to.
In a month, I’ll be asking readers again to decide what the Song of Summer 2024 was, and based on previous years, you’ll still enjoy discussing whether it should be “I Had Some Help,” “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” or “Espresso” — a song that wasn’t No. 1 on the Hot 100 and won’t be Billboard’s Song of the Summer. Even when they grapple with available product, I still regard my industry colleagues to be better in touch with the monoculture than anybody else, however much we still struggle with the fringes, or with radio’s infrastructure challenges.
Beyond that, this year’s resurgent interest in Song of the Summer is a good thing for the radio and music industries, both of which need more hits and more consumer passion. I’m with Slate’s Julia Turner, who joins Molanphy on a follow-up episode to declare, “The point is to argue about it.” Her vote is still for “Espresso.” I’m in favor of keeping our shared experience a shared one. We could make the decision on the Song of Summer binding. I say we keep it friendly.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com