Have you heard the Sabrina Carpenter song Espresso? Even if you don’t know it by name, you will have done. It’s honeyed but arch (“That’s that me, espresso”). Frothy, hooky, with a lyrical sting (“My ‘give a fucks’ are on vacation”). The coquettish hyper-real video has the US singer draped over speedboats and surfboards like a Superdry Bardot (glossy subterfuge; mainstream with a wink).
Carpenter was the opening act on the Australian leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, but her Espresso knocked Swift’s Fortnight off the top spot on Global Spotify and it has been streamed more than 434m times.
Creeping into the zeitgeist through the back door, it’s perfectly poised to grab the sought-after trophy: the Song of the Summer.
While there are other contenders (Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things; Tommy Richman’s Million Dollar Baby; Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us; Eminem’s Houdini – which knocked Carpenter off the UK No 1 slot this weekend), behemoths such as Swift, Beyoncé, and Billie Eilish seem (hmm, interesting) a little shoved to the side. A case of: sorry, my queens, you don’t always get to stroll in and take what you want.
What is the Song of the Summer (SOTS)? Short answer: many things. It’s an all-engulfing seasonal mega-hit that defines the cultural moment and transcends categorisation and market demographics. It’s an irresistible earworm with sand dusted between its toes and wind ruffling its hair. It’s unstoppably ubiquitous, swirling all around you, like an odourless cultural gas.
Time was, it mainly manifested via radio play or a film soundtrack or the dancefloor of a holiday destination but these days it’s all about platforms like TikTok (which embraced Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam last year). Such songs tend to be breezy, upbeat, flirtatious. They often evoke optimism, freedom, beaches, festivals, the long school and college holidays. They are often aimed at the young – the phenomenon of the Song of the Summer rose with the invention of the teenager. Increased leisure time and the rise of cinema and travel played their part too.
Most would agree that the Beach Boys were the big bang moment for the quintessential summer sound (Good Vibrations; I Get Around), but the distinct SOTS sphere is an eclectic miscellany of genres, styles and moods. In the past, it’s included everything from the Supremes (Where Did Our Love Go?, 1964) to Alice Cooper (School’s Out, 1972) to the Knack (My Sharona, 1979).
Some songs evoke travel: Duran Duran posturing on yachts for Rio; the sample of a plane on Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) by Spiller and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, which was rumoured to be from the terrace at Space, the club near Ibiza’s airport. Film songs that ruled the summer include Take My Breath Away from Top Gun’s 1986 soundtrack, 1991’s (Everything I Do) I Do It For You by Bryan Adams, and the entire Grease soundtrack in 1978.
In a sphere that’s routinely colourblind, not just disco but Latin beats have proved recurringly modish (1987’s Bamboléo by the Gipsy Kings; Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca in 1999; 1996’s eternal wedding banger Macarena by Los del Rio). Some artists resort to repurposing old grooves (see J-Lo’s sample of Kaoma’s Lambada in her worldwide hit with Pitbull, On the Floor, from 2011).
Then there are the outliers and curios that bounce out of left-field. The grunge-adjacent slacker manifesto of Beck’s Loser in 1993. Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, which engulfed summer 2022 after being used on Netflix’s Stranger Things. The brilliant full-on filth of WAP from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in 2020. Take a bow, Deee-Lite’s 1990 Groove Is in the Heart.
The message is clear: the all-engulfing summer pop genre has no bouncer on the door: anyone and anything can get in, and they often do. Nor does it have a sense of hierarchy: a random song will cheerfully push aside the big hitters. Yet still some dismiss the Song of the Summer as a frivolity. Too poppy, too light, too corporate, perhaps not quite as naff as a Christmas song, but not for serious music aficionados.
In truth, this a wilful genre that refuses to comply. For songs whose actual job it is to evoke the summer mood (in effect a straw hat you can dance to), surprisingly few have summer in the title or as their theme.
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Some summers, there are so many great songs it’s hard to choose. The timing is elastic: you could be eating your Easter eggs in spring and it could land. For me, listening to Soul II Soul’s Keep on Movin’ sparks golden Proustian flashbacks to lolling on sun-baked commons … but it was birthed in March.
Looking behind the music industry curtain, the Song of the Summer is a peak business moment in the calendar. The industry gears itself up for it. Artists plan releases around it. There will be industry money driving interest on the likes of TikTok. Everybody wants to have The Song (and the exposure and big bucks that come with it). There have been attempts to work out the SOTS formula, to break the secrets of the code, in terms of melody, tempo, energy, danceability, and something called “acousticness”.
All of which sounds amusing. (The algebra of the dancefloor banger? The physics of the sun-soaked bop?) However, such attempts are also telling, revealing an excruciating truth about the music business: that it’s frightened of you – the music-consuming public. It doesn’t know who you are and what you want from one year to the next. It wants to set the pace and tone, but sometimes it just has to chase after you and your wayward fluctuating tastes and whims like a bewildered lover. If you find it hard to predict the Song of the Summer, then (whisper it) so does the music industry.
Perhaps this wayward quality (unknowability, eccentricity) makes the SOTS more interesting, not least in the incredible power it harnesses. Not only by bypassing obvious super-brand shoo-ins (your Taylors and Billies), but also by anointing less obvious artists, and readjusting music industry settings for the foreseeable.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the Song of the Summer is as commercial as anything else. Still, it remains curiously resistant to being wholly sewn up. Cynical identikit tracks don’t tend to crawl into the zeitgeist and become our songs of the summer. Misfits, outsiders and newbies have a chance. Rihanna had her first huge hit with Umbrella in the summer of 2007. Katy Perry’s breakthrough song was I Kissed a Girl in 2008.
So as much as the SOTS encapsulates the music industry ethos (the mega-selling universal hit), it also in a way defies it. It has to, in order to do its job: capture the mood of the nation (or nations); catch that lightning in a bottle. It can be seen in the sheer randomness of what hits. How, despite all the effort, the code remains uncrackable. Something (a hook, a mood, an energy, an invigorating sup of Espresso) snags and fixes, and that’s that.
In this way, the Song of the Summer is also the sound of pop-cultural democracy in action. Whichever artists and product the industry breadheads want to push, whatever they want to be the song of the summer, ultimately it doesn’t matter. The people always decide.