What Is a Summer Jam?
Do you define a summer jam as that which is Summer Adjacent (lyrics about heat/sunshine/school being out) or that which is Seasonally Dominant (last year’s “Call Me Maybe,” ten years ago “Crazy in Love”)? Of course some songs, like Nelly’s 2002 hit “Hot in Herre,” are both. And perhaps you, like Nick Greene at Noisey, distrust the concept of a summer jam, full stop:
These [songs] represent a very specific kind of summer, and it’s not the kind of summer you have as an adult… This should be obvious and inevitable, but the idea that you are expected to work every single weekday until you retire or die is unfathomable to a young person. No one tells children this directly; it is always passed along in code. How many times did your parents tell you, “It’s a really beautiful day, you should go outside,” while you were watching a rerun of Ricki Lake in July? That benign weather report was their way of saying, “Good God, you fucking moron, get some fresh air before you join us on the slow march toward death.”
In spite of workaday realities, the New Yorker goes on a hunt for the ultimate summer anthem and gives a definitive answer in Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” NPR takes the Seasonally Dominant approach, putting together this year-by-year list of summer hits going back to 1962. Billboard goes to Summer Adjacent Camp with this list of 30 chart-toppers with the same sweltering subject, and Emma and Jia are voting for Drillary Clinton and recommending this new mixtape by tuff Chicago teenager Katie Got Bandz.