In the city, music at its most communal is surprisingly easy to overlook
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Despacito” has held the top spot on Billboard’s “Summer Songs” chart,
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Sister Nancy, Entertainment News
September 22 is the final day of Summer’ 17, which leaves the pop field two weeks to put a small dent in Luis Fonsi’s claim for this year’s Song of the Summer. Fonsi’s hits “Daddy Yankee” and Justin Bieber-featuring Latin dance smash “Despacito” have held the top spot on Billboard’s “Summer Songs” chart for the entire summer — and then some. This week marked “Despacito’s” 16 th atop Billboard’s Hot 100 (a different chart that is essentially the same chart without the exclusive focus on summer) , tying the record set by “One Sweet Day, ” Mariah Carey’s 1996 gospel duet with Boyz II Men.
The popularity of “Despacito” surprised me. I’ ve spent the summer only vaguely aware of its existence and even more vaguely aware of what it sounds like. When I listened to it today, I thought perhaps I had never heard it before; when I listened to it again, I thought perhaps I had heard it many times, and it simply hadn’ t made an impression on me.
Don’ t get me wrong: “Despacito” is notable for a whole host of reasons — not least of which, it’s the first Spanish-language single to top the U. S. charts since “Macarena.” Maybe it’s been the soundtrack to your summer, but for me, it’s been absent. The song hasn’ t followed me around like some past summer smashes. Last summer, I had the recurrent experience of being put unconsciously into motion by Drake’s “One Dance.” In previous summers, songs like Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” were impossible to ignore, not only for their beats and hooks but for the way they dominated the conversation, inspiring countless think pieces on topics like consent and appropriation.
But who cares? What is the Song of the Summer if not an arbitrary and unofficial award created to drum up content amidst the doldrums of the Silly Season on sites like this one? You’ ll notice that the idea of a dominant summer song has been around for generations in America but that it was only in the mid-aughts — right around the time that blogging was coming into its own — that the entertainment press took the concept and ran. The New York Times’s former music critic Kelefa Sanneh, following in Ann Powers’ footsteps, began regularly writing about the Song of the Summer around that time. Billboard’s “Summer Songs” chart was born in 2010. And in 2013, Stephen Colbert satirized the debate over the year’s definitive summer song with a segment on the “Colbert Report” called “ Song of the Summer of the Century.”
There’s a less cynical way to look at the Song of the Summer, though. The concept arguably became resonant when it did, not because of the need for content but because of the new importance placed on shared experiences. The mid-aughts was a time when CDs and radio gave way to iPods and mp3s en masse and when listening became more solitary. For most people, summer is the only time of year when music is experienced communally. It is the season of barbecues, pool parties and weddings. It is the season of car trips and driving around with the windows down and the volume up. To move around a city in the summer is to be constantly confronted with music played by other people, and usually that music is played with other people in mind. Summer songs need to be crowd-pleasers.
The shared aspect of the Song of the Summer is, I think, the reason why there is a debate each year over the one song to rule them all. Each year’s song is representative of the culture at large at a given moment. In 2014, Amanda Dobbins described the Song of Summer as, “by its very definition. . a consensus choice.” She continued: “It is the song that wrecks wedding dance floors. It is the song that you and your mother begrudgingly agree on. . .. It does not necessarily have to hit No. 1 on the charts, but it should probably be on the charts, because it must be widely played. It must bring people together. It must be a shared enthusiasm.”
