Songs of the Summer, 2021

Lagos Calling, My Students Say

The most covered song of all-time isn't a mere summer tune. If you go by the English National Opera website, it's an aria: "Summertime," from the opera Porgy and Bess, with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Many, including Stephen Sondheim, believe that the writer DuBose Heyward, who wrote the 1925 novel Porgy on which the Gershwins based their opera, should have been credited as a lyricist as well. (Heyward was white and wrote about black Charleston life; he came from an aristocatic Charleston, S.C., family.)

In any case, 25,000 versions of "Summertime" can't be wrong, though Billie Holiday is credited as being the first cover, Ella Fitzgerald the swingingest, Big Brother & the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin the rockingest, Billy Stewart the most eccentrically soulful, and Lana del Ray the most recent: This aria has plenty of air. Del Rey's 2019 version, by the way, called "Doin' Time," is a mashup that includes Gershwin song, originally done by the 1990s rock band Sublime. It saddened me that none of my students in one of my music criticism classes that semester (fall 2019) knew Porgy & Bess,but they knew Sublime.

The song of the summer in my definition is now a relic of the monoculture, when we all got our music from AM radio, and had the same songs emanating from our transistor and car radios. In my life, the first summer song had to be the insanely catchy and repetitive "Summertime Summertime," a hit in the 1950s and 1962 by the Jamies, a brother-and-sister-and-friends quartet from Dorcester, Mass.

A summer song is not the same as the Song of the Summer. A summer song always has "summer" in the title; Song of the Summer is a highly personal tune, the song that represents what summer meant to you: the summer job, the summer romance, the tune played at family barbecues, the one that jumped out of a playlist and made you say, that's the song!

When we were growing up there were so many. I remember "Fingertips Pt. 2" by Stevie Wonder as the song that got me through the dreaded summer of 1963, when I knew my family was leaving Franklin Square and my friends, many of whom had been together from grades 4-8 at Willow Road School and then the 7-12 Valley Stream North, for an unpromising cul de sac development of 36 newly built homes five miles north and a million miles away in Searingtown. Proud Queens native and movie critic Jami Bernard said Searingtown sounded "sizzling," but it was anything but, and my misadventures at Herricks High School will be the subject of future columns.

The summer I graduated, 1967, started promising and with multitudes, from clusters of Sgt. Pepper to "Light My Fire," to “Respect,” but two enchanted albums stand out out from summer 1967: Love's Forever Changes, and the self-titled debut by Moby Grape, all 12 songs released simultaneously as singles by Columbia Records. The Grape releases were deserving, but in hindsight, the marketing decision backfired, and wouldn't "Hey Grandma"/ "Omaha" sufficed for a two sided hit? Forever Changes, a perennial "best albums of all-time" in most critics lists, including mine, took a more gloomy but accurate appraisal of the season: "Bummer in the Summer," a garage rock classic.

But we can't talk about the personal song of the summer without acknowledging some of those seasonal songs that became generational touchstones: "Summertime Blues," by Eddie Cochran, "Hot Fun in the Summer Time" by Sly & the Family Stone, and "Summer in the City" (1966) by the Lovin' Spoonful. I've always loved the Spoonful song, with its honking car horns and sidewalk drilling, because the promise of the song is fulfilled. Anyone whose been through a New York summer knows that it's folly to do anything during the day; you stay inside until after dark, when the city really comes alive. I lived in the city through some scary summers, like 1977: the summer of the blackout, the summer when the Bronx was burning, when there were sanitation strikes that left the garbage stinking in piles on the sidewalk for weeks . . . when the serial killer Son of Sam stalked the streets (no problem, he was shooting at disco people in the other boroughs, while I still I had my Manhattan railroad flat.)

That apartment, on E. 26th Street between Third and Lexington, got burglarized that summer at 11 am, in broad daylight. It was a fifth floor walk up, and I was out for an hour, to feed and play with my vacationing friend Marya's cat a few blocks away. When I came back, everything was gone: TV, cable box (early days of Manhattan Cable, with HBO), stereo, speakers, turntable, amplifier, an ounce of weed. How they got down five floors with all that stuff in the daytime without being noticed still bewilders me. I was impressed that when I reported it to the police, the NYPD responded. Two guys in uniform. They were sympathetic. They looked around and said, "It looks like they really ransacked the place." I looked around, saw nothing but the usually shabbiness, and said, "Not really. It's pretty much like this all the time." I didn't even have a rug for the crooks to piss on, to pull the room together. The cops recommended renters insurance and a Medco deadbolt lock, and were on their way. What could be bad? It was my second summer of CBGB 20 blocks south, and my Songs of the Summer were "Blitzkrieig Bop" and "Pinhead."

Then, early one Sunday summer morning, the windows open, I heard a woman begging for a man's life and a series of gun shots. One of the many prostitutes who operated around that part of Lexington Avenue in the East 20s had gotten too friendly with a musician who lived around the corner from me. That morning at sunrise her pimp blew the guy away, and in a few weeks I moved to Great Neck.

Now that pop music culture is no longer aimed at my demographic, my own songs of summer are rarely in sync

with those of my college students at St. John's University. In the fall semester, the first assignment for Writing Music, Movie, and TV Reviews is always the song of the summer. Music discovery seems random, dependent on which playlists people are exposed to: at their jobs, at family barbecues, on a 90s hip-hop list on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal.

But the big trend is global, as is suitable for my multicultural students. The consensus winners all had Afro-Caribbean roots or sounds. Many found the Hawaiian reggae video vibe of "Let's Do It Again" by J. Boog, a Samoan-American from Los Angeles, to be soothing and evocative of summer.

Two Nigerian artists also appeal to a new generation: "Dumebi," by Rema, features teenagers skateboarding and riding in a van, eating toasted marshmallows over a campfire, while the singer draws in a notebook. It's utterly PG, if not G rated.

The other popular favorite, "Essence" by WizKid featuring Tems, is also Nigerian, from the album Made in Lagos. The video for "Essence" is slightly steamy thanks to the self-embraces of the beautiful singer Tems. She so dominates this track that I suggested that "Essence" should be credited to Tems featuring WizKid.

There is also a version of "Essence" featuring Tems and Justin Bieber, as the Biebmeister has become a feature commodity ever since his appearance on the video for "Despacito," by Luis Fonsi, already featuring Daddy Yankee. The Biebster's addition drove an already international hit into orbit, and now you have Chassidic wedding bands covering "Despacito." He does not bring much to "Essence," except the possibility of more Canadian airplay as WizKid will be playing Montreal and Toronto in early 2022.

What gives Rema and WizKid their special sauce is the language; they lead their Afrobeats with words in Nigeria's plethora of indigenous tongues, the language itself establishing polyrhythms. In "Dumebi," Rema sings and raps in Yoruba, Igbo, English, and sounds he improvised in the studio, known as "Lamba" in Nigeria, according to one of my Africa-savvy students. WizKid has been singing and rapping in Yoruba since he became famous at home a decade ago. If this is the future, it sounds good to me.