What Makes Something a Summer Song?
Plus my top five summer songs.
I’m currently in a cafe with great vibes, delicious Dalgona coffee, way above-par empanadas, mellow lighting…but one thing is wrong. It’s 90 degrees outside, it’s June, but they are playing some kind of Christmas song.
It’s not even a famous Christmas song, but I know it’s a Christmas song! There’s a little jingle-jangle in the background of the song. The lyrics are mostly incomprehensible, but I heard something about “the season” and “by the fire.” It’s a major key, I guess? 4/4 time? I’m not really sure what makes something a Christmas song. Maybe Derek from Married At First Sight DC could help me out.
What I feel more qualified to talk about is the opposite, which I’m craving almost as much as a second empanada: a good old-fashioned summer song.
Here’s what I think makes something a “summer song.” I need some specific mentions of summer—if not the word itself, at least some discussion of how hot it is or something similar. I want the five senses of summer. Let me smell the Hollister August perfume, which I can’t smell in real life because it’s selling on eBay for $455. I need a little bit of lyrical nihilism, but not too much. It’s summer, and it’s time for some petty crimes. I once had a friend who would brag about cursing on the Virginia Beach boardwalk, where it’s apparently illegal to curse. I want something like that but taken up a notch or two.
Speaking of notches, my metronome should be like 5/8 to 3/4 of the way up when I’m listening to a summer song. A summer song certainly isn’t a power ballad, but it’s not like Darude-Sandstorm fast, either.
It’s common to yearn for the winter during the months that your coconut oil is liquified on your shelf, but a good summer song recognizes the fleetingness of the season and all the feels that go along with that. Summer is definitely a special time, and especially for people in high school or college (read: the people for whom music is made), it’s a time when social barriers are relaxed a bit. You might be able to bang it out with someone who’d never speak to you otherwise in the summer. This results in summer music being very nostalgic for the present moment as it’s happening.
Finally, I believe summer music should be able to be played at a Vans skatepark. Or at the very least, as part of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack.
With these criteria in mind, here are my top five songs of summer, in no particular order:
MGMT - Electric Feel
Specific mentions of summer: X (but implied through swimming)
Summer imagery: ✅
Slight badassery: Two out of Four Lokos
Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅
Nostalgia for now: ❌
Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: two out of five kickflips
Oh, the imagery of this song. What I remember most is how hot this line is: “Standing there with nothing on/ She gonna teach me how to swim.”
What I don’t remember is the weird out there extended metaphor leading up to this. Mostly because these Long Island homeboys seriously can’t enunciate. It’s certainly a vibe, I know when I went to see them at The National in 2008 (which was, by the way, peak season for MGMT) I was singing along like “hunh nah nah noo nah nahhh.” But apparently, the real lyrics are:
“All along the Western front/ People line up to receive/ She got the power in her hand/ To shock you like you won't believe/ Saw her in the amazon/ With the voltage running through her skin.”
I did not realize that this was about some Amazonian electric sex goddess, but I guess I watched the music video and will forever associate any swimming hole with these sexy rich guys from West Egg, so I consider this a solid summer song.
The Ataris - In This Diary
Specific mentions of summer: ✅
Summer imagery: ✅
Slight badassery: Two out of Four Lokos
Upbeat (but not overwhelming) tempo: ✅
Nostalgia for now: ✅
Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: 4 out of 5 kickflips
“Here in this diary, I write you visions of my summer” Kris Roe opens.
There’s badassery, but it’s so slight that it’s almost reminiscent of a youth group talking about their crazy times at camp:
“Breaking into hotel swimming pools/ And wreaking havoc on our world/ Hanging out at truck stops/ Just to pass the time.”
The nostalgia for now hits you over the head in the chorus: “Being grown up isn't half as fun as growing up/ These are the best days of our lives.”
But perhaps my favorite lyrics are just pure summer imagery. This dude had a great summer in the simplest, most childlike way, and he wants you to know about it: “Lighting fireworks in parking lots/ Illuminate the blackest nights/ Cherry cokes under this moonlit summer sky”
If I think back to my favorite summer memories, they too are often centered around little bursts of momentary contentment and bliss. Last year, it was mid pandemic, sitting 6 feet apart in Aideronak chairs on my front lawn with some friends and neighbors crushing beers in the Fourth of July after consuming something called a “meat box.” The summer I stayed in my college town, it was befriending our cute neighbors and sneaking into some fancier apartments’ swimming pools. I’m instantly brought back to moments when I can taste, smell, or touch them, and that’s what I love about this song.
Jack’s Mannequin - Holiday from Real
Specific mentions of summer: ✅
Summer imagery:✅
Slight badassery: Three out of Four Lokos
Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅
Nostalgia for now: ✅
Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: three out of five kickflips
We open with the sound of seagulls, which matches the setting of cartoon Venice Beach conveyed on the album cover. All you need to hear is “California in the summer” mixed with “Fuck yeah, we can live like this” and it’s already a lyrical improvement on any run-of-the-mill Chili Peppers song.
The nihilism is totally tongue-in-cheek— “We’d fry our brains and say it’s so much fun out here” is said with about as much sugary, upbeat enthusiasm as Third Eye Blind’s “Doo doo doo, doo doo-doo doo” song about crystal meth.
Summer is the season of the Cool Girlfriend, and we know it’s real because “She lets me drive her car so I can score an eight from the lesbians out west of Venice.” (Side note: a top-voted comment on the YouTube video reads: “I'm a lesbian, but if he tried, he could probably get a bit more than an eighth from me! xD”)
This song almost sounds like someone who has never been to California trying to write a song about it based on what they’ve seen in TV shows and movies (which makes for a very catchy song!) When it came out in 2005, I was busy watching and rewatching seasons of The OC, plotting my escape to a land where I could hang on the beach with my hot friends and catch Death Cab for Cutie playing in the Bait Shop on a school night. Fuck yeah, we CAN live like this!
(Eleven years later, I finally made it out to Venice Beach and I thought it smelled too much like peepee for my tastes)
Frank Ocean - Swim Good
Specific mentions of summer: X (but we're swimming again)
Summer imagery:✅
Slight badassery: Four out of Four Lokos
Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅
Nostalgia for now: ✅
Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: this is a tricky one. Back in my day, I’d say no, but these days, I think the kids are skating to hip hop more. In fact, Machine Gun Kelly came out and basically said it was his duty to play guitar and make a pop-punk album, because most kids had never been to a concert where someone played a guitar. I never thought Machine Gun Kelly would be the one to save rock n roll.
As far as nihilism goes, it’s Mr. Clockwork Channel Orange over here. The opening lines exert a baseline that asks to be played at maximum volume and a chilling lyrical bravado:
“That's a pretty big trunk on my Lincoln town car, ain't it?/ Big enough to take these broken hearts and put 'em in it/ Now I'm drivin' 'round on the boulevard, trunk bleedin'/ And everytime the cops pull me over, they don't ever see them.”
The video, only available on Vimeo (le artiste!) is also set in California, driving up the 1 at some points. And there are seagull noises again! You gotta love it.
Trust me—I know how much the world doesn’t need another overeducated white woman’s thinkpiece of Frank Ocean. That said, I still want to point out that this song came out before Frank Ocean did, and his “Take off this suit/ and swim good” is almost certainly a reference to taking off his heteronormative guise (sorry).
Even with those deeper meanings in mind, the simplicity of the chorus is what makes it work. In this summer, who doesn’t want to “Kick off my shoes/ and swim good”? It’s a simple feeling of freedom and refreshment, thus making it a perfect backdrop to summer.
The Front Bottoms - The Beers
Specific mentions of summer: ✅
Summer imagery: ✅
Slight badassery: Four out of Four Lokos
Upbeat (but not overwhelming) tempo: ✅
Nostalgia for now: ✅
Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: five out of five kickflips
This song really has a lot of intersectionality of summery elements. The chorus calls out summer (specifically, that summer) as a time that the singer was destroying himself to impress someone else:
“And I will remember that summer/ As the summer I was taking steroids/'Cause you like a man with muscles/ And I like you”
As for the titular beers? They’re everywhere, contained in every possible vessel in the (presumably, someone’s parents’) house:
“There's beer/ In coffee mugs, water bottles, and soda cups/ And it's clear as the windows I came through”
The song does feature some manic drumming that drives it along, and it’s a bit faster than the other songs on here, but there’s a lower tech sound to the keyboards in the background which make it sound as intimate as a beat you made with your cousins on a Casio in your grandparents’ basement.
I love this track because it’s as much of a summer party song as it is about feeling uncomfortable and yearning for something, and that’s a hard thing to pull off.
Runners Up
Catchy, beachy, and impossible not to sing along to. This youthful, upbeat summer anthem convinced me that yes, violins can be in a rock band. Also, to finally give a different coast some shine for once—Ocean Avenue is actually located in Jacksonville, FL.
There’s not much to say about this electric, contagious one-hit-wonder that wasn’t already covered in this bizarre, comprehensive long-form Behind the Music piece.
Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
Back in the summer of 2012, I worked at a summer camp for rich little kids and this was officially declared the camp song that summer. Each week, the counselors did a dance to this catchy hit, adding elements to outdo the previous performance each week. Think: ribbon dancers, confetti launchers. Here was the final performance. By the way, that nerdy violin guy? He was the center of quite a bit of drama by banging two different camp counselors at once.