The Real Song of
“Song of The Summer,” and Why The Current Metrics Don’t Work
Ubiquity is Worthless if it leads to a “Fancy” Future
Even though your local weather may not accept it, here’s an undeniable truth: summer is over. So of course, with the end of summer, comes reflection upon what it wrought. While August was a mountain of misery in most respects, it did feature the savior to this year’s iteration of the Song of The Summer debate.
The Song of The Summer is something that the Thought Leaders in the pop culture beat have created in order to have thinkpieces for the end-of-August doldrums.
To even accept that it’s a thing is to typically play into some battle between snobs and tweens, where the real winners are outlets like Vulture, who stack up a ton of page views and comments, proving audience engagement.
So, let the record reflect that I was never above a pop culture debate.
Since you already know my stance on Iggy Azalea, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m not on board with the conventional wisdom that “Fancy,” is the song of the summer.
Their conclusion is supported by the song’s tracking in Billboard’s weekly Hot 100 chart. What, you might ask, makes a song rise in said chart?
The week’s most popular current songs, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming activity data from online music sources tracked by Nielsen BDS. Songs are defined as current if they are newly-released titles, or songs receiving widespread airplay and/or sales activity for the first time.
So, radio and Spotify. That’s it?
That’s who we’re going to allow to further ruin this summer?
There’s layers to my pick, but I’m okay with anybody saying my decision is swung by bias, since I’m giving the honor to a track from an artist who gives Ms. Azalea more side-eye than I do.
An artist who owns their own narrative, a song whose music video owned every pair of eyeballs across the internet this summer, and a performance that has now won over the artist’s harshest critic.
That’s right, I submit Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” for Song of The Summer.
If you don’t already know, the song’s video (below) is the least work-safe thing you can find on YouTube, so watch accordingly.
“Anaconda,” which, rose from the tail end of the summer in August to give us something worth blasting out of your car stereo, is the correct answer to this debate.
The stats back me up: in one day it broke VEVO’s records for views.
In the age of multitasking and low engagement, Nicki Minaj made something that forced everybody to drop what they were doing and click PLAY. Then, they clicked REPLAY. Again, and again.
Barely anybody commands that type of response anymore. And Nicki got it for a single that even she playfully dismisses as “some dumb shit.”
In an age when west coast radio only plays 4 songs and Spotify’s radio channels auto-generate and keep rolling, Billboard’s Hot 100 metrics are wack. We need standards not tied to ClearChannel media, and are based on engaged audiences.
The best test of a song of the summer, though, is that it won’t turn into a running joke, all too often the case, and often part of the package. “It was inescapable!” is no excuse to raise a song upon high. It gets to the point of parody, just look at Crazytown’s “Butterfly” in the film Orange County or Jay Z’s “03 Bonnie & Clyde” in the Chris Rock movie Head of State.
Simply put, we need a song that doesn’t grate once it reaches Song Of The Summer contender-status. Something that is not horrible after 1000 plays. I’m a fan of Charli XCX’s, but her “Fancy” chorus is the kind of thing you develop an allergy to once you’ve heard it a few dozen times.
Next, examine the song’s secret weapon, a sample of Sir Mix A Lot. Without “Baby Got Back,” who knows what song Nicki would have made this summer, but it certainly enhances “Anaconda.”
It’s all so unlikely I have to applaud.
If you had told me in June that the Sir Mix A Lot would be on my favorite radio record of the summer, I would have politely told you to stop taking MDMA.
The song’s producers need the proper credit, though, so to paraphrase Jay Z:
“Sir Mix A Lot made it a hot line,
Nicki, Polow da Don, and Da Internz
made it a hot song.”
Lastly, let’s take Nicki’s bars under consideration. And instead of me copy-pasting lines from RapGenius, here’s an audio-only embed:
A lot was made, mostly by Hot 97's Peter Rosenberg, of how Nicki Minaj wasn’t rapping enough. Since that slider’s worth of beef came and passed, Nicki’s made repeated points of demonstrating her lyrical chops, but mostly on tracks not meant for commercial radio.
So, for Nicki to unleash the “Monster” within on her big summer jam, which was supported by a big budget video, this is a welcome swing of the pendulum.
That rhyme of Cocaine/Romaine/Balmain, though, is where I stand up and applaud Nicki. More than just Nicki at her most excellent and unpredictable, it’s a quality demonstration of her ownership of her sexual power.
Throughout the music video, she owns her own sexuality, from chopping that banana up to declare that she is not beholden, to the hilarious taunting of her bestie Drake. Nicki proves she no object, that she is in full control.
That’s what I call The Song of the Summer.
A Postscript:
For album of the summer, though, we have much less contention, because (I think) consensus was reached while we all became Groot:
Maybe it happened because the summer was more singles than albums, but the soundtrack for The Guardians of the Galaxy, (the aptly titled Awesome Mix Vol. 1) is the album of the summer if you ask me.
Looking at it by way of its time on the top of the album sales charts, to the fact that it can be thrown on at the beach without a second thought, you’d never think the fact that it’s a mixtape of some of the best tracks from the 1970's.
