2008 Woodie Awards
A guide to summer jams: pop edition
By: Peter Valelly, Arts Editor
Issue date: 9/7/07 Section: The Arts
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You can take me out of the Arts Section, but you can't take the Arts Section out of me. Case in point: every summer, I get psyched not so much for the warm weather or returning to my friends from home, but for the sheer amount of free time to consume music, film, books, and more. School's over, a little voice inside my head tells me, so now you can finally spend all your time listening and reading and watching. But with each passing summer, it seems harder to even find the time for consumption since all of my time is taken up by sitting, sleeping, eating, and other hardcore vegetating. Which is why this summer, I finally reached a new low - or scaled a new peak, depending on your perspective - by fully embracing the most effortlessly appealing musical phenomenon on the earth: the summer jam.
After all, if there's one thing you can always rely on from the summer, it's that there will be certain songs that are totally, utterly inescapable. And while quality and popularity are hardly ever tied in pop music, the summer seems a time of especially lax airwave standards; the plain fact is that whether or not a song has any merit whatsoever has nothing to do with how many of the words you know by late August.
So was the case with many of the jams that ruled my psyche this summer. Sean Kingston's endearing but grating "Beautiful Girls" was a favorite for a stretch of July, but now I think I can do without hearing it for at least a year. Then there were those tunes whose inexplicable appeal completely overshadowed their should-have-been crappiness. Take T-Pain. I literally can't fathom why this man got a record deal, or how he went from last fall's two-hit-wonder into essentially the reigning champ of R&B, yet I still rejoice whenever I hear his robot-voiced epic "Buy You a Drank."
The obvious reigning champs had their shot. When Beyoncé turned every single song from her year-old "B'Day" into a single with an elaborate video, she furnished us with an embarrassment of bleating, wailing R&B tunes both good and bad. Meanwhile, superstar producer Timbaland's solo career was bolstered with the catchy if grammatically iffy "The Way I Are." There were underdogs, too, like Lloyd's slinky and addictive "Get It Shawty," easily one of the best pop singles I've encountered this year.
After all, if there's one thing you can always rely on from the summer, it's that there will be certain songs that are totally, utterly inescapable. And while quality and popularity are hardly ever tied in pop music, the summer seems a time of especially lax airwave standards; the plain fact is that whether or not a song has any merit whatsoever has nothing to do with how many of the words you know by late August.
So was the case with many of the jams that ruled my psyche this summer. Sean Kingston's endearing but grating "Beautiful Girls" was a favorite for a stretch of July, but now I think I can do without hearing it for at least a year. Then there were those tunes whose inexplicable appeal completely overshadowed their should-have-been crappiness. Take T-Pain. I literally can't fathom why this man got a record deal, or how he went from last fall's two-hit-wonder into essentially the reigning champ of R&B, yet I still rejoice whenever I hear his robot-voiced epic "Buy You a Drank."
The obvious reigning champs had their shot. When Beyoncé turned every single song from her year-old "B'Day" into a single with an elaborate video, she furnished us with an embarrassment of bleating, wailing R&B tunes both good and bad. Meanwhile, superstar producer Timbaland's solo career was bolstered with the catchy if grammatically iffy "The Way I Are." There were underdogs, too, like Lloyd's slinky and addictive "Get It Shawty," easily one of the best pop singles I've encountered this year.
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