I’m a big fan of summer anthems. The sort of song that you listen to during all of the hottest months of the year– it’s on the radio every time you get in the car, it’s on in the background in every bar or played once or twice every time you go to the club, you hear it walking through shops or down the street– and then summer ends, and you forget all about it. But you know it’s that summer’s anthem, because you accidentally hear a snatch of it three years later, maybe in February, and suddenly every little detail about that summer comes flooding back to you at once. Briefly, you feel the sun on your skin again, and smell the sticky vinyl interior of your old car.
High school and early college were my big summer anthem years, mostly because I had both a working car and a fantastic local radio station. Now that I’ve got neither, I find myself sort of forcing the anthems, finding a great shiny pop song and playing it until I and everyone around me is sick of it. It’s not the same, of course, but what can you do? If no one around me is going to be casually and coincidentally playing fantastic bopping gems, I’ll just have to take the reins here.
This year, my main jam is turning out to be a hit from three years back– Mylo’s “In My Arms.” He mixes Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” with just a five word phrase from “Waiting for a Falling Star” (by yawner balladeers Boy Meets Girl) and spins it into something magical, like poppy, dancey cotton candy. The layers and loops that he builds under the vocals imbue them with an almost impossible range of inflection, from wistful to lusty to playful to yearning. It’s great as a summer anthem, and as if that weren’t enough, the video is also clever as hell:
I was delighted to find that the same year, not one but two other bands also sampled that terrible pop song: Sunset Strippers and Cabin Crew. Personally, I like the Sunset Strippers version better, if only because I prefer their music video. The Cabin Crew video is basically an extended synchronized boob shot. Don’t get me wrong, boobs are great, but I’m a much bigger fan of plot and general goofiness, so of course I fell right in love with this:
It’s not quite as clever or moving as Mylo’s video, but it’s cute! And the song has enough of that same poppy pull that it’s going on my summer jams mix, right beside him.
