something’s in my molars aka summer jam 2020
now that summer is over (ugh!) for real, let’s think on it.
((the last day of summer official is the anniversary of aaliyah’s death.))
((sweating persists, but post august 25 we put away our white bikini top and coordinating white pleather hip-huggers.))
i’m the summer jam collector. you need a full set, and if there’s anything i learned from my father’s mustang monthly magazine subscription and my mother’s barbie bazaar magazine subscription, it’s that serial numbers and idiosyncrasies make a hobby a habit and a habit a holiness.
2020 vision really needed some damn glasses.
so summer jams! much of the theology is based in fm radio. when i lived in appalachia the first day of summer was the first day you saw a boy shirtless in his truck, from either the panorama front windshield or the deviously sexy back trapezoid window. who woulda thunk that you could equally devise a summer jam schema from that clitty throb thirst, and it came from the forthcoming menthol cig kool president?
duh, that’s barely a question.
president barry started those spotify summer jam playlists like his third year i think (ooh whee i just got deva vu typing that like i’d typed it before - did you know deja vu can also be described as the moment when you make a new memory? wild!)
the spotify presidential playlists were split into day / night. and that’s how it should be.
i add my own category, radio banger, atop the day drinking/night smoking level.
the imagination reels! you know, 2018 summer my day/night picks both had music videos filmed on the midway of a fair. day? boo’d up. night? boblo boat.
oh how i live for the spooky summer night jam!
((i think summer 2019 we just listened to old town road and thought that was the craziest thing that could ever happen.))
2020 gets three:
radio - come thru by summer walker feat usher (talk about filming at a midway!)
day - covergirl by bia
night - lay down by melanie feat the edwin hawkins singers.
although it’s tenuous which is day and which is night here in 2020.
((tenuous was the word of the summer when me and my brother went to the trailer and spent 11 days floating by the dock and flagging down the ice-cream boat.))
what’s not tenuous is the relationship of the sticky vocals in these 2020 jams.
summer walker really took the top spot for me because she sings the chorus like she’s got bubblegum in her molars, it’s quarter after two and she’d like to come thru, but she’s spacing glazing looking at the walls. meanwhile usher’s at the carnival’s ring toss, trying to win a bootleg snagglepuss doll.
bia starts the whole song just a quarter-second behind the beat, rapping so lazy like “i’m not fucking him if he don’t de-schur-ve it.” she couldn’t be bothered! she’s right!
melanie gets the shit running with the choir and the screaming but gets so bored around reminiscing. yeah woodstock, summer whatever, we caught a disease. and now that mud lives in my vocals.
chew on it summer 2020. i’ll miss you guys.
