Quotes of the Day
Is Beyonce's Crazy In Love better than Hamlet? Hamlet is long on intrigue and tension. It's also just long. Crazy in Love delivers its emotional punch in 3 min. 44 sec. Admittedly, it doesn't have much to say beyond: I'm crazy! I'm in love! But aren't those the chief sentiments of a certain indecisive prince? Shakespeare will probably outlast Beyonce, but that's hardly the point. For the next 50 years, millions of people will hear the fanfare at the top of Crazy in Love and instantly recall the summer of 2003. A simple pop song will make them feel young, while reminding them that they're getting old. Maybe next to Hamlet pop songs are trivial things, but they're important trivial things.
Summer is high season for pop. It's when record companies deliver their catchiest tunes and people obligingly get together and break up as if they're in a high-speed movie montage. And thanks to the growing popularity of iPods and their ilk — and the major labels' grudging acknowledgment that it's better to sell one song for 99¢ than no songs at all — singles will be particularly prevalent this summer. With help from radio programmers and music executives, we've scoured the various formats to come up with 12 likely contenders for Crazy in Love's mantle. Most of these songs are about people kissing, crying or partying. They're not high art. But then they're not supposed to be. They're just hits, very palpable hits.
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Pop
"My Happy Ending"
AVRIL LAVIGNE
The secret of this breakup ballad from one of the better albums ever made by a teenager is revealed in tiny notation at the end of the lyric sheet: CHORUS X 2. It's the oldest trick in the pop songbook, but when Lavigne, 19, trembles through the chorus once--"You were everything, everything that I wanted/We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it"--only to emerge stronger at the end of the second go-round, millions of adolescent girls will close their eyes and know they are a few minutes closer to getting over the guy who promised to wear the friendship bracelet forever and then took it off weeks before the end of summer camp.
"Take Your Mama"
SCISSOR SISTERS
Straight people have embraced some pretty gay songs over the years (the Village People's Y.M.C.A., Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax, the Queen catalog). You can interpret this as the gradual acceptance of gay culture or as the mainstream's enduring obliviousness to it. (The Village People did not drop by the YMCA to pump iron.) Now here's a song about coming out to Mom by a group named after a lesbian sex act. You'd think only Liza Minnelli could mistake them for straight. But Take Your Mama also happens to be the most complete pop tune of the summer, with a jaunty piano melody that Elton John would kill to have written and a giddy retro chorus--"Gonna take your mama out all night/Yeah we'll show her what it's all about." Even mildly inquisitive Queer Eye viewers could imagine it was just another great party anthem. For the sake of the Scissor Sisters' bank accounts, long live obliviousness.
"You're the Only One"
MARIA MENA
"Big In Norway" is usually code for "small in non-glaciated countries," but the half-Norwegian Mena has a voice that fits on American pop radio while also setting her apart from all the other teen girls with a stylist. She scats her way through the verses, which allows her to fit in lots of sensitive/spooky Morissette-ish ramblings ("I probably forgot to tell you this/Like that time when I forgot to tell you about the scar/Remember how uncomfortable that made you feel?"). Then she hits the high notes in the chorus with surprising joy and clarity.
Rap
"Flap Your Wings"
NELLY
Never mind that no one has heard this song yet. As one radio programmer put it, "Even if it's just Nelly farting for four minutes, every station in the country is going to play that record — probably twice an hour." Who said radio consolidation was bad? Word has it that this Neptunes-produced track from Sweat, one of two albums Nelly will be releasing simultaneously in August, is in the same vein as Country Grammar and Hot in Herre, the rapper's previous summer hits. You can bet it will have a heavily layered but distinctive beat, an instant catchphrase and lyrics about two of Nelly's great musical obsessions: pot smoking and orgies.
"Scandalous"
MIS-TEEQ
Remember driving with your parents and hearing a song that had a cringe-inducing bit of innuendo? Remember the awkward silence you shared as they tried to figure out if you knew what it meant and you tried to figure out if they knew you knew? Relive that precious moment with Scandalous, in which the spelling-impaired British hip-hop trio drops such lines as "Solid as a rock/How many ways can you hit the spot" over a lush, string-heavy track that is no less great for sounding as if it had been ripped off from Dr. Dre's studio. If the lyrics don't provide sufficient notice that subtlety is not Mis-Teeq's MO, then the blaring siren in the chorus should do the trick.
Country
"Redneck Woman"
GRETCHEN WILSON
Three months ago, Wilson was a complete unknown. Now Redneck Woman is the No. 1 song on the country chart, and the rest of the nation cowers in fear at the crossover to come. Like its Achy Breaky ancestor, Redneck is such an exaggerated piece of cornpone--"I'm a redneck woman/I ain't no high class broad/I'm just a product of my raisin'/I say 'hey y'all' and 'Yee Haw'"--that it succeeds as both a genuine ode to hillbillies and a genuine joke about hillbillies. Wilson, who has obviously been studying her Shania Twain, sells the song hard, and with an endorsement from Kid Rock, who appears in the video, Redneck should rampage out of the South and dominate seventh-inning stretches as far north as Detroit.
"Live Like You Were Dyin'"
TIM MCGRAW
It's unclear exactly when it happened, but sometime in the past decade it became acceptable for country music — loving tough guys to shed the occasional manly tear. Now Nashville's big guns want buckets. For those who gulped their way through George Strait's Desperately and sat stoically by as Alan Jackson asked Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), McGraw has composed the toughest test to date: call it Tuesdays with Morrie, the ballad. McGraw wrote this elegy following the death of his father, charismatic ex-Big League pitcher Tug McGraw, from cancer in January. Lyrically, it's shameless — and that's from a fan — with life lessons ("love deeper," "read the good book") so trite they might raise a skeptical eyebrow at the Hallmark store. Vocally, McGraw drawls his way through with such perfectly controlled emotion that, while you question his depth, you never doubt his authenticity.
R. and B.
"Confessions Part II"
USHER
He already has two No. 1 singles from his multiplatinum album Confessions, and as Evan Harrison, the general manager of AOL Music, says, "You'll have to leave the country if you want to get away from Usher this summer." Usher's third single is about what happened when his "chick on the side said she got one on the way." The chick on the entree plate was Chilli from TLC, so gossip alone will help keep this on playlists through September. It's also a perfectly acceptable bit of I'm-so-sorry-baby R. and B. It'll have chart competition from U Saved Me by the unkillable R. Kelly, but Usher should have enough momentum to prevail.
Adult/Contemporary
"Accidentally In Love"
Counting Crows
This is, quite frankly, a profoundly horrible song. It opens with a wacky kazoolike guitar effect. That's the best part. But after one listen, the melody spins in your head like a relentless hamster wheel. Commissioned for the Shrek 2 sound track, it was designed to be the kind of sticky thing young children and their grandparents could enjoy together. That may shed some light on the line about strawberry ice cream, but it does not explain why a once respectable band consented to sing a song so sugary it would send the Archies into shock. This is catchier than bird flu and possibly just as dangerous.
Alternative/Indie
"Portions For Foxes"
RILO KILEY
The tightest thing to emerge from the indie-rock Petri dish in years — it's an adult bad-relationship tune ("I know I'm alone if I'm with or without you/But just being around you offers me another form of relief") punctuated by a hook-y guitar line and lead singer Jenny Lewis' bittersweet and oft-repeated wail that she's "bad news." It's notably smarter than anything else on this list. But, says Morning Becomes Eclectic DJ Nic Harocourt: "I played it on the show, and I couldn't stop singing along with the 'bad news' part. This belongs all over commercial radio."
"Run"
SNOW PATROL
For shoe-gazing white-boy rock bands from England, melancholy isn't a pose so much as a pleasant vacation from despondency. That said, this brooding, expansive, 6-min. end-of-summer anthem has a chorus with a hint of optimism--"Light up, light up, as if you have a choice/Even if you cannot hear my voice/I'll be right beside you dear"--as well as the requisite lyric about long goodbyes and a soaring vocal by singer Gary Lightbody. It's also being pushed heavily by iTunes (it's currently the site's free download of the week) and record-label boss Jimmy Iovine, who, according to one station manager, "believes it can be as big as Coldplay's Yellow." He may be right.
"Float On"
MODEST MOUSE
Four albums into a career as ne'er-do-well inheritors to the mantle of ne'er-do-well college rockers Pavement, this Washington State trio has produced its first truly lovely song. Lead singer Isaac Brock crows about various misadventures that inevitably melt away ("Even if things get a bit too heavy/We'll all float on") while the rest of the band makes bouncy, happy noises in the background. It's how Nick Drake's Pink Moon might have turned out if ol' Nick had been just a little happier. Perfect for a backyard sing-along as summer's last party winds down.
- Josh Tyrangiel