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 99ยข 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.
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