What’s this year’s Song of the Summer? It depends on your silo

Plus, reviews of new albums by Jon Batiste, Louis Cato and Becca Mancari.

View this email online August 26, 2023 by Stephen Thompson This week, we break down the leading contenders for song-of-the-summer status; plus, reviews of new albums by Jon Batiste, Louis Cato and Becca Mancari. Photo by Michael Tran/AFP As Labor Day approaches, it’s as good a time as any to declare summer over and commence a thorough, joyless autopsy. In this line of work, that means determining what constituted “the song of the summer” using every metric available — from the Billboard charts to our cold, black hearts. To scan NPR Music’s six-decade review of past songs of the summer is to embark on a tour of the inescapable: songs that entered the monoculture and then floated on the wind for months on end. In some cases, those months have extended into years; no matter how desperately I try to flee Glass Animals’ 2020 earworm “Heat Waves,” it continues to stalk me on the radio dial three years later. Our songs-of-summer picks for 2022 — Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Beyoncé’s “BREAK MY SOUL,” Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó,” Harry Styles’ “As It Was” and Jack Harlow’s “First Class” — were everywhere, and more or less still are. But this has been a curious summer, musically speaking. The season’s greatest pop-cultural juggernauts have tended toward film (Barbie, Oppenheimer) and concert tours (Taylor Swift’s Eras, Beyoncé’s Renaissance), but this summer’s biggest songs weren’t your prototypical pop or hip-hop bangers. Using Spotify’s Songs of Summer chart as a handy (and freshly announced) metric, the Top 3 most-streamed songs of Summer 2023 are, in ascending order, as follows: 3) Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer” Taylor Swift has released three whole albums since 2019’s Lover, and yet “Cruel Summer” seems to be morphing into the summertime-perennial equivalent of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Come May 2024, look for “Cruel Summer” to barge back into view like that Spirit Halloween outlet where the Petco used to be. Swift is having an absolutely gargantuan year, but it’s a stretch to call this the song of this summer. 2) Eslabon Armado & Peso Pluma, “Ella Baila Sola” “Ella Baila Sola” has been one of the biggest musical stories of the year: It’s the first regional Mexican song ever to hit the Billboard Top 10, thanks in part to its endless reverberations on TikTok. It’s a shoo-in to be added to NPR Music’s summer-songs list, it’s a great song, and it resides at the very top of Spotify’s global chart for summer 2023. But in large swaths of the country, pop radio stations haven’t embraced “Ella Baila Sola” the way streamers and TikTok have. 1) Morgan Wallen, “Last Night” Country music has been massive this summer: At one point, the Top 3 songs in the U.S. were Jason Aldean’s turgid ode to small-town vigilantism (“Try That in a Small Town”), Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” and Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” That’s the first time in the history of Billboard’s Hot 100 that all three of the top spots were held by country songs — and that’s before viral beardsmith Oliver Anthony emerged from the woods of Virginia. (If there’s one thing we can all agree on as a nation, it’s that the blame for economic inequality rests squarely on poor people’s attempts to experience even a fleeting second of joy.) Anyway, Wallen’s 2023 dominance — which includes three songs in Spotify’s U.S. Top 20 songs of the summer — is a curious case. For one thing, it kind of busts up a years-long “cancel culture” narrative to see the singer’s meteoric rise accelerate in the years since he was caught shouting a racial slur in a viral video. For another, “Last Night” sounds like an intriguing preamble to a song that never actually comes into existence. That’s the song of the summer? The song where, every time I hear it, I think, “Oh, this is gonna be good,” but then it’s over? Still, there’s no denying the song’s success: No. 1 on Spotify, many weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. And lord knows it’s vastly superior to the more grievance-based country tracks that have topped the charts this summer. As the NFL season gets set to kick off, conditions are looking just right for the “Cruel Summer”-style resurgence of Neal McCoy’s 2017 hit “Take a Knee… My Ass (I Won’t Take a Knee).” Honestly, at this point we probably deserve that, a meteor strike, or both. Anyway, if you want, like, six more hours of summer songs, don’t forget our latest Roséwave playlist!   Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and hear Nate Chinen reviews a pair of new albums by famous Late Show with Stephen Colbert bandleaders — Jon Batiste and Louis Cato, both of whom Nate also saw at the Newport Jazz festival this summer — and asks an eternally relevant question: “When the world’s your stage, can an album capture the feeling?” (I’ll make you click through for the answer, because Nate’s a great writer and I’m a monster.) Nate didn't write up that excellent piece and call it a week; he also has a gorgeous remembrance of the great Wayne Shorter, who died in March. Shorter, who would have turned 90 Friday, is the subject of a new Amazon Prime documentary (Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity), as well as an all-star concert that featured the likes of Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell. Nate offers up a thoughtful review of both, wrapped up in larger reflections about the man himself. Becca Mancari is used to busting out of restrictive environments: They grew up queer in a deeply religious family, then worked as a singer-songwriter in Nashville. As Jewly Hight writes in her review of Mancari’s new album Left Hand, Mancari “play[s] with sound in evocative ways, incorporating styles that are blurred at the edges or soft at the center: bedroom pop, trip-hop, soft rock, chillwave, quiet storm, even stream-of-consciousness speech that verges on guided meditation.” Reporting for All Things Considered, Betto Arcos heads to Cali, Colombia, to survey the scene at “El Petronio,” a massive celebration of Afro-Colombian music and culture. As this newsletter might have mentioned — at least once, maybe twice — NPR Music has put together a terrific series of scene reports in honor of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. (Did you say you want to stop reading this immediately and check it out? I mean, I get it. No hard feelings.) Aaaaaaanyway, our pals at World Cafe asked a fair question about our coverage — “Where’s Philly?” — and brought in the marvelous John Morrison to survey the city’s hip-hop history. Robin Hilton is off this week, so New Music Friday scraped the bottom of the guest-host barrel and had yours truly host a discussion of new albums by Burna Boy, Victoria Monét, Bebel Gilberto, Danger Mouse & Jemini and Miguel Zenón & Luis Perdomo. I've only loved Lyle Lovett since... let's see, wow, 1987, when he released the still-perfect "If I Had a Boat." More than three and a half decades later, he's still wonderful. Watch him perform "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down," accompanied by Jeff White and Stuart Duncan, at WNRN's studios in Charlottesville, Va. Tiny Desk Keren Carrión/NPR Remember, earlier in this newsletter, when I mentioned that an explosion of Mexican regional music ranks among the biggest culture stories of 2023? Here’s another data point, this time from Yahritza y Su Esencia, a family band from Washington’s Yakima Valley. The group’s Tiny Desk debut had Alt.Latino’s Felix Contreras in tears, and I doubt he’s alone there. One More Thing Fellow olds, assemble! The Replacements just released a version of “Can’t Hardly Wait” with a cello! Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. 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