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No way, "Summertime" by Sublime is far superior.

Interestingly, there are at least four distinct sorts of summer songs: (1) Won't summer be fun when it gets here?; Summer's here and (2) it sucks or (3) is great; and (4) Summer's (almost) over. Here's one of those old Baby Boomer numbers (by way of Gershwin):

Oh yes! Janis is the AWESOME, just don't tell Ken.

"Summertime" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince is actually pretty good.

I can't link directly to it because work is again currently on one of its "Let's block YouTube" kicks, but you can find it at YouTube via here.

EDIT: I will also make the bold statement that "Cruel Summer" is the best thing that Bananarama ever did. (For the "summer is here and it sucks" category.)

And then there's the song that just use summer as a metaphor. King's X's "Summerland" is mostly a wistful lament about "the good times are gone and will never come back".

Summer in DC and NYC is a hell of sweltering heat and humidity, so you get some pretty bad attitudes about summer.

Fall on the other hand is completely awesome around here. We need to have Autumn tunes.

The Lake Erie beaches aren't what they used to be. /whine

It's a good thing you aren't in charge of a censorship committee. :)

but dar summer is gross it's grooooooooossssssssssss grooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosssssssssssssssssssssssssss

seriously though i've always enjoyed chromeo and john fahey for long summer drives to whatever lame ass place my wife wants to travel to.

I think it's deliberately left ambiguous. There's definitely part of the song that's about getting old and not being what you once were, but Summerland is referred to in the past tense, too, which would be strange if it were only about the afterlife.

There are plenty of autumn "standards" -- Autumn In New York, Autumn Leaves, September Song. (Okay, so the last one is more about getting old. So sue me.) But they don't lend themselves to cruising or parties the way summer songs do. Anyway, if you're going to keep bitching about summer in the city, I might as well post this one, too:

I'm on Shem's side. Anybody who is defending "Summertime Blues" needs to knock back some Metamucil, turn on 60 Minutes and GO TO BED OLD MAN.

Thirded. I always thought the song was kind of boring. I don't even like it when it's performed ironically.

At the risk of taking time to straighten out you whippersnappers once again and missing dessert here at the home -- it's rice pudding night! -- this above-it-all, nearly terminal seriousness about music you won't be listening to in five or ten years anyway is the antithesis of summer music, but don't worry kids, you'll grow out of it eventually. Of course Buffett's stuff is trivial music -- hell, that's his act! He knows he's only had two hit songs in 31 albums and one of them sounds like the title song to a really bad chick flick. (Actually, "A Pirate Looks at Forty" is pretty good, but that's another story.) None of these songs are about being "good music" or pretending they're something other than pop tunes; in fact, they're about not giving a flying f*ck because the worst thing on your mind for a week or two is getting sunburned or running out of cold beer. Sheesh!

Hmph.

*kicks D.A.R.'s sandcastle over*

*makes a mad dash for the shoreline*

There's also this old one:

LOLmetal summer edition?

I'm not serious about music, I'm serious about fighting a never-ending battle against sucking in all its forms, wherever I find it. And that song pings my suck-o-meter. At this point, it's just a copy of a copy of a copy.

With me, it's like a timer starts. While it's running, I don't respond at all, but when it goes off (which depends on my mood) I'm suddenly like "turn this fucking shit off" and I've got to shut it off or get away from it. Being the youngest, and having older siblings with shitty taste in music has given me a high tolerance, but I still go off sometimes.

I came here to mention Bus Stop by the Hollies. But now I'm compelled to write a diatribe regarding Summertime Blues.

So you think STB sucks, even the iconic The Who's version. What about The Guess Who, Bon Jovi, Rush? Yeah they all suck too. What about Blue Cheer, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys? Suck suck suck? Joan Jet, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen? How about The Stray Cats, The Clash, Deborah Harry? All suckatude? What about a country version by Buck Owens? A metal version by Motorhead? A comedy by Cheech Marin? All teh suk? What about each and every one of the literally thousands of other versions covered by thousands of other artists?

The thing about STB is that it is one of the rare Rock Standards. It doesn't matter if the lyrics are any good or the melody is any good. I don't know who owns the rights to it, but the point is, that if it isn't actually public domain, nobody's had a problem getting the rights to it. And that's what makes standards, standards. Each artist puts their own stamp on it.

And besides all that, a "Why doesn't the world revolve around me?" anthem, is so American, it would be unpatriotic not to love it.

What about The Guess Who, Bon Jovi, Rush? Yeah they all suck too. What about Blue Cheer, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys? Suck suck suck? Joan Jet, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen? How about The Stray Cats, The Clash, Deborah Harry? All suckatude? What about a country version by Buck Owens? A metal version by Motorhead? A comedy by Cheech Marin? All teh suk? What about each and every one of the literally thousands of other versions covered by thousands of other artists?

wow, everything you named sucks. i don't think this is how you are supposed to make an argument, bro.

:)

anyway the original eddie cochran version is ok. i like saying DUH DUHDUHDUH, DUH DUHDUHDUN when it comes on because that's not bad for a hook from the ice age.

Shem's one-man crusade against suckatude and his Platonic theories in support of that crusade aside, ultimately "This sucks" just means "I don't like this" when it comes to aesthetic judgments. We sort of volunteer to forget that fact when we discuss the relative merits of this or that work of art, a fact I was reminded of while listening to Straight Outta Compton the other day.

No, seriously. I've recently downloaded various CDs from the last 20 years, a handful of rap/hip-hop CDs included. F*ck Tha Police is far more clever than I had suspected it would be.

Meh, personally I'd pass on Biggie, but make sure you check out Public Enemy. And Eric B. and Rakim. And Digable Planets.

But I don't want to die by Biggie Smalls! Once again dhex's lack of capitalization and punctuation makes the situation funny.

I'm not much of a rap fan (and certainly not of Biggie), but I do keep some Public Enemy in my library, and I always liked Big Daddy Kane and MC Shan.

I like MC Lutheran Teleprompta B.

Forget East Coast rap and West Coast rap -- Great Lakes rap is now where it's at. Straight Outta Manitowoc is hs best work.

That reminds me of why I snicker whenever I see a Northwest Airlines plane, with the big "NWA" painted on the tail.

When I was a kid, we would visit my cousins in the summer and my aunt would take us kids to the pool. There was a jukebox that was always playing the likes of these over the PA system:

Summer Breeze
The Night Chicago Died
Billy Don't Be a Hero
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (a cover; I forget who did it)
Lion Sleeps Tonight
Horse With No Name
Bad Bad Leroy Brown
The Loco-Motion
Band on the Run
I Shot the Sherriff
King Fu Fighting

To this day, my cousins and I remember these "pool songs." We'll say, "Remember that song? Wasn't it a pool song?"

Although most of those songs are not inherently about summer (except the first one), in my memories they are all tangled up with memories of the pool, and summertime, and being a kid.

Lately I've tried to put together an updated list of songs I think are ideal for listening to at the pool or beach now. The only one I can think of right now is "Walk on the Ocean" by Toad the Wet Sprocket. It's about a summer vacation, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, but it's depressing.

I think you're right, DAR.

Yah, but not depressing like, say, "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath or "Creep" by Radiohead.

When you're lying on a towel with the sun beating down on you, it's actually kind of mellow and and relaxing.

Yanno, given some of the responses on this thread and my bleg thread, I don't see how you even can compare "mileage" because everyone is headed off in about thirty-twelve different directions musically (and in dhex's case, I think we're talking some power of that number). Sometimes after shooing some of you kids off the lawn I start to think maybe it really was a better world back when everyone's phone was from Ma Bell, there were three channels on television and there were a mere handful of popular (in the precise sense of non-classical) musical genres. I'm all for choice and (non-mandatory) diversity and all that requisite disclaimer crap, but there really is something to be said for sharing a common culture even if only to have the common urge to rebel against it.

I look at some stuff from the last ten or twenty years on some of these music blogs and see category labels like "post-punk-alt-country-metal-prog." My eyes glaze over. 90% + of this stuff is still based on 12 bar blues, pentatonic scales and I-IV-V chord progressions. Sheesh!

rats and humans are both mammals.

but that's not always a useful label.

I dunno, I have difficulty generating any sentiment surrounding anything by Toad the Wet Sprocket. Maybe it's that awful name they chose for themselves. It just seems to drip 90s, I'm going to influence the emo trend that you'll suffer through-ism from every pore.

We do share a common culture. Old people music. And what we watched on TV when we were little. Seriously, any discussion between people under the age of 35-ish will eventually devolve into what cartoons were watched after school/on Saturday morning. Just because it's not being immediately and totally defined by a record executive anymore doesn't mean it's not still there.

QFT. Great catch. And here, in a pre-MTV B&W Winter Wonderland video, they are:

Oh, to be fair, that can be taken to a level of real annoyance. Few people would give a damn about the Montgomery County population of the Muddy-Colored Generic Toad and its most important distinction from the Harris County population of the same species ("ten miles north on I-45"), after all. :) Similarly, the vast majority of even enthusiastic music fans don't care deeply about terminology and taxonomy, unless it's their one pet genre/scene/whatever, and even that's a minority thing.

Case in point - the record stores, while they were still the 400-pound gorilla of music distribution. All trends and diversification did for them was cause the "rock/pop" sections to be relabeled "Alternative" for a few years.

Just FYI, the name "Toad the Wet Sprocket" actually comes from a Monty Python sketch called "Rock Notes"...

...which is why I was so disappointed to discover that TtWS was not at all funny.

Come to think of it. The Modern Lovers album was great for summer, especially Roadrunner.