I’ve seen a couple of stories lately speculating about what will be the official song of this summer. Beyond the pathetic fact that this is apparently all that’s left of the tradition of investigative journalism, the very question is absurd. The song of the summer is something you can only determine in retrospect. You hear a song and it transports you back to those warm summer days driving around with the windows down and the radio blasting.

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn has posted a list of songs that he asserts are the songs of summers past. The idea is to look at the songs and determine when you entered middle age by finding at what point you can’t hum along with the songs. You can argue about whether or not that’s a valid concept, but it is an interesting way to chart your relationship with pop culture. Here are a few of the songs from that list.

The Magic Numbers “Crazy In Love” (Beyonce)
You just don’t hear the melodica enough in popular music nowadays. This is a very pleasant arrangement that features the melodica, acoustic guitars and very nice boy/girl harmonies.

Evil Adam “Genie In A Bottle” (Christina Aguilera)
Disney needs to bring back the Mickey Mouse Club so we can start grooming another generation of crazy, slutty pop stars. But at least Christina Aguilera isn’t nearly so slutty since she became a mother. Too bad that didn’t work for Britney Spears.

Frankmusik “Every Breath You Take” (The Police)
My introduction to cable television and MTV happened during the summer of 1983. A couple of friends and I subleased a house for the summer when I was going to college. The previous tenant hadn’t turned off the cable and so I plugged in my little television and sat transfixed by MTV. I watched it for 14 hours straight the first day and 12 hours the next. It seemed like there was this whole visual language that was foreign to me that I needed to understand. After two days of immersion I understood that this language was a collection of hackneyed cliches that I could safely ignore. I haven’t watched much MTV since then.

At any rate, the “artsy” black-and-white video for this song was broadcast every ten minutes or so over those first two days. After awhile I became numb to the visuals and just became disturbed by the creepy obsessive-stalker lyrics.

Veruca Salt “My Sharona” (The Knack)
Hearing this song really places me back in high school, for better and for worse. Veruca Salt slows it down just enough to make it sound very dirty.

Katie Price and Peter Andre “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (Elton John and Kiki Dee)
I’ve always thought that what this song really needed was a disco backbeat.