[Now that we’re really in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for some of our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertime favorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]
On whether all
art is political, and why the question matters more than the answer.
In the summer of
1966, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” became
a mega-hit, staying at #1 on the Billboard
singles chart for three consecutive August weeks. The song’s famous bridge,
which features a series of car horns and ends with a jackhammer, is only the
most overt of the many ways in which the song perfectly captures its title
subject, especially for young city dwellers (like the Spoonful themselves): the contrast
between sweltering days and cool (figuratively if not literally) nights; the
way in which the former seem to move so slowly when all you want is to get to
the thrills of the latter; the grit and sweat that cake necks and sidewalks,
bodies and spirits, making all feel nearly dead yet also somehow more alive at
the same time. Given how many of those young record buyers lived in cities like
New York and Los Angeles, it’s no surprise that “Summer in the City” became one
of the season’s and year’s biggest successes.
Of course, the
summer of the song’s release also featured “hot towns” that had nothing to do
with the thermometer: 1966 was the third of what would turn out to be five
consecutive years of “Long Hot
Summer,” periods of urban
unrest and riots connected to the decade’s simmering racial, cultural, and
social tensions, activisms, and conflicts. Indeed, oe of the first such
conflicts had erupted in the Spoonful’s
own New York City two years earlier, following the July 1964
shooting of a Harlem youth by a white police officer; by 1966 few major
urban areas had been left unaffected. It’s difficult to imagine, from my
admitted temporal distance, any 1966 city dweller thinking of summer in the
city without connecting it to these seasons and years of strife; given early
rock and roll’s combination
of racial interrelationships and social radicalism, it’s even more
difficult to think about a rock group penning such a song without having the
long hot summer in mind. But on the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence
in the lyrics for “Summer in the City” (nor in the band’s smiling performance
captured at the first link above) that it had such less cheery contexts.
By a certain
line of critical reasoning, all
art is political precisely because it has such contexts, whether it overtly
engages with them or not (and indeed, by a certain line of reasoning the
failure to engage is itself a political act, even in the most pop of popular
culture). But to my mind, the goal shouldn’t be to figure out whether to
implicate a song like “Summer in the City” in its political and historical
contexts, or even how to read the song in light of them—the goal, and I would
say it represents a central AmericanStudies project, should be to think about
both The Lovin’ Spoonful and the Long Hot Summer as part of American culture in
the summer of 1966 (along with, for example, the iconic surfing film The Endless Summer).
There would be all sorts of ways to think about the combination of these
different moments and texts, events and voices, but the vital first step is
simply to recognize their co-existence, the way in which any American
summer—every American season—is comprised out of all of them.
Next summer jam
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?
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