This year’s Song Of The Summer comes to you from 1985

View this email online by Stephen Thompson Welcome! It was the week we crossed “survive the first half of 2022” off our to-do lists. It was the week Julia Roberts and George Clooney announced an on-screen reunion while mostly failing to mention a little movie called Money Monster. It was the week HBO offered up more details about the fourth season of True Detective. And it was the week R. Kelly’s highly depressing trial culminated in a 30-year prison sentence. Let’s get to it.   Opening Argument: This year’s Song Of The Summer comes to you from… 1985 If you write or talk about music for a living, a few new unwritten rules have cropped up in recent years. For example, the job of compiling best-of-the-year lists has expanded to include an obligatory best-of-the-year-so-far list, usually sometime in June. (Speaking of which, here are the albums and songs lists we just put together at NPR Music.) Around the same time, we’re required — not by law, but it feels that way sometimes — to assess the popular-music landscape and start determining which currently ubiquitous tracks might be remembered as “the song of the summer.” Sometimes the answers will be obvious, as they were in 2019, when Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” and Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” appeared to be the only tracks in existence between the months of April and October. In other years, we spend many weeks waiting for clarity as the cultural tides churn and shift. After all, this isn’t a tidy science. As with pornography, song-of-the-summer status is one of those “we know it when we see it” deals, and each listener’s mileage is bound to vary. If you’re a Harry Styles stan, for example, you’re wondering why I haven’t already noted the effervescent and agreeable “As It Was” or “Late Night Talking.” If you base your life on Beyoncé’s teachings — which: no argument here — you’re clearing your throat and nodding pointedly in the direction of “Break My Soul,” whose message of defiance just happens to fit snugly against the current cultural moment. I’m personally partial to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” which (figuratively) teleports listeners directly to the disco-ball-lit roller rink of their choice. One complicating factor, though, is that the shelf life of a pop song has never been longer. A $200 million movie might play in theaters for six or eight weeks, and entire seasons of TV shows can come and go from the public’s imagination within days. But a three-minute pop song with just the right public buy-in can hang around on the pop charts for many months — even years. Though Billie Eilish and Lizzo might disagree, “Old Town Road” was pretty unmistakably the song of the summer for 2019, given that it sat atop the Billboard charts for a record 19 consecutive weeks from April to August. But that song came out in December 2018 and took months to gather steam as it grew from a TikTok sensation to a Billy Ray Cyrus-fueled crossover to a BTS-fueled mainstay. Like Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” which was 18 months old when it began to really take off, “Old Town Road” was a living organism: ever-shifting, eternally malleable, seemingly unkillable.  So it only makes sense that the 2022 pop landscape has been altered by another immortal organism: the Kate Bush banger “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which originally peaked at No. 30 all the way back in 1985. When the first part of Stranger Things’ fourth season dropped in late May, the song’s prominent placement helped propel it back onto the U.S. charts; it quickly became the first U.S. Top 10 hit in Bush’s nearly 50-year career, as well as her first No. 1 hit in the U.K. since 1978, not to mention a true feel-good story in a summer that sorely needed one. With new Stranger Things episodes dropping Friday, the song could well get another boost. Chris Moorhouse/Getty Images What the “Running Up That Hill” resurgence demonstrates, beyond the timelessness and craft of the song itself, is the extreme power of familiarity. For those of us who were kids in 1985, its return evokes childhood nostalgia. But it’s not as if the song had been fully consigned to the distant past: It played a prominent role in the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, and Meg Myers’ faithful 2019 cover has been a persistent presence in its own right. The original’s return doesn’t feel like a discovery, so much as a reminder. The return of “Running Up That Hill” has a lot to say about the way songs help form our shared cultural language, even as we’re siloed in a thousand other ways. The barriers to entry are low with songs, which require only access to a device on which to play them; we don’t have to subscribe to Netflix, the way we do with Stranger Things, and we don’t have to pay to sit in a movie theater, the way we do with, say, Top Gun: Maverick.  Songs live on the wind in ways other forms of entertainment simply can’t. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend Speaking of Kate Bush, it’s time to de-mothball your bright red dresses and mark your calendars for The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, the glorious tradition in which folks gather in flash mobs to reenact Bush’s 1978 video for “Wuthering Heights.” This year’s big event — events, really — will take place all over the world on and around July 30, which just happens to be the singer’s 64th birthday. Consult the Internet to find a Wuthering Heights Day near you, and don’t be afraid to gather some friends and start your own. Amelia Meath is one-third of Mountain Man and one-half of Sylvan Esso. Alexandra Sauser-Monnig is one-third of Mountain Man and the entirety of Daughter of Swords. Together, they’ve recently formed The A’s and released a pair of spare, lovely covers: “He Needs Me” (a Harry Nilsson tune from 1980’s Popeye soundtrack) and the traditional “Wedding Dress.” A full-length album, Fruit, is due out later this year. We’re still tinkering with it around the ol’ Thompsley household, but we’ve been having fun with a new social-media app called BeReal, in which you post exactly once per day. When given a prompt by the app, you tap a single button to shoot 1) a selfie; and 2) the world as it exists in front of your phone at that moment. Maybe you’re petting a cat, or goggling at the splendor of Niagara Falls, or doing the dishes; the mundanity and unpredictability are part of the charm. It’s a tiny, Wordle-level time commitment; it’s a way to share your world without feeling like it has to look stage-managed and perfect (ahem, Instagram); and you can curate it to a small circle of friends in ways that can make you feel present and connected. I like it. What We Did This Week A24 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, est atqui dicam ei. Vix ut posse liber. Ei dolore nominati hendrerit mea, at sint epicuri appetere vim. Utinam adolescens adversarium et sit. Ad sed illum doctus epicuri. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, est atqui dicam ei. Vix ut posse liber. Ei dolore nominati hendrerit mea, at sint epicuri appetere vim. Utinam adolescens adversarium et sit. Ad sed illum doctus epicuri. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WMFE (edit station). Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. 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