A Lot of Good Songs but No Summer Standout

Last year, it was Sisqo’s “Thong Song.”

In 1999, Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of)” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” duked it out for the title of Summer Anthem.

Almost without fail, some tune will catch the ear of the masses and be forever linked to a particular summer. But what about Summer Anthem 2001?

“There wasn’t really one song of the summer, that’s for sure. There were so many really good ones,” said Erik Bradley, music director for WBBM-FM, a Top 40 radio station in Chicago.

“There wasn’t really a summer anthem like ‘Mambo No. 5’--maybe because summer songs are equated with being a little more novelty, and the only real novelty song that was released this summer was the Afroman song.”

Afroman’s “Because I Got High” has been riding high on the charts and radio request lines for the past four weeks, although it’s a relatively late addition to the summer canon . Other candidates include Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” and Staind’s “It’s Been Awhile,” all representing different music genres and tastes.

Increasingly, diversified music and splintering audiences have made the quest for a summer anthem a bit more elusive.

“Mainstream pop music is really fragmented now, in a way it wasn’t 10 years ago. It used to be that top 40 radio was pop, but now there are such jagged edges of pop music--you’ve got your ballads, youth music, hip-hop, rock,” said Billboard magazine senior editor Chuck Taylor. “There’s a lot going on in what we call mainstream music now, so pinpointing one single song that represents a song of the summer to everybody is not as easy as it once was.”

Taylor nominated Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment” as the song of summer, a single that peaked at No. 2 after 27 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100.

“It’s a rock pop song, it’s a debut hit and it has everything that a summer hit is supposed to have: You can sing to it, you can party to it and you can tap your toes to it at the beach,” Taylor said. “It’s a song that appeals to a young audience, but not so bubble gum that it doesn’t sweep across the whole realm of top 40.”

Amy Doyle, vice president of programming for MTV, put “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” at the top of summer soundtracks.

“It was not only a big hit for pop, but also hip-hop audiences,” Doyle said. “Because it brought two different groups together and had such massive exposure, we think it’s the summer’s anthem.”