July 12, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summer in the City

[Now that we’rereally in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for someof our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertimefavorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]

On whether allart is political, and why the question matters more than the answer.

In the summer of1966, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” becamea mega-hit, staying at #1 on the Billboardsingles 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 themost overt of the many ways in which the song perfectly captures its titlesubject, especially for young city dwellers (like the Spoonful themselves): the contrastbetween sweltering days and cool (figuratively if not literally) nights; theway in which the former seem to move so slowly when all you want is to get tothe 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 atthe same time. Given how many of those young record buyers lived in cities likeNew York and Los Angeles, it’s no surprise that “Summer in the City” became oneof the season’s and year’s biggest successes.

Of course, thesummer of the song’s release also featured “hot towns” that had nothing to dowith the thermometer: 1966 was the third of what would turn out to be fiveconsecutive years of “Long HotSummer,” periods of urbanunrest and riots connected to the decade’s simmering racial, cultural, andsocial tensions, activisms, and conflicts. Indeed, oe of the first suchconflicts had erupted in the Spoonful’sown New York City two years earlier, following the July 1964shooting of a Harlem youth by a white police officer; by 1966 few majorurban areas had been left unaffected. It’s difficult to imagine, from myadmitted temporal distance, any 1966 city dweller thinking of summer in thecity without connecting it to these seasons and years of strife; given earlyrock and roll’s combinationof racial interrelationships and social radicalism, it’s even moredifficult to think about a rock group penning such a song without having thelong hot summer in mind. But on the other hand, there is absolutely no evidencein the lyrics for “Summer in the City” (nor in the band’s smiling performancecaptured at the first link above) that it had such less cheery contexts.

By a certainline of critical reasoning, allart is political precisely because it has such contexts, whether it overtlyengages with them or not (and indeed, by a certain line of reasoning thefailure to engage is itself a political act, even in the most pop of popularculture). But to my mind, the goal shouldn’t be to figure out whether toimplicate a song like “Summer in the City” in its political and historicalcontexts, or even how to read the song in light of them—the goal, and I wouldsay it represents a central AmericanStudies project, should be to think aboutboth The Lovin’ Spoonful and the Long Hot Summer as part of American culture inthe 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 thesedifferent moments and texts, events and voices, but the vital first step issimply to recognize their co-existence, the way in which any Americansummer—every American season—is comprised out of all of them.

Next summer jamtomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts onthis song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?