July 13, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summertime

[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 two distinctbut equally significant ways to AmericanStudy the Fresh Prince.

He had had hisfamous failures, but by the time Will Smith released 1991’s “Summertime”(under his rap name the FreshPrince, and in conjunction with his partner and co-writer DJ Jazzy Jeff),the multi-talented artist was back on his path toward world (or at leastcultural) domination. He had just completed the first season of his TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,which would over its six seasons become one of the decade’s most popularsitcoms; he was only two years out from his acclaimed film debut in Six Degrees of Separation(1993), and only a handful from his first mega-hits, Bad Boys (1995) and IndependenceDay (1996); and “Summertime” itself became one of his first huge hits,reaching #4 on Billboard’s singleschart and #1 on the R&B/Hip Hop chart. It wasn’t quite the Willenium yet in 1991, but the occasionwas at least approaching.

I’m not sure ifit’s possible to argue with Smith’s uniquely successful presence in 1990sAmerican culture (has any other artist had simultaneous hits in TV, film, andmusic?), but how we AmericanStudy that presence, well, that’s a more complexand open-ended question. On the one hand, I think it’s possible to see Smith’srap career, and more specifically a song like “Summertime,” as a crucial stagein the genre’s evolution from something locallyand culturally grounded (in urban, African American communities andexperiences) to something more mainstreamand marketable (more, you could say, Bel-Air). “Summertime” even opens withlyrics that explicitly contrast its vibe and identity with other contemporarysongs: “Here it is the groove slightly transformed/Just a bit of a break fromthe norm/Just a little something to break the monotony/Of all that hardcoredance that has gotten to be/A little bit out of control.” Seen in this light,the song’s sample of (and closing allusion to) Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” (1974)indicates that it is a “new definition” (as that closing lyric puts it) of suchmusical and cultural traditions.

On the otherhand, this reading of Smith’s music and/or persona would seem to me problematicin precisely the same ways as were critiquesof The Cosby Show for beinginsufficiently representative of particular versions of the African Americanexperience. That is, Will Smith’s raps were no less (and no more)“representative” than Tupac Shakur’s, and vice versa—each are first andforemost the expression of a particular artist and voice, but each can alsoconnect to multiple possible communities and experiences, and thus communicatethose to their audiences. Seen in that light, “Summertime” can be read as aprofoundly intertextual conversation with tradition, one that opens with averse that entreats its audience to “think of the summers of the past” and thenalludes in each of the next two verses to “Summer Madness,” that source of itsmusical sample. Whether that tradition is specifically African American orbroadly American (or simply human) depends in part of the listener’s ownidentity and perspective, and of course the different possibilities are farfrom mutually exclusive. Indeed, they’re all part of that complex culturalentity that was and is the Fresh Prince.

Last summer jamtomorrow,

Ben

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