Hip-hop marmalade spic and span
Just posted this on Dave's tumblr, my disagreeing with his designating LFO's "Summer Girls" a novelty song and with his contention that LFO are trying to be really stupid:
The song doesn't feel like a novelty to me, but rather just what it seems to be, a summertime song that's steeped in a haze of free-associative nostalgia. And none of the lyrics come across as stupid or strange in that context, since their premise is that a particular time and place, and friendships with particular people, will call forth particular associations. So New Kids had a bunch of hits (yeah, OK, a summer ten years earlier, more or less), Chinese food makes him sick (a reference to a particular incident, you can see it happening among him and his friends), Shakespeare and Paul Revere (not as clear a picture, maybe Will S. is assigned summer reading; LFO are from Massachusetts where Paul Revere's ride is part of official local history, the Boston Marathon run each year on the ride's anniversary), the mixture of references we understand and those we don't making perfect sense given this premise. Rather skillful, I think, more effectively dreamy than it would be without the idiosyncrasies. But not a novelty, given that summer songs are something you get every summer.
The song doesn't feel like a novelty to me, but rather just what it seems to be, a summertime song that's steeped in a haze of free-associative nostalgia. And none of the lyrics come across as stupid or strange in that context, since their premise is that a particular time and place, and friendships with particular people, will call forth particular associations. So New Kids had a bunch of hits (yeah, OK, a summer ten years earlier, more or less), Chinese food makes him sick (a reference to a particular incident, you can see it happening among him and his friends), Shakespeare and Paul Revere (not as clear a picture, maybe Will S. is assigned summer reading; LFO are from Massachusetts where Paul Revere's ride is part of official local history, the Boston Marathon run each year on the ride's anniversary), the mixture of references we understand and those we don't making perfect sense given this premise. Rather skillful, I think, more effectively dreamy than it would be without the idiosyncrasies. But not a novelty, given that summer songs are something you get every summer.