School’s out for summer. But you already know that Alice Cooper’s celebratory anthem is the starting point, so let’s dig a little deeper. Life seldom offers extended periods free from responsibility and obligation. So it’s no wonder that teenage love and misadventure in the summertime is a regular subject in pop. Here are some of the best examples.
It’s “the start of the summer” and “she is taking me over”. What could be a greater concern to a young life than a teenage romance? In this one, Tim Wheeler – who was barely out of short trousers when he wrote Oh Yeah – pines for a lost love who “on warm June evenings… would come to my house / Still in her school skirt and summer blouse”. By combining an earworm of a chorus with wistful verses, Oh Yeah embodies both the excitement and the innocence of its subject.
It was exactly that kind of short-lived romance that inspired REM bassist Mike Mills to pen one of the band’s most memorable early songs. Having just started dating Ingrid Schorr at university, Mills – via singer Michael Stipe – pleads for her to stay in their student digs rather than return to her small-town home for summer, where a life of drudgery in a factory no doubt awaits. Schorr has since rebuffed much of the lore around this song – there were no factories in Rockville. But never let the facts get in the way of a good tune.
Like Roy Ayers’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, Feels Like Summer somehow manages to sound like a long hot day. And its accompanying animated video makes a case for spending those days in your own neck of the woods. In this instance, the neighbourhood represented the US’s hip-hop and R&B community at large: SZA and Janelle Monáe whizz by on skateboards, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean play tug of war and Will Smith washes his car. In the summer, your tribe is never far away.
The last song Billy Corgan wrote for the Smashing Pumpkins’ 28-song epic Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is perhaps the definitive take on suburban ennui. Its subjects, who would have been 16 at the time it was cut, find themselves out in the city trying to stave off boredom, and “sure we’ll never see an end to it all”. But Corgan knew better: buried in the mix is an incessant loop singing “to die young”. The end of innocence is inevitable.
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But why not step out into the summer night one last time before that happens? Few would say no to Anaïs Mitchell’s gorgeous invocation to meet on the streets in a song that suggests a fleeting summer romance without stating it explicitly. She is “waiting and wondering” if the object of her affection is sincere, or “whether your fonder heart lies”. Sung quietly over fingerpicked acoustic guitar, the song comes alive when a male vocalist joins Mitchell in wordless yearning: the sound of the two coming together, or at least the dream of it. Could it ever last? Now is the time to find out.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance for The Observer