Apparently whoever decides such things has decreed that The Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" is the Official Song of Summer. I know this because I have children who demand to listen to our local Top 40 (misnomer alert! They really only play 12 songs at the most) station.
I for one am relieved, as it seems that this lady's song "Right Round" peaked too early. Wait, you mean it's not that Flo Rida? I thought she sounded unusually masculine in that song. In any case, I'm not that crazy about my kids singing along with a song that I thought was about oral sex but is actually about spending all your money at a strip club.
So, anyway, at first I derided "Boom Boom Pow" as an unintentional Flight of the Conchords cover, but, like a fungus, it's grown on me. It's about nothing but itself (a sentiment I stole from an article I read a couple of days ago--Slate, maybe? Or was it the New Yorker?), but it's fun and cool, and if it's basically a beat in search of a song, well, nobody's perfect. In the unlikely event you haven't heard this song once an hour for the last two or three weeks, you can have Will.i.am drop the beat on you here.
Maybe I'm crazy (well, almost certainly, but I mean maybe my judgment is impaired in this case), but "Boom Boom Pow" reminds me of nothing so much as this, another beat in search of a song that was a huge hit and almost certainly the weirdest thing on mainstream radio at the time. But maybe that's just because I had the same reaction to "Batdance" in 1989 as I do to "Boom Boom Pow" in 2009: "What the hell is this? This sucks!...Well, maybe it's okay....actually, I kinda like this!...Hell yeah! Turn it up!"
Two more quick notes on pop music. I love the new Pink song, "Please Don't Leave Me." Yeah, I guess her, "I'm so appealingly difficult to live with" lyrical pose is getting a little old, but she's at least got a lyrical point of view, and her possibly-fake confessional lyrics go down much easier over a catchy dance pop number.
Finally, if you're in the market for some appealing pop music this summer, why not check out Jada's "American Cowboy"(Linking to the myspace video page, as their record company inexplicably hasn't put their video up on youtube. The official video on myspace has under 6000 views, compared to 70k views of an unofficial fan video without moving pictures on youtube. Why a record company would yoke promising new product exclusively to the hottest website of 2004 is kind of beyond me.). It's a catchy tune, and one of the members of Jada, Jacyn Tremblay, was in my 11th grade American Literature class several years ago. Jacyn was one of the only people in this particular class who actually did work and didn't take advantage of my inexperience and wussiness by going nuts. (Not like some people I could name) She's a good egg and I happen to know from live performances I caught when she was a teen, she can really sing. And how many pop stars can you say that about?
