Camilla Cabello (feat. Playboi Carti) - "I LUV IT" / Sabrina Carpenter - "Espresso"

Listen here and here.

From the mouth of Jack Evans:

The job of a pop song is to tap into a listener's basest impulses before they can figure out what's happening. We shake our asses in our cars or feel our eyes well up for reasons we don’t quite understand. Most of us wouldn’t want to sign away our wits, but those of us prone to overanalysis know the value of something that shuts off the superego for a few minutes. So it stands to reason that a great pop song should be at least a little bit stupid.

As Song Of The Summer candidates of various seriousness, these songs share a brain-fried, ambient horniness characteristic of days when the humidity leaves you plastered to the couch, and each hits like a cold Coke can to the temple.

Language, here, is a frivolous plaything. Cabello’s hook, single-minded and lingering a little behind the beat, is a recitation of toddler-ish fixation, both devotional and fleeting; all the better to bring in Carti to go preverbal over a Lite-Brite synth pattern.

Carpenter’s song, meanwhile, is a candy necklace of words heretofore never strung together. Its pop-talk is equally awe-inspiring — “walked in and dream-came-true’d it for ya,” I mean, come on — and completely ridiculous: Is that Mountain Dew lyric a Spencer’s Gifts-tier sex pun? Is she really Doing A Mario?

If you’re looking for essayistic excellence in your summer hit, I can point you to a couple of rappers with a bone to pick. I’ll be over here getting blissed on the linguistic drift.

Jack Evans is a writer from Florida.