Cruel summer: where is this year's get lucky?
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When pop star and millennial tastemaker Lorde tweeted earlier this month, "guys @ToveLo is casually about to drop the pop song of the summer", it seemed too good to be true. Would
Tove Lo's Cool Girl, accompanied by a jolly gif of the Swedish singer flashing her bum, succeed where so many had failed? Could 2016 finally have its ubiquitous sunshine banger?
Apparently not. Lorde's idea of the sort of song you can dance all night to is for head nodding instead. Where is our Get Lucky, our I Gotta Feeling, our Macarena? Where is our Saturday
Night? The upbeat summer song is as essential to the months of June, July and August as wearing flip-flops to work. This was our last chance and we fluffed it. Summer 2016 looks destined to
be remembered as the season when nothing stuck. No definitive tune rang out in the lidos, no consensus spread across social media, and no song embedded itself deeply enough in collective
memory to be swooned over by Rylan Clark-Neal in I Love Summer 2016 telly specials to come. Dig about for "song of the summer" on social media and you'll find fans resorting
to bigging up tracks from the hammy likes of Adam Lambert and Meghan Trainor. No consensus, no surefire summery vibes. We didn't fight in the LMFAO wars for this. There were more
credible contenders, of course. We could have made a proper hit out of Dua Lipa sizzler Hotter Than Hell (it reached No 15 in the UK), admitted we actually enjoyed the dad-disco of Justin
Timberlake's Can't Stop The Feeling, or embraced the Avalanches' Jackson 5-ish Because I'm Me. Still, these are slim pickings. Sure, Sia and Sean Paul's Cheap
Thrills has beamed out of every high street shop but would your mum know the chorus? There's nothing to unite the people any more. A poisonous political atmosphere hasn't helped,
but we can't lay it all on Kimye versus Taylor. There was Brexit, too. But, if anything, summer pop thrives against doomy headlines. Even in 1984, with every second top 10 hit
predicting a nuclear winter – Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes, Nik Kershaw's I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Ultravox's Dancing With Tears In My Eyes – Black
Lace's Agadoo stole the season. Reggie 'N' Bollie could have at least cheered us up with some novelty bilge. There are worse ideas. Possibly. But perhaps summer 2016's
real Grinch is Drake. As One Dance annexed the No 1 spot, July came around and we were still saddled with a song from early spring – a summer anthem by default. We'll get no California
Gurls or Hot In Herre this year, but we'll always have One Dance. It feels like it already.