Song of the Summer 2014: The Winner!

We didn't get much of a summer this year, did we? As someone who has the recent year with triple-digit heat for weeks on end seared into his psyche, this is emphatically not a complaint: It just didn't get very warm this year. Aside from not being able to swim as much as I'd have liked to, that's fine and dandy with me. Bring on autumn, I say! Give me my pumpkin-spiced everything, and nobody gets hurt!

Now, are you ready for the big announcement? Want to hear the song that dominated the airwaves of the popular American consciousness and the brainwaves within my head? Can't wait to find out who stands astride the world, victorious in the inescapability of their powerful earworm? The winner of the 2014 Song of the Summer Contest is...

Nobody. This may be a first. Nothing was that special, or good, or weirdly endearing, or catchy, or anything. And I don't just mean that there is no Song of the Summer for me personally. Just about everyone has let the season pass with a weak shrug. If one song came closest to winning, it'd be "Am I Wrong", which I'm still enjoying. But even being the best of the bunch doesn't really qualify it as a Song of the Summer; it's just a song that I like that got played a bunch this summer.

There were plenty of songs the general public ate up with a spoon that I didn't care for. The aforementioned "Fancy", which was annoying almost immediately, and "Stay With Me", which wore out its welcome in about ten plays, would be prime examples of this. But it's not like I'm willfully ignoring their popularity in order to declare no winners. In taking the cultural temperature on the internet and by flipping stations, I'd say that both songs were plenty popular, but neither of them caught on with the fire of something like "Get Lucky". Maybe I'm not the best guy in the world at capturing the zeitgeist of the music world, but I don't think I'm off the mark here. I mean, look.

So, I hope you enjoyed your summer! I hope you got to travel, or read some fun books, or caught an exciting blockbuster, or started listening to an awesome new podcast, or spent warm evenings lazing on the patio with friends and family with the scent of bratwurst lingering in the air. But as far as music goes, let's just flush 2014 down the memory hole and try again next year.