Song of Summer: “When Summer Comes Again,” by the Lewis Brothers

It has been suggested recently, by the Washington Post’s excellent pop-music critic, Chris Richards, that the summer of 2016 is lacking a proper pop anthem: that we are afloat, untethered, splintered, and wounded, both musically and otherwise. Historically, the defining characteristic of a so-called song of the summer has been its ability to function as a default center of gravity, a jam that, in spite of our heavily fractured moment, everybody’s still hearing everywhere, all the time, and nominally (if only begrudgingly) enjoying. Retroactively, a song of the summer often becomes shorthand for a specific summer itself, in the way that no one can now responsibly evoke June of 1995 without also crooning the chorus to TLC’s “Waterfalls” and doing that excellent jutted-elbows dance.