You had to be there

Sometimes a song captures a moment and makes you believe there in the zeitgeist. And sometimes that song even defines memories. And if you want to make almost anyone between 30 and 45 smile, you can probably just play “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. That song got big in 2012 and, to some extent, defined the spirit of the age.

Carly Rae Jepsen is actually Canadian, but for many people, that song is as American as it gets because the summer of 2012 was an Olympic summer. And it was one of those summer Olympics in which U.S. swimming was more or less unstoppable. And that song was more or less unstoppable, and you heard it, along with the Olympics hype, all the time. If you want to bask in American Olympic glory and enthusiasm, you can still watch the video that the 2012 U.S. Olympic Swimming Team did with “Call Me Maybe.” I would argue that a universally popular song and the Olympics are probably the two most powerful unifying forces that exist in American culture.

The power of a song like that is lasting. Just the other day, an algorithm fed me one of the many now-vintage videos that groups of people made singing along to that song. In this case, the person who posted it commented that kids today will never understand why this video was so amazing. Who’s in it? Very young Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber, singing along to “Call Me Maybe,” with others. Watching it now, you remember Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber when they were young and, by extension, yourself when you were young. There is nothing like the nostalgia of the songs you sang along to when you were younger. 

In 2012, Business Insider had an article about the best “Call Me Maybe” videos. As they pointed out, “Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ has evolved into something more than just a teeny-bopper song. It has, for a fact, become a national phenomenon.” That article offered a timeline of the phenomenon through its featured “top ten” of the videos. Their best of the best includes: Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, Katy Perry and friends, James Franco, the “Aussie blokes” version, the Harvard baseball team, the SMU women’s rowing team, the Donald, the mix of Obama sound bites, Miami Dolphins’ cheerleaders (perhaps the best of them all), and Carly Rae Jepsen herself with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots. 

The power of “Call Me Maybe” is undeniable. It is so undeniable that even Carly Rae Jepsen’s current fans–she was not a flash in the pan–though they want to draw attention to her other work, do not badmouth the song that could make her seem like a “one hit wonder.” The song was and is a wonder. 

One of the best things about viral summer songs, especially when they are infectious and upbeat, is the way in which they can lift the mood and change the tone and carry you through something. How can you frown, when you’re working on the smiling choreography for your own lipsync of “Call Me Maybe” with your junior high soccer team? If that sounds silly and unlikely to be true, consider how popular dance videos were during COVID. They offered escapism and smiles and entertainment and something fun to do. How many people shot dance videos with their Dad that they otherwise never would have? So many!  

Another bop for that same generation which demonstrates the power of pop is “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus. No one grasps this more than “The Happy Captain” on Twitter/X (he is a great person to follow). “Party in the U.S.A.” is practically a subtheme of his whole account. Once someone asked what the soundtrack to the Ken Burns documentary about the GWOT will be when he gets around to it. The Happy Captain replied: “If it’s not Party in the USA, by @MileyCyrus I’m not watching. That song got me through two deployments.” Talking about his EOD experience, he once tweeted a picture of himself in the bomb suit with this caption: “It is so quiet inside the bomb suit that all you can hear is your own breathing, your heartbeat, and the lyrics to Party in the U.S.A.” (He was singing it at the time of the photo, too.) And just in October, he tweeted a video of himself at a wedding reception with the song playing: “When this song comes on and you have to remember that you are at a wedding and not deployed.”

There is a great scene in The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep’s character (Miranda Priestly) schools Anne Hathaway’s character on the importance of fashion. After hearing clothing choices and fashion referred to as “stuff,” fashion magazine editor Priestly goes off. “Oh, ok, so you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lovely blue sweater for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not just turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then it was Yves St Laurent I think, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled down into some tragic, casual corner, where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you made a choice which exempts you from the fashion industry, when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of stuff.” The fashion industry is not some silly realm of people disconnected from real people–it shapes what we wear, the options and images available to us, and, by extension, how we experience the world.

Pop music may seem silly and sentimental and we refer to its hits as “earworms” and “teeny-bopper” stuff, but there is a power in pop music. The 2009 film The Boat that Rocked offers something like that cerulean sweater speech in the way it shows the power of popular music and the songs that come through the radio. Pop music songs are our soundtracks; they bring smiles to faces, they bond us with friends and family, they establish loyalties that will last our entire lives, they knit together our memories, and they sometimes hold the essence of our youth. When a song takes over everyone’s airwaves and brainwaves, it creates a common bond that otherwise almost never exists on the level of the national community, especially when it is not at war. If you remember “Call Me Maybe” you know. If you don’t know about those things, well, you had to be there.