Hot time, summer in the city

A few months ago, New York magazine ran an obituary for a proud New York tradition: the song of the summer.
Mark Jacobson's "The Boom-Box Years" argued that in an age characterized by studded iPods as far as the eye can see, the boombox anthems that defined the hot months of a generation - the "Hot Stuffs," the "Rapper's Delights" - are a thing of the past.
I guess he just figured Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body" was a cell-phone jingle.
His premature eulogy went on to argue that, back in the good old days, the summer song was a much more public phenomenon than it is for us droll moderns, and that as "Play That Funky Music Whiteboy" reverberated off the sticky pavements of yesteryear, it worked to unite New Yorkers in an intimate sonic embrace that is now forever lost.
In Jacobson's words: "Aside from the occasional non sequitur from a dissonant sing-along, [modern-day] listeners tend to be hermetically sealed."
Now, this isn't completely off the mark. What, with Bloombergian crackdowns on noise pollution and a decade of draconian "quality of Life improvements," I'm sure that "Lean Back" was slightly less ubiquitous than "Funkytown."
And I'll grant that the pod people seem, on a superficial level, to participate less in a public discourse on pop music than, say, a dude with a ghetto blaster.
But to argue that pop music is somehow no longer a public phenomenon, that the annual tournament of the fittest, hottest tracks no longer plays out on the city's streets, is to invite a diagnosis of hearing loss.
A walk down 10th Street on a typical summer day would have done a lot to assuage Jacobson's worries.
For starters, even if boomboxes are no longer the hottest thing coming, a 12-inch sub-woofer still is. This summer, even the Windstars (or at least the ones with spinners - don't laugh, because they are out there and that is terrifying) were bumping Lloyd Banks' claim that "On Fire" would "last the whole summer," and thereby make him sound like the prophet he's mostly not.
And it goes without saying that there are plenty of people dedicated to sharing their musical preferences with the Village at every intersection.
Then there are the various apartment complexes clustered around Avenue B that seem to have special rooms dedicated to playing hip-hop club hits at ear-splitting volume so the crowds of young Puerto Ricans huddled in front can jam out on the sidewalk.
A stop at aany deli on this little walk would have revealed that even New York's "One and Only Light Music Station," which is apparently the only radio station picked up inside delis, was playing Mario Winans and Usher. Ditto coffee shops and hipster hangouts, except they were playing "Float On" and "Take Me Out" like it was 1983. Or 2004. Or something.
Of course, in the Village, you don't even need to leave your house to find evidence that popular music is still experienced publicly, since paper-thin walls and bangin' home systems ensure a communal listening experience. Denizens of Weinstein: Enjoy the cinder block that muffles the jam rock from down the hall while you can.
And you know what? The pod people were listening to the same songs privately that they were whenever they shook the buds out of their ear canals.
The relationship between the music listened to on a public basis - the still-omnipresent beat of the street - and the music listened to on a private basis on personal jukeboxes, as facilitated by a digital marketplace that allows greater pop-musical individuation by the day, is vastly more complicated than the hermetically sealed wasteland Jacobson describes.
People are seduced by the latest pop sound standing on the corner, or in the club, or in the liquor store, or while bearing witness to their next-door-neighbors' soundtracked copulations, just as much as they were back when New York was scuzzy. That perfect chorus still sails out of the blue and into ubiquity.
But nowadays people can download it and listen to it wherever and whenever they want, too. The author seems to think that the individualization of popular music constitutes an alienation from the public sphere. But that's a gross oversimplification.
A more accurate model is the feedback loop, wherein the combined influence of public cacophony and private selection detect out the hottest joints and then turn them into aural juggernauts that get played five times a minute anywhere there's an amplifier.
Just because people are using headphones doesn't mean they're out of the loop.
Journalists like Jacobson should endeavor to embrace and understand the growing complexity by which people share music.
Every day in New York, people experience pop music in myriad fashions, each of which is worthy of careful examination and thought, because pop music is one of the most effective and beautiful ways of effecting a growing unity in our ever-more-heterogeneous populace.
That, in a nutshell, is what this column will be all about this year. I hope you'll be along for the ride.