As someone who’s hellbent on consuming every last thing I possibly can, and on an ever-dwindling attention span, it’s rare that I revisit reading material more than a couple times. This Rob Harvilla by-way-of The Ringer essay about the LFO song “Summer Girls” is one of those pieces so electric that I am constantly looking for reasons to revisit it.
There was a newfound sense that as fluky pop stardom went, anyone could do it, anything could happen, and anything did. Even these guys. Even this. “Like a lot of the megahits of 1999, there was a sense when you were listening to it that this was something weird and gigantic that we would still be remembering 20 years from now,” says Rolling Stone critic and author Rob Sheffield, who slotted “Summer Girls” no. 7 on his monster list of the 99 best singles of the year. (TLC’s “No Scrubs” is his favorite.) “It was a thing of hearing it and just going, ‘Oh, come on, you’ve got to be fucking kidding’ for, like, four minutes solid. Honestly, that has never once gone away listening to the song.”
Read it if you haven’t, and if you like, please let me know what you think so I can have more reason to think about it!
XO RD