By: Rebecca Sloan
There’s something almost suspicious about a song this happy.
I mean, here comesElvira Kalnik with “Summer Time,” armed with rainbow bubbles, sunshine, unicorns, beach fires and a chorus telling everybody to move their bodies and feel free, and your first instinct, assuming you’ve spent sufficient time marinating in the grand swamp of modern culture, is to start looking for the catch.
Where’s the heartbreak?
Where’s the betrayal?
Where’s the crushing existential dread?
Where’s somebody staring at an iPhone at 3:17 in the morning wondering why a person they met twice hasn’t texted them back?
Nowhere.
Thank God.
“Summer Time” is Kalnik’s refusal to participate in the Misery Olympics, and maybe that’s what makes the thing feel so strangely refreshing. Originally part of her 2017 album Magical Child, the song has resurfaced at exactly the right time because we’ve apparently decided that being anxious 24 hours a day is evidence that you’re paying attention.
Kalnik proposes another option:
Have some fun.
Revolutionary, huh?
Musically, “Summer Time” comes bouncing through the speakers with the aerodynamic enthusiasm of electronic pop that remembers dance music is supposed to make you want to dance. There’s no twelve-page instruction manual required. No doctorate in avant-garde composition. No critic standing beside you explaining why you’re supposed to appreciate it.
Beat.
Melody.
Hook.
Go.
And that chorus comes marching in with all the subtlety of somebody kicking open the door to your miserable little air-conditioned room and yelling, “THE BEACH IS OUT THERE!”
“Summertime, let’s go party, party.”
There it is.
Pop music stripped back to one of its original purposes: liberation through repetition.
Kalnik sings about walking through rainbow bubbles and letting sunshine kiss your skin, which sounds completely ridiculous until you realize how desperately grown adults need permission to experience ridiculous things.
We spend half our lives trying not to look stupid.
That’s the tragedy.
Somewhere between childhood and whatever meeting you’ve got scheduled tomorrow morning, somebody convinced you that dignity meant never dancing badly, never laughing too loudly, and never doing anything that might make another person wonder whether you’ve lost your mind.
Kalnik has a line for that too: don’t be afraid of being silly.
That might be the whole record right there.
The genius, or madness, of “Summer Time” is that it doesn’t hide behind irony. Kalnik doesn’t put quotation marks around happiness. She means it.
She has explained the song as being about dropping the emotional junk people drag around: grudges from yesterday, anxiety about tomorrow, all those imaginary disasters we rehearse until we’ve managed to ruin a perfectly good Tuesday.
And suddenly those unicorns don’t seem so stupid.
They’re rebellion.
They’re the refusal to become one more terminally serious adult carrying around a mental suitcase filled with things that haven’t happened.
The production understands this instinctively. It moves rather than broods. Electronic textures provide color, the rhythm pushes everything forward, and Kalnik’s vocal doesn’t try to wrestle the track into submission. She sounds like she’s inside the party rather than standing above it.
That matters.
Kalnik is classically trained, which means she presumably could turn this into a demonstration of technique if she wanted. Instead, she serves the song. That’s called taste, kids. Having the ability to do something and knowing when not to do it.
There’s also something interesting about hearing “Summer Time” alongside her more introspective “Water Knows.” On paper, they seem like opposites. One deals with emotional release through water, reflection and surrender; the other wants to throw a party on the beach.
But they’re really chasing the same thing.
Freedom.
“Water Knows” asks you to release the pain.
“Summer Time” asks what you’re going to do afterward.
Kalnik’s answer?
Dance.
And maybe that sounds simplistic until you remember that rock & roll, disco, punk, soul, rave culture and half the music that ever mattered were built on essentially the same proposition: life is frequently unbearable, so turn the damn thing up.
That’s where “Summer Time” wins.
It doesn’t argue that everything is wonderful. It argues that everything doesn’t have to be wonderful before you allow yourself to experience joy.
Huge difference.
You can spend your life waiting for circumstances to become perfect, and congratulations, you’ll die waiting.
Or you can find a beach.
Find some friends.
Find some music.
Look ridiculous.
Kalnik has spent her career bouncing between music, film, fashion, performance and whatever other creative doorway happens to be unlocked, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that she understands freedom as something you do rather than something you merely discuss.
“Summer Time” isn’t profound because it contains some hidden philosophical puzzle.
It’s profound because it doesn’t.
The message is sitting right there in broad daylight.
Stop carrying everything.
Stop worrying about looking cool.
Move your body.
Feel free.
And if somebody laughs?
Heck, invite them to the party.
