Remember These Songs of the Summer?

Image via Complex Original

2001’s All For You was the last blockbuster album of Janet Jackson’s imperial period as one of pop’s biggest stars. And its singles campaign was kicked off early the previous summer with “Doesn’t Really Matter,” initially released on the Nutty Professor II: The Klumps soundtrack alongside other 2000 summer jams such as Jay Z’s “Hey Papi” and Musiq Soulchid’s “Just Friends.” It was perhaps the last time Jackson’s longtime production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis provided her with a perfect track, at once sugary sweet and polyrhythmic enough to keep up with the Timbalands and Neptunes of the day.

The summer of 2001 was a simpler, more harmonious time—literally, harmony groups like Destiny’s Child, Jagged Edge, and 112 dominated R&B like they haven’t in the decade since. On Jagged Edge’s biggest hit, they even got some extra harmony from the era’s dominant singing rapper, with Nelly throwing in some of those “uh ohhhh”’s from his then-recent hit “E.I.”

Vanessa Carlton was the Carly Rae Jepsen of her day, both because she made the most earnestly girlish summer jam of 2002 and because nobody could believe that the singer was actually in her 20s. Carlton never managed to equal the success of “A Thousand Miles,” but the song has held up as a classic. Just ask Bobby Shmurda.

A few months after Get Rich or Die Tryin' had the impact of an atom bomb on hip-hop, there was no question that the summer of 2003 belonged to 50 Cent. And the album had so many hits that he had some to spare—a song with Lil’ Kim just barely missed the deadline for 50’s album, so it wound up as the biggest hit from her La Bella Mafia album. Unfortunately, things turned to beef, as they so often seem to do with 50 Cent, and the two never shot a video for the song even as it dominated radio airwaves.

Reggae and dancehall reached the peak of its crossover success in America in the early 2000s, and a new crop of hits took over seemingly every summer, often with the same riddim. The “Diwali” riddim ruled summer 2003, and in summer 2004 everyone needed a track with the “Coolie Dance” riddim. The biggest “Coolie Dance” hit, at least in America, came from Nina Sky, a pair of twin sisters born in Puerto Rico and based in New York.

“Lose Control” was Missy Elliott’s first self-produced hit, after years of making smashes with her beat-making partner in crime Timbaland. Unfortunately, the riotous track also marked the end of Missy’s hit parade, with Graves’ disease and other career setbacks keeping her off the charts since the summer of 2005. But Missy is on the comeback trail, and “Lose Control” has been a part of it recently, when Missy performed the track during her cameo on Katy Perry’s halftime show at the 2015 Super Bowl, and the nearly decade-old song surged to No. 18 on Billboard’s digital sales chart.

Few producers have ever run a summer as completely as Atlanta’s Polow Da Don ran the summer of 2006. He graduated from Southern rap beat-maker to pop rainmaker that summer with smashes like the Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons” and Fergie’s “London Bridge.” And by the end of the summer, Rich Boy had released his smash Polow collaboration, “Throw Some D’s.”

Sales figures for cell phone ringtones of popular songs peaked in 2007, with the popularity of anthemic hip-hop songs perfectly suited to the format giving rise to so-called “ringtone rap.” Whether you loved them or hated them, many of the groups behind rap’s biggest ringtones were never heard from again, especially Shop Boyz, who made the heavy metal-themed “Party Like a Rockstar.”

The year after “Umbrella” and “Shawty Is a 10” made him the hottest songwriter in R&B, Terius “The-Dream” Nash was in high demand. And his biggest hit of the summer of 2008 was a thumping track for teen star Jesse McCartney, who’d just turned 21 and needed something a little more mature to transition his career into a new phase.

Six years later, with his career having grown by leaps and bounds, it’s hard to think of Drake as just the “Best I Ever Had” guy—he typically doesn’t even perform the song in his concerts anymore. But the song, which rocketed up the Hot 100 before America even knew it wanted a Canadian rap superstar, remains the game changer making everything that came after it possible.

After toiling as a Miami crunk rapper and Lil Jon’s sidekick throughout the 2000s, Pitbull entered a new decade rebranding himself as Mr. Worldwide. He became pop radio’s favorite rapper through an endless series of dance hits, and helped revive the careers of other Latino stars ranging from Jennifer Lopez to Enrique Iglesias. For the latter, Iglesias and Pitbull sampled Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long,” the summer jam of 1983.

Some summer jams are tinged with tragedy. Longtime Bruce Springsteen sideman Clarence Clemons was brought back into the spotlight in 2011 by Lady Gaga, who asked the iconic saxophonist to play a solo on her single “The Edge of Glory.” But the pop anthem wound up being the big man’s swan song, and he passed away on June 18, while the song was riding high on the charts.

Some summer jams actually stretch across two summers. “Lights,” the title track to Ellie Goulding’s debut album, was released in the spring of 2011, and was a hit in her native U.K. that summer. But it took an entire year to catch on in America, peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100 after over 50 weeks on the chart.

Bruno Mars has always been an old-fashioned performer—a student of pop music’s past—as the current record-breaking success of Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” has demonstrated. So when the groovy retro of disco pop songs like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” started taking over the charts in 2013, Mars had the perfect album cut on 2012’s Unorthodox Jukebox to release a single that fit in perfectly with the trend.

Nico Sereba and Vincent Dery were known by the group name Envy when the two Norway-based singers of African descent released “Am I Wrong?” But as the song took off, the duo changed up to their real names, as the song topped charts around the world early in the year, and reached America in the summer.

Ever since “Baby One More Time,” Swedish producer/songwriter Max Martin has dictated the sound of pop radio. So if he says Tori Kelly, a young singer who became popular singing covers on YouTube, is going to be a major star, then she probably is. You might not have heard Kelly’s Martin-produced single “Nobody Love” yet, but you will soon, and probably 100 times more after that this summer.