Inflate the unicorn, charge the vape, put this year’s iteration of alcopop on ice and set your fingers to gun: the song of the summer has arrived.
In a music and media industry in need of catchy frameworks (guilty), defining the season’s banger has become a yearly pastime, but 2023 was starting to feel a bit nervy. Pundits have been reaching for tracks such as Calvin Harris’s Miracle, Fifty Fifty’s Cupid and PinkPantheress’s Boy’s a Liar, which, while all excellent, were released in the depths of winter and thus can never be songs of the summer, spiritually speaking.
Dave and Central Cee’s spry Sprinter released last week – the most-streamed song in a single day in 2023 so far, on Spotify in the UK – felt like the first proper contender with its guitar wafting like a warm breeze, but can a song with the line “this gyal want me in her uterus” ever really have the requisite carefree vibe? It’s all academic now anyway: nothing is likely to be as potently, Cornetto-ly summery this season as Who Told You, the new single from east London rapper J Hus, with Drake, the patron saint of the summer jam, dropping in to guest.
“Who told you bad man don’t dance?” J Hus asks at the outset, making those pseudo-hard blokes you see in the club, performatively standing stock still while eking out a Corona, look very silly indeed. His song goes on to be about the very pleasure of dancing, in particular dancing close to someone hot, a chief joy of summer.
J Hus has established himself as – this high praise is warranted – one of the greatest musicians of his generation, someone as good at self-deprecation as he is braggartly posturing, who has a casual omnipotence whatever type of beat is tossed his way. That greatness lies in the very way he works with those beats: a kind of dance in itself with Hus leading, moving in time with a rhythm but never dominated by it. Take the way he raps, “She wore that tight dress just to enhance”, slipping imperceptibly behind the beat (just as he previously did with, “I’m a rolling stone like Mick Jagger” on Fortune Teller). Hus doesn’t plod dutifully along: he walks his own path.
Drake turns up in full tourist garb, wearing a semi-Jamaican accent and British slang – “Your backside is so fit” – like someone who’s just bought a wide-brimmed comedy straw hat from a beachside cabana. But he’s been doing this so long now that it’s become an authentic Drake mode, and his meandering singsong delivery, really closer to jazz vocals than any other genre, is such a pleasure. The way he sings “Trouble will find me” and then repeats the line with tiny gaps added between the words to emphasise the certainty of trouble finding him – like Hus, this is such detailed and freely expressive songcraft. He and J Hus also have an emotional history: it was Drake who gave him a moving homecoming moment in front of 20,000 people at an O2 Arena concert in 2019, after he had been released from prison.
The Afrobeats rhythm by producer P2J is nimble and fleet of foot, inviting subtle bum shakes rather than outright twerks or lairy raised arms, as some songs of the UK summer can do. Last year’s equivalent was probably Burna Boy’s Last Last, which was equally rhythmically sophisticated; what with the huge success of Libianca’s People this year (whose sad mien made it very much the song of the winter), it’s so gratifying to see broader British audiences finally embrace African pop. Drake’s presence and charisma ensures this will be another hit in that lineage, but J Hus’s own sensitivity to what makes summer heat up would have carried it up the charts anyway.
