Hello, hankschannel.  I gotta put this out here because I talk in my video that's coming up on vlogbrothers about LFO's Summer Girls and I think that this--I think, so, there's a problem with this song and we're just gonna get into it.  We're gonna go all the way through.  There's a problem with this song which is that it has, it has a preamble, and the guy says, "Do you remember that summer, the summer that we met, that summer".  He says the word 'summer' like eight times and then, he goes on to say, "New kids on the block had a bunch of hits," which is a thing that describes the summer in question.  He is talking about the summer that they met and in that summer, there were a lot of hits by New Kids on the Block, which is a thing that happened and then, he abandons the entire idea of this summer that occurred in the past and instead he discusses the fact that Chinese food makes him sick and then the entire song devolves in--it's got, it's got some fucking batshit crazy lines.

Let's just bring up the lyrics.  Lyrics, 'Summer Girls'.  I'm not editing this video, and like, I love a good summer bop, like, (?~1:10) Steal my Sunshine, like that--I love that shit.  So we got, we got the great, like, "You're the best girl that I ever did see/The great Larry Bird, Jersey 33" uh, is great.  "When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet/Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets."  Okay.  

So what, what clearly is happening here is I like listening to k-pop, j-pop, I like listening to weird Eastern European hip-hop, there's just so--like, I love listening to music that I appreciate only aesthetically, completely devoid of meaning.  There's this song that I loved in college called Ultra Relax by Shinohara Tomoe and it's the definition of a bop.  It's hard to find, like, it's not on Spotify, like, I have a copy of it, but it's only 'cause I ripped it off YouTube in like, 2009, so uh, but then, once upon a time, I looked up what Ultra Relax was about and I was super disappointed.  There's like a whole section to this song where it's like, I went grocery shopping and I bought this fruit and this fruit and this fruit and this fruit and a vegetable.  Yeah.  

So, but it's, but I love it, and I kinda get the feeling that LFO's Summer Girls is a little bit like it might as well be in another language, like, there are threads of it that occasionally make sense.  Like, yes, he clearly likes it when girls stop by for the summer and in a way that makes me think, like, he lives in a place that's sort of a vacation spot and so like, the rich girls are coming into town and so there's like a sense here, but then he's also saying "We fell deep in love but now we ain't speakin'"  I don't, like, what?!  Where are--where's that related?  Who is this girl?  Like, he likes it when the girls stop by for the summer but, but the fact that it is in the frame of this--it's like it was translated from another language, but then, so not only this, "Now we ain't speakin', Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton."  On Family--I just can't!  

Oh, "When I met you, I said my name was Rich/You look like a girl from Abercrombie & Fitch".  It's a great line, like, a lot of this stuff rhythmically makes sense, like the rhyme scheme, the meter, the rhymes work, like, what doesn't work is the meaning and this song appears to have been designed to not--to just like, have its aesthetic be devoid of meaning and like, let's be honest with ourselves, a lot of summer jams are like this, but this is so like, honest about it.  "Cherry pants Coke crushed rocks 'til I boogie"?  That can't be the actual line.  That's what the lyric says.  "Cherry--", there's no such thing as cherry pants Coke, that's not the line.  What's happening?  

There's so many great frickin' lines in this song.  "Summertime girls are the kind that I like/I'll steal your honey like I stole your bike," like, clearly, okay, so, I've done a little bit of research on this song and it was recorded as like, a fun little demo that they didn't expect to have any success to like, just sort of like, showcase what their band was capable of.  They got picked up and I think that this isn't the only time--I'd like to actually do a video at some point about songs that sort of like, shouldn't have become hits that became hits.  The quintessential example of this being Louie Louie.  That song makes no sense.  It clearly, some guys walked into a garage, they turned on a tape recorded, and they like, fucking yelled a song, a cover of a song that they didn't know the words to, and like, we all know it.  We all know it!  It's like it's a huge thing.  It never should have been and it makes no sense for that song to have been a hit, and yet it was and that feels a little bit like this, where it was just like, we weren't trying to have this be a thing and it's a little bit embarrassing, like, we weren't trying to write a good song.  We were trying to be like, okay, these are place--like, they look and act and feel like placeholder lyrics to me and fuck it, like, it's fun! 

I like it, and like, what doesn't work, the only thing that doesn't work to me about this song is the preamble, where he's like, this is gonna be a song about the summer that we shared together and then he's like, in that summer, New Kids on the Block was on the radio a lot.  Unrelatedly, Chinese food makes me sick.  Unrelatedly, you, like, when you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet.  Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets.  Un, just like, words, words, words.  "There was a good man named Paul Revere/I feel much better, baby, when you're near."  I mean, at least that--he's talking to the girl again, like, sometimes he's talking to this girl, sometimes he's not.  It doesn't make any sense, but it's okay.  

"You come from Georgia where the peaches grow," so she's visiting from Georgia.  "They drink lemonade and they talk real slow."  That's something.  That's a thing.  "She loves hip-hop and rock and roll," so like, sometimes he's talking about this girl, and sometimes he's saying "Cherry pants Coke crushed rocks 'til I boogie."  That can't be the line.  I have to look this up now.  I mean, that's what it says.  Okay, we're gonna--y'all, y'all dedicated hankschannel viewers and listeners, we are--I know that it is after my working hours and it's--this video's already seven minutes long and I have promised myself I'm not going to edit it, but we're gonna listen to this fucking song together, okay?  I'm just gonna turn it up, it's gonna be dim so that we don't get a copyright strike.  Alright.  

"For the summer, for the summer."  Nope.  "Yeah, do you remember?  Do you remember?"  He bites his lips so much.  No, I just--I--okay, we're not gonna listen to all the song.  I just wanna hear this one, this cherry pants Coke.  No.  No.  That's too-ahh, this is a long, there's a lot of freakin' lines in this song.  Wait, where is it?  I mean, I love, I love it so much. 

Thank you for hanging out.  This seems like, it's starting to feel like a livestream, but I know that it's not live.  "Ruby red slippers and a whole bunch of trees/Like the color purple, macaroni and cheese.  Ruby red slippers and a bunch of trees."  This is not a song that was intended to be a hit.  No one thought this was going to happen, and I love it.  And I love it for the guys at LFO, though we have tragically lost two of them.  I didn't expect necessarily for this video to have, like, sort of, wrap up this way, but they, two of the three members of LFO died of cancer, one fairly recently, so.  Wow.  That's wild, but I'm glad they had this moment and I'm sure that they had lots of people making fun of them, but I think it's great.  I think it's great, and like, I'm not saying that, that, like, "New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits/Chinese food makes me sick" isn't one of the worst couplets in song writing, it absolutely is, but I think this song wants that.  I think it wants to be that.  I think it owns that, and that's, that's something else.  That's next level.  It's very weird, and that is my passionate defense of Summer Girls by LFO, everybody.  I'm sorry that we never got to the thing.  "Hip-hop mama, spic n span/Met you one summer and it all began."  Genius.  Have a nice day, everyone.