Song of the summer contenders: Drake, Beyonce and The Weeknd vie for the anthem in this season of discontent, disease and unease

Picking the song of the summer for 2020 will be a challenge, amid protests and Covid-19 social distancing

Beyoncé’s Black Parade, Weeknd’s Blinding Lights and Toosie Slide by Drake are among the contenders

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It’s been a crazy year, and picking the song that embodies the summer of 2020 could be a challenge. Drake could get song of the summer with his Tootsie Slide.

Published: 10:15pm, 1 Jul 2020Updated: 10:15pm, 1 Jul 2020

Anointing the song of the summer was going to be a challenge even before protests roared to life in the United States in response to George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police.

By shutting down so many of the activities that make a song of the summer happen – concerts, sporting events, pool parties involving people beyond the immediate family – the Covid-19 pandemic had already interrupted the annual process that led tunes like Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road and Luis Fonsi’s Despacito to warm weather cultural ubiquity.

But the explosive widening of the Black Lives Matter movement only deepened the task at hand: suddenly, the established hallmarks of the song of the summer – a casually flirty lyric or a groove to inspire a night without cares – felt insufficient to soundtrack a season of such righteous discontent.

So how do we pick the song that best embodies the spirit of a summer defined by contradictory imperatives: to stay inside or to take to the streets?

Ideally, one song could exult, object, mourn, reassure. And indeed, just such a tune appeared this month from Beyoncé, whose exuberant Black Parade – released with no advance notice but plenty of symbolic significance on Juneteenth – celebrates blackness in its many glories, even as it acknowledges the persistent threats of racism and police violence.

Over a swaggering beat brightened with wind instruments redolent of an outdoor march, Beyoncé boasts of looking “pandemic fly on the runway” and of having “made a picket sign off your picket fence”. She’s rapping and singing with equal command in another display of her mastery of synthesis.