by Oliver Wang

Some songs just sound like summer, others happen to come along during summer and become inextricably intertwined with your memories of the season. I'm not sure if the following qualifies for the former (though it does have a lovely backyard BBQ vibe) but since I discovered it a month back, it seems destined to become part of my summer 2010 songbook.

Murs and 9th Wonder: I Used to Love Her (Again)
From Fornever (SMC, 2010)

Old Man Rap™, I know. After all, Common's original "I Used To Love Her" was already an instant classic of "back in the day" nostalgia, enough so that it practically seemed to inspire an entire movie suffused in the same "remember when?" longings. Murs and 9th Wonder's remake is like having nostalgia for nostalgia; very meta but also executed beautifully, especially 9th's track (a fabulously imaginative flip) and Murs smoothly balances between paying tribute to Common's original lyrics while adding a few spins of his own (autotune takes it on the chin, again). Besides a few exceptions, hip-hop is generally very cover-shy—blame it on maintaining a fiction of originality despite an industry teeming with ghostwriters - but I'm hoping this changes with time and rappers find new life for old classics. (Yeah, like I said, I'm on that Old Man Rap™ these days).

And hell, if we're going jump in the Way Back Machine anyway, here's another one of my favorites of '94. I can't remember if this actually dropped that summer but Buckshot + Barry White = the sound of summer even in the depths of winter. Don't front.

Black Moon: I Gotcha Opin (Remix)
From Diggin' In Dah Vaults (Nervous, 2005)