Make Your Pick Now for Unofficial Pop Song of Summer 2007

By July it's usually pretty clear what have been deemed the unofficial songs of summer. They're not necessarily the best songs of the season -- hell, they're frequently downright the worst. But they're the ones with the catchy chorus that invade your brain and won't leave. They're the ones you hear everywhere -- in heavy rotation on pop radio. In the stores, on the beach and on TV. They're light and fluffy.

This summer in particular, it feels like pop radio has a ton of contenders. My early pick is probably Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls." The sample of Ben E. King's "Stand by me" is instantly recognizable, and that chorus of "suicidal, suicidal" sticks to your brain like gum on your shoe. It's not a great song -- his vocals are particularly terrible -- but it's definitely a snap shot of summer 2007, when Carribean-influenced tunes are all the rage.

What are your thoughts? The L.A. Times has already nominated Shop Boyz' "Party Like a Rockstar" while others are nominating two different songs by Rihanna ("Umbrella" or "Shut Up and Dance") or Justin Timberlake's "Summer Love."

Edison Research's Sean Ross writes that last summer, Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" wound up with summer song honors. He compiles a list of this summer's contenders, writing:

Somehow the summer song unites the adults who gave up contemporary music radio for NPR a decade ago with their kids who have allegedly never cared about it in the first place. For a few months, there is less focus on the long tail and more on the "SexyBack." This summer's crop of top contenders is, as "Hz So Good" columnist Rich Appel notes, more carefully timed than ever. So going into Memorial Day weekend, we already have Justin Timberlake's top 5 song with "summer" in the title and Kat DeLuna's fast-rising "Whine Up" that begins with the declaration, "It's summertime!"

"SexyBack," by the way, is a good illustration of why it's always a little dangerous to predict the summer song on Memorial Day, or even to try to anoint one on Labor Day. "SexyBack" came out in mid-June--too late for this column last year--and hadn't quite overtaken Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" by the end of the summer. But Timberlake is up to his fourth hit from "FutureSex./LoveSounds," in which time "SexyBack" became, if not the biggest record of the summer itself, the biggest, most tenacious hit in recent memory.

But we're not shying away from coming up with a handful of candidates. As always, we begin with the ground rule that a true summer song must be uptempo--which rules out Daughtry's "Home," T-Pain's "Buy You A Drank (Shawty Snappin'), Plain White T's' "Hey There Delilah," and Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)." It also rules out Jordin Sparks' "This Is My Now," even if it did become the first "American Idol" coronation song to become a hit since "A Moment Like This."

That said, "uptempo" doesn't always have to translate to "fun and uptempo." Pink's reissued "Who Knew" is uptempo and breezy musically, a contrast with its "dearly departed" lyric. But it's not automatically out of contention, as the success of Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" in the summer of 1997 proved. And in Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls," we have a summer song candidate in which the word "suicidal" figures prominently in the hook. But we are, for the most part, in search of dashboard pounders here.

Make your picks now! Either click above -- or if the poll isn't showing up on this page, go here.