With summer 2015 in full swing, has any one song yet claimed the once coveted ‘song of the summer’, guaranteeing near endless airplay on the radio waves broadcast around the country?

It’s hard to recall just which song first came to encapsulate what it is to be the summer in music. On this evening’s Essential Songs, the 1970 classic In the Summertime by Mungo Jerry makes a decent stab at owning the title. With more than 6m records sold when the song debuted, it was the top-selling single of the year, a hit all over the world, and a mainstay of any golden-oldies summer playlist.

The ‘song of the summer’ concept has been knocking around for a long time, with no shortage of artists and musical styles attempting to translate the strange effect a few days of the sunshine has into song form, concentrating what summer amounts to in a catchy melody with a memorable chorus. A joyous tune that gets sunburn-smacked revellers onto dance floors, that is met with less than typical fury when played out on tinny mobile-phone speakers on buses, or that streams into your ears while your watch the waves wind their way towards the shoreline while working on your tanlines.  

It is, and remains, no easy feat. But now it faces stiffer competition than ever before.

Songs of summers past caught on in an era when the audio selection of the average person was particularly limited. Radio allowed the earworms to burrow ever further into our pop-cultural consciousness, and while the advent of Walkman and Discman players created a greater space for personal listening, lugging tapes or CDs through customs was a thankless job.

Now though, for any song of the summer to break through, it has to permeate through the wall of sound we personally curate on our mobile devices, from podcasts to audiobooks, live-streaming radio channels to music.

Lying in the sun, floating on a lilo in a swimming pool, there’s really no reason why you should be listening to Mungo Jerry’s controversial lyrics about doing whatever you want with girls whose fathers have no money when you could be listening to the back catalogue of whomever had the Christmas number one.

Even at social occasions like barbecues, a song of the summer has to slide its way through the spatter of the sausages and the chatter of the guests. The music at a summer party is largely forgotten before the mood is sufficiently fuelled to break out into some sporadic move busting.

The last bastion, perhaps, is the summer road trip, the confines of a car over prolonged periods creating a captive audience looking for any noise but each other’s voices for a stretch. It is now on the car stereo where songs of the summer are forged, with the healthy beat of rain on the windscreen to add to the percussion.

In 2015, we are the masters of our own playlists, the song of the summer is no more. Gone the way of the Minidisc, the very concept of an annual anthem annihilating the airwaves seems alien now. The summer, especially the Irish one at that, is far too short to worry about being dictated to.

After all... life’s for living, yeah, that’s our philosophy. 

Every Thursday on The Right Hook, George is joined live in studio by Bill Hughes, who fills in the musical blindspot in the presenter’s cultural awareness with the riffs, refrains, and robust hits have defined musical history.

You can listen back to this week's podcast below: