Girls, it’s been a rough summer. Oil-slicked pelicans. The third installment in that god-awful Twilight franchise. Team USA getting knocked out of the World Cup. If it weren’t for Don Draper and that hot guy from True Blood, there would be virtually nothing redeeming about summer 2010.
What’s the only thing that can brighten your day when the Worst Oil Spill Ever is painting the Gulf black? A perfect summer song: that inescapably catchy, harmless pop confection so easy to sing along to it’s almost condescending. As it turns out, the emerging song of this summer is about as auto-tune-terrible as they come. In order to distract you from Katy Perry’s assault on the airwaves, Her Campus brings you the best (and worst) summer songs of all time.
Note: This list isn’t just for songs about summer, but rather the tracks released in that May to August stretch, the ones scientifically engineered to stick in your head like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth. Is your favorite summer song—or, alternatively, a song that makes a tiny part of you die inside every time you hear it—missing from this scale of awesome-to-awful? Give your jam a shout-out in the comments.