I Want My Vasco Rossi and Eamon

It was a summer of pop. Every morning when the noise of the Janiculum Hill’s busy streets became too much to sleep through, we arose from bed, drank a quick shot of coffee and snapped out of our grogginess through the means most readily available to us, a means that woke us up, entertained us, made us laugh, made us cry and gave us a connection to our home. This means: MTV Europe.

And though we tried to avoid it, it happened over the course of those two hectic months in Rome that my roommate and I, two open music snobs, cut off from all sources of new music (save MTV), became completely sympathetic to the arguments in favor of bad pop and established our eternal patronage to a single song that forever in my mind will come to define summer 2004.

The mélange displayed on our faithful channel 19 ran the gamut, and we followed each video with a critic’s attention. We watched for the subtle brushes between Avril Lavigne and her too-fast boyfriend in the video for “Don’t Tell Me,” and after some time of deriding Avril’s self-righteousness (“Did I not tell you that I’m not like that girl? / The one who gives it all away”) we started coming to a newfound respect for the teen rocker’s choice.

“You know, in today’s world, that’s a tough call to make,” my roommate would remark.

“Yeah, I guess it is.” I would reply as we watched the video for the fortieth time.

My roommate and I dissented on some songs. I thought that Baby Spice’s latest offering, “Maybe,” was a charming slice of pop, almost James Bond-like in its sound and well-dressed video, but he was unimpressed.

“This song’s boring; I can’t believe you like it,” he would comment, entranced with the inspirational story of Nelly Furtado’s Portuguese-English “Força,” in which a boy loses a ball on a perch high up on a building and passers-by form a human pyramid to help him reach the ball. I thought it was sappy.

“You just have no heart,” my roommate would say.

But we agreed on hatred of D12’s “My Band,” in which Eminem, to the accompaniment of his band, raps well about how he gets all of the attention, and the band raps poorly about how they get no attention. The worst comes when the band dons gleaming white suits for a Boyz II Men-like harmonizing bit, with the fat D12 member upfront, breast coverage removed from his outfit. This video countered our theory that its Roman popularity might just come out of not understanding the lyrics, but despite our hatred for it, we wouldn’t change the channel when it came on.

But there were Italian videos too, and “MTV On The Beach” beauties Andreola and Francesca would unload on us a daily bevy of videos whose lyrics we couldn’t understand.

We became disciples of Italian rock god Vasco Rossi, who must be in his mid-50s but still dons leather pants and jacket and a trademark black baseball cap over his ferocious mane of graying hair for his rave-up “Buoni O Captivi,” which rips off from Michael Jackson’s “Bad” the winning concept of two gangs about to get into a knife fight, but deciding instead to just dance. Between this and Mario Venuti’s “Nella Fattispecie,” remarkable for a lengthy sperm and egg cartoon sequence, my itinerant Italian home was represented well.

But we had our favorites, and my Roman summer quickly became devoted to one song that months earlier I would have never thought I could fall for. This song was perpetually at the top of the Roman countdown, and was omnipresent during the high months of summer, blasting into the piazzas in the evening and played gently in the supermarket during the day. The video was heartbreaking, and this song beautiful. Both told a story of betrayal, pain, and closure.

The song: “Fuck It.”

“Fuck It,” by a man we knew only as Eamon, entered our apartment twice, sometimes three times in the dead hours when we weren’t in class and it was too hot to be outdoors. Our hearts would race through the Eamon’s emotions receiving the phone call in the recording studio revealing his girlfriend’s infidelity (“You even gave him head,” Eamon rails to the song’s ex-lover), reflecting on the relationship’s good times (“I even said you were my number one”) and confronting his cheating lover in a Bronx pizzeria, at one point forcefully thrusting the pizza off the table belting out the following unforgettable chorus: “Fuck all I said, it don’t mean shit now / Fuck the presents, might as well throw them out / Fuck all those kisses, they didn’t mean jack / Fuck you, you ho, I don’t want you back.”

Such eloquence! Such force! In a summer spent reading Latin love elegy and Ciceronian rhetorical treatise, the bluntness of Eamon’s kiss-off should have seemed pedestrian, but this was the summer of pop, and for that summer, this song was ours.

I haven’t heard it since I left Europe, and I haven’t made any effort to. My tastes have gone back to normal, and part of me blushes at what I deemed good music; I write this to purge my summer’s taste sins. But I know for sure that any time I hear a wisp of Avril, or of Baby Spice, or even a single note of Eamon’s hit, a small part of me will cringe and remember the summer of pop.