My Song of the Summer: "Love Me JeJe" by Tems
In your late 30s, summer's not as long as it used to be. But it can still sound sweet.
Sometimes, being 38 years old — which I turned near the start of summer in June — feels like the age equivalent of August: things are still hot and vibrant, but we’re creeping towards the end of the excitement, and we better start getting serious to prepare for a change in the seasons ( we should probably start wearing pants instead of shorts, too). Maybe it’s the hint of melancholy in my nature to describe my late 30s this way — I know people far older having way later nights than me — but there’s no question that things have slowed down a bit and, what once seemed boundless now feels bounded. “Summer’s not,” sang Frank Ocean, “as long as it used to be.”
I guess what’s weird about describing the narrowing of life this way is that even as I type the words, I’m mostly okay with it. Age is to no small degree a matter of acceptance — it’s a reality, as much as botox has made it seem superficially mutable — and while my 20s and early 30s were thrilling and fast paced, I enjoy the pace of my late 30s. And I enjoy August. Summer tinged with bittersweetness suits me — it’s a cliche, sure, but I really do treasure it more knowing it’s about to leave. I like that people seem tired and walk a bit more slowly down Manhattan streets, their energy zapped and faded from two months of sweltering sun. I like that people leave town, and there’s a quiet ghostly quality to sidewalks that lack their presence.
With this in mind, “Love Me JeJe,” my song of the summer, is not just a mood, it’s a message: “JeJe” means softly or gently in Nigeria, where Tems, the artist, is from. And to me, asking the world to love you tender is an admission of sorts, a tell: you must know what it feels to be loved the other way — harshly and meanly — and you’re not as naive as you once were. You have to be handled with care. You’re battered and bruised but, by agreeing to be loved again, are clearly not hopeless, and you’re willing to tell someone exactly what you need from them. I think “Love Me JeJe” means knowing yourself — there’s something confident about the ask. You could pretend you can still take the battering and bruising, or you could just admit that you’re not as tough as you once were. The scars have healed, even if you can still see them slightly, and you work to avoid scraping your knee again. In other words, “Love Me JeJe” is a song for 38-year-olds.
The vibe of the music matches the message. The song hangs in the air like humidity. It almost feels suspended in place, something ambient instead of accelerating. But it’s still bubbly — there’s sweetness in the sound. In the video, Tems ambles through Lagos in the back of a buggy, the breeze in her hair. She’s stuck in traffic, so the car is moving, but not quickly. She’s on your “wave right now,” she sings, and you imagine an easy tide like you find in a sea, not the ocean, one that shakes you without subsuming you. The place I most enjoyed hearing it this summer was in the passenger seat of my friend’s car, after having loading up our stuff from the beach and kicking sand out of our Birkenstocks, feeling tired from the sun and the swimming. There’s a fatigue baked into “Love Me JeJe” — a good fatigue, the kind you get when you know you’ve earned it by being active and alive. You only realize how fun the day has been when it’s finally over and you can feel it in your achey legs.
Fall is coming, but it’s not here yet. Don’t fret. There’s goodness out there to be got. You still have time. The days are shorter but the nights are as warm as they’ve ever been, and so they should feel open and ripe instead of suffocating and bleak. The leaves are on the tree. It occurs to me that while “Love Me JeJe” could be a song about relationships — the request of one partner to be treated a certain way by another — it could also be something of a self-care reminder: be kind to yourself, even when things are changing and different pathways emerge. Someone once told me that the only great thing about being 70 is that your eye sight starts to go so you can’t really see your wrinkles in the mirror. Perhaps 38 is when the mirror really starts dimming, at least metaphorically: some things might be wrapping up, but hopefully you can’t see what’s gone — only what’s still there.