Playlists

A thread about playlists. Virtual mix tapes, really.

I'm quite fond of making these. I have several in my iTunes library:

• BY MOOD
  • A meanness in this world - Dark, haunting songs. Includes "Nebraska", "Seasons In The Abyss" and "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)".
  • Get Psyched Mix - Songs that can really kickstart me. Name and concept come from How I Met Your Mother, obviously.
  • Consolation - Soothing, comforting music. There will be peace... in the valley... for me-e-e...
  • On the Road - Music for in the car. Mostly simple blues-rock like "La Grange" and the "Roadhouse Blues"
  • Badass. Exactly What It Says on the Tin: songs that sound badass and can accompany all sorts of badassery.
• BY STYLE
  • Zappa's Boogie. Blues/boogie-ish songs by Frank Zappa.
  • A playlist of the 25 essential blues standards, as selected by me.
  • A playlist of cheerful German folk songs.
  • Ham. Bombastic stuff like marches, patriotic hymns, war film themes...
  • PARTY HARD. All the dance-techno-EDM-ish songs I have (currently seven, including "Gangnam Style").
  • Synthesiseritis. Songs that feature synthesisers prominently, from "Jump" and "The Final Countdown" to "Popcorn" and the Ghostbusters theme.
• BY THEME
  • Songs about drugs.
  • Songs about whores.
  • Songs about homosexuality. Mostly filled with Judas Priest and the Village People.
  • Songs about the historical French-German rivalry. French and German nationalist songs alternate on the list.
  • Socialist (and general leftist) battle hymns.
  • Memetastic. Songs which I, and most people, know from Internet jokes.
  • Patriotic Fervor. Dutch patriotic music, including our national anthem.
  • Football. Songs about my preferred football team, Feyenoord Rotterdam.

So, do you like playlists as well?

edited 16th Feb '13 5:43:11 PM by MidnightRambler

Some of these are on itunes, some are on spotify. The spotify ones are linked, so if you've got spotify too you can listen:

• Mood:
  • Fun Nights And Nun Fights. This is a high energy "getting ready to go out" playlist with a weird in-jokey title. Songs include Ace Of Spades, Seven Nation Army, U-Mass, and Dance This Mess Around
  • Fake Soundtrack: I think I had a specific "mood" in mind for this at first, then it just kind of became a catch-all for songs I consider Crowning Music Of Awesome in some way, which ranges from blues-rock (Livin' Blues - Wang Dang Doodle) to reggae (Sister Nancy - Bam Bam) to Metallica In the Style of bluegrass (Iron Horse - Fade To Black). I still think this would all work together as the soundtrack to some kind of over-the-top Genre-Busting urban sci-fi western action dramedy.
• Theme
  • Eat This Music: Not necessarily songs that are about food, just ones that have food themed titles. I initially had this more crazily ambitious idea of organizing this further into playlists based on breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert foods.
  • Marry Egg's Mess: Christmas music, get it?
  • Happy Hollow Weiners: I guess I'm giving all of my holiday-themed playlists atrocious puns for titles. There aren't a lot of songs specifically about Halloween, so I also went for campy horror-themed songs or ones about creatures one associates with Halloween (witches, zombies, werewolves etc).
  • The Final Day. Songs about the end of the world - I of course made this to listen to on 12/12/12.
  • Boston Bands. Songs by local bands that I enjoy.
  • 90's Soundtracks. Songs from the Cult Soundtracks of 90's movies, obviously.
• Style
  • Teen Angst: I guess this qualifies as a style - basically all the semi-angsty mid-to-late-90's grunge, alternative rock, skate punk etc I listened to as a teen.
  • 1994. More 90's nostalgia, even if some of it is stuff I hadn't heard of at the time. I put this in "style" because it's mainly alternative and indie.
  • The Fake Eighties. I had an idea like this in the back of my mind for a while, but this "Rate The Song Above You" comment about "80s music that's made today" made me want to put it together (and gave me a song I hadn't heard before that I could add).
  • Hair Metal. Self-explanatory. I started this one because I happened to get uncharacteristically addicted to Motley Crue's "Kick Start My Heart" and Ratt's "Round And Round" right around the same time.
  • Punxorz. Punk Rock and Hardcore Punk, mainly.
  • "Heroes". "Heroes" *
    It's named after the David Bowie album, so the quotation marks are officially part of the name
    is a local 80's/early 90's dance night and these are some of the songs they play on a semi-regular basis. There's a little bit of overlap with "The Fake Eighties" because they'll play stuff from the 00's and beyond if it's sufficiently eighties sounding enough to blend in.
  • Power Ballads. I sort of consider this an offshoot of the hair metal one, because I wanted to keep that one uptempo.

edited 24th Feb '13 12:04:13 AM by MikeK

I like your "Fake Eighties" idea. Oh, and everyone, you don't have to do the "Mood - Theme - Style" thing, that's just how I organise them.

I had tons of playlists on my iPod...then its hard drive went kaput. It's going to take me forever to organize it all again...but I had playlists of stuff that I wanted to learn how to play (or to just play in general), a playlist of So Bad, It's Good music, several Beatles-related playlists...God, I can't even remember most of them :/

Then sometimes I'd just randomly put my iPod on shuffle and place the next 20 or so songs in their own playlist, like a sort of mini-mix kind of thing.

And, more recently, I actually started using Apple's Genius feature, which (most of the time) works surprisingly well at matching up songs together. The best one was the one that spawned from "Born to Be Alive" by Patrick Hernandez—greatest collection of disco and dance songs I'd ever heard.

I only have one playlist, sadly... It's something I've done to play on my birthdays, a selection of metal songs with no Harsh Vocals.

Thanks for this thread, it inspired me to create a CMOA playlist I'm making right now. \o/

I knew it was some troper that first introduced me to that song...

edited 5th Jan '13 5:17:34 PM by MikeK

I've been assembling playlists for a now-imaginary radio show based around various themes, most a touch morbid or blackly humorous.

I just made a playlist called "Synthesiseritis", full of songs which feature synthesisers prominently.