There Will Be Playlists

As far as I'm concerned, making playlists is a dead - or at least dying - art. While I'm not quite the right age to have lived through the glories of cassette swapping in the 90's, some of my fondest musical memories from  my teens involve sitting on the floor of my dad's study crafting my own mix CDs. My efforts were childish but damn if they weren't fun to make: designing album covers (with hideous clipart); thinking of a witty title; I even had a device for printing onto the non-shiny side of the CD!

My epic; my saga was the Anti-Pop series. It was born, it died, it went on a world tour and was gloriously resurrected over a quadrilogy (or maybe a qunitrilogy) of compilations. A messiah formed of rock and metal arisen to smite all that chart, pop and dance rubbish.
Naive as these compilations were I put a lot of effort into ordering them just so. The mood of one track would flow almost seemlessly into the next - although to be honest they all followed the same pattern of increasingly heavy songs culminating in whatever was the most extreme music I can could handle at the time.

The format of the CD with its laughable 74 minute - or sometimes 80, oh the joy of squeezing in one last song! - running time, forced care and careful consideration of content. Maybe I wouldn't choose that monster anthem, maybe instead a sneaky B-side or track from an unsigned band could nestle between Master Of Puppets and Raining Blood. Themes, leitmotifs, 3 songs in a row with the word METAL in the title, all was possible with just a CD and an idea. But in these mp3 days, size is of no concern. Why indeed cut anything from your list of monster tracks? Why not just pile them all in a big heap and hit shuffle? Which is what I did with when I first got an iPod, like all the rest of you did too, and a small part of us all died. The Anti-Pop was never seen again...

My creative yearning for putting songs in a sequential order reared its head again, however, about 2 years ago. I decided to embark on a playlist making experience once more, the only catch was that I could only include bands/musicians I'd discovered on Spotify. This was of course during the 4th great era of my musical development (a theme for future blogs) where I bought a Spotify subscription and set out to listen to as much as I possibly could while pretending to work*. It took me nearly a year to create an epic 100 track playlist, named after a quirky track by Black Dice. Despite its 100 track length - no more, no less, thems the rules - I had considered each transition carefully, moving almost seemlessly between all the genres I was interested in: avant rock, synth-pop, contemporary classical, world music, pseudo-world music, noise, glitch, ambient. That's the most beautiful part of playlist making, drawing links between such disparate and different musics.
Then Spotify decided to fuck things up and remove stuff from its library, this included the title track of my most precious creation. So I thought screw it, I'll chop it in half and declare it the official What Was Music? playlist.

What Was Music?

It doesn't fit on a CD though. And also its almost 4 hours long... Enjoy!

The Anti-Pop lives!

*Dear current employer, I swear that this was during my last job.