Have you noticed that I like Halloween? I made some more Halloween-themed mazes. I felt like doing a haunted house and a graveyard. My drawing skills have waned, I need more practice. Third book? Maybe. I have sold 10’s of copies of the others so far. If you try these mazes out, be sure to post your solution on your social media of choice, and tag me. I’m @AiXeLsyD13 just about everywhere. You can even listen to one of my Halloween playlists while you do it… or the monster playlists, or the newest one: Halloween | Certified Bangers 💀🦇🕸️🕷️
I’m building a Bass Case playlist on Amazon Music. I’m looking for songs with a killer bass-only or at least bass-heavy intro. Mostly punk, metal, rock, etc. but open to just about anything. Bass guitar or a bass VI, not electronic bass or keys.
This is the start of it (but not all of it) so far:
Metallica – “(Anesthesia)—Pulling Teeth”
Black Sabbath – “N.I.B.”
Misfits – “London Dungeon”
Type O Negative – “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)”
Rancid – “Journey to the End of the East Bay”
Alice In Chains – “Would?”
Beastie Boys – “Gratitude”
Queen – “Under Pressure [feat. David Bowie]”
Green Day – “Longview”
Ozzy Osbourne – “No More Tears”
Motörhead – “Ace of Spades”
AFI – “Miss Murder”
Primus – “My Name Is Mud”
The White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army”
Metallica – “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
Beastie Boys – “Sabotage [Explicit]”
Queen – “Another One Bites The Dust”
The Cure – “Just like Heaven”
Guns N’ Roses – “Rocket Queen”
Megadeth – “Peace Sells”
Anthrax – “Got The Time”
The Cure – “Burn”
Operation Ivy – “Sound System”
Jimi Hendrix – “Born Under a Bad Sign”
Black Flag – “Six Pack”
Primus – “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver”
Fugazi – “Waiting Room”
Faith No More – “We Care a Lot”
Guns N’ Roses – “You Could Be Mine”
TOOL – “Schism”
The Dead Milkmen – “Bitchin’ Camaro”
Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Higher Ground”
Black Flag – “TV Party”
Violent Femmes – “Blister In The Sun”
Metallica – “Crash Course In Brain Surgery”
NOFX – “The Idiots Are Taking Over”
Faith No More – “Falling to Pieces”
The Breeders – “Cannonball”
Rick James – “Super Freak”
Duran Duran – “Rio”
Jane’s Addiction – “Mountain Song”
The B-52’s – “Rock Lobster”
Rage Against The Machine – “Bombtrack”
A Flock Of Seagulls – “What Am I Supposed To Do”
Weezer – “Only In Dreams”
The Commodores – “Brick House”
Death Cab For Cutie – “I Will Possess Your Heart”
Iron Maiden – “Killers”
Nirvana – “Lounge Act”
Jane’s Addiction – “Three Days”
Van Halen – “Runnin’ with the Devil”
The Cure – “Fascination Street”
The Smithereens – “Blood And Roses”
The Stone Roses – “I Wanna Be Adored”
Metallica – “King Nothing”
The Byrds – “Eight Miles High”
The Stone Roses – “She Bangs the Drums”
The Clash – “The Magnificent Seven”
Lou Reed – “Walk On the Wild Side”
Joe Jackson – “Got The Time”
Stevie Wonder – “I Wish”
War – “Low Rider”
The Jam – “Pretty Green”
The Temptations – “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”
Sonic Youth – “My Friend Goo”
Pennywise – “Ace of Spades”
The Beatles – “Come Together”
AFI – “Death Of Seasons”
NOFX – “Hobophobic (Scared of Bums)”
Thin Lizzy – “Dancing In The Moonlight (It’s Caught Me In It’s Spotlight)”
The Monkees – “You Just May Be The One”
Metallica – “The God That Failed”
Bad Brains – “The Regulator”
Rancid – “Maxwell Murder”
Deee-Lite – “Groove Is in the Heart”
Talking Heads – “Psycho Killer”
Dead Kennedys – “Viva Las Vegas”
Song name/artist would be more helpful than a Spotify link because I can’t copy/paste from there into Amazon Music.
…and this is subject to change pretty quickly & often.
I have a playlist problem. So, I have a lot of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent playlists. Some I have that are just massive & I listen to them on random. Some are a little more compact. What are your favorite Halloween songs? Anything I’m missing, songs or themes?
If you read this, you know I mostly use Amazon Music, but I do copy stuff to Spotify. I should copy these ones over. I refuse to pay to synch them with Tune My Music though, so I try to wait until I’m close to done to copy it. I may have copied some of these a long time ago.
What are your go-to Halloween songs? What am I missing from these lists?
This is another punk-rock leaning short one. “Bloodbath at Burger King” is an absolute gem, as are many others here. This is what I have so far:
Screeching Weasel – “I Saw The Devil At McDonalds (Demo)”
Teenage Bottlerocket – “Blood Bath At Burger King”
The Berlin Project – “Taco Bell World”
Gas Station Boner Pills – “Fist Fight at the Waffle House”
Richies – “Le Big Mac”
Indigo Girls – “Dairy Queen”
The Knuckleheadz – “Fuck McDz”
Teenage Bottlerocket – “Too Much La Collina”
Wesley Willis – “Rock ‘N Roll McDonald’s”
The Smithereens – “White Castle Blues”
Boris the Sprinkler – “Don’t Really Want To Walk To Taco Bell Without You”
Silly Stu – “McDonald’s in the Pentagon”
Motorpsychos – “Fries With That”
The Aquabats! – “Burger Rain!”
Parry Gripp – “Raining Tacos”
What am I missing? Are there punk-leaning songs about Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Raising Cane’s, or Chick-fil-A? Panera? Jersey Mike’s, Jimmy John’s, Subway, Quizno’s, Vocelli Pizza, Papa John’s, or Domino’s? What about Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr., Checker’s, Rally’s, Five Guy’s, In & Out, Krystal, Jack-in-the-Box, Rax, Arby’s, or Auntie Anne’s? I’ll even take Eat’n Park or Denny’s.
Holy cow, reddit’s r/punk and Facebook’s Oddly Specific Playlists stepped up with some killer suggestions! The list is currently at 85 tracks. Some fit more loosely than others… but close enough counts in horse shoes, hand grenades, and punk rock.
Also, I need to figure out the right plugin to let me embed Amazon playlists here.
Inspired by the comments on a reddit post, I wanted to dig into some pre-“punk” proto-punk. I set Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, & Copilot to the task as I’m fascinated by their ability to parse & compile information if prompted accurately. (I’m also fascinated my their penchant to provide completely incorrect or even made-up information. Some time I will have to blog about my experiment in having them search restaurant menus in an area to see if they serve shellfish. Copilot recommended some seafood places, so clearly it wants to kill me.)
I added my own stuff that some of them disagreed with, but it is my list after all. 🤣 Going back to little Richard and including Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” were points of contention, as I would expect from a conversation with people.
Music snobs aficionados, audiophiles, and punk rock gatekeepers will argue all day every day about the origin of punk… but for me, to be clear, it’s the moment that the Ramones’ self-titled album dropped. So, with that in mind I gave the language models this prompt:
There is and always will be constant debate, but if we agree for the premise of this exercise that the Ramones self-titled debut album was the first punk album… What are 25 songs that should belong on a proto-punk or punk precursor playlist?
I would assume bands that get mentioned as the progenitors would most likely include The Kinks, the Sonics, Link Wray, The Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, & more I’m sure to be missing. Maybe even the band Death who hailed from Detroit MI?
All songs on the list should have been released before April 23, 1976… and be listed in order if release date by single or album, whichever dropped first.
This has been corrected for my typically egregious spelling/typing/lack-of-proofreading errors. After tossing the rules to the wind, keeping to the spirit of punk rock, we arrived here:
“Little Demon” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1956)
“Tutti Frutti” – Little Richard (1955)
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” – Jerry Lee Lewis (1957)
“Rumble” – Link Wray (1958)
“La Bamba” – Ritchie Valens (1958)
“Love Me” – The Phantom (1958)
“Louie Louie” – The Kingsmen (1963)
“Surfin’ Bird” – The Trashmen (1963)
“Baby Let Me Take You Home” – The Animals (1964)
“House of the Rising Sun” – The Animals (1964)
“I’m Crying” – The Animals (1964)
“You Really Got Me” – The Kinks (1964)
“Gloria” – Them (1964)
“I Can’t Explain” – The Who (1964)
“Dirty Water” – The Standells (1966)
“My Generation” – The Who (1965)
“Strychnine” – The Sonics (1965)
“I’m a Man” – The Yardbirds (1965)
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” – The Animals (1965)
“96 Tears” – ? & The Mysterians (1966)
“Wild Thing” – The Troggs (1966)
“Complication” – The Monks (1966)
“Psychotic Reaction” – Count Five (1966)
“Pushin’ Too Hard” – The Seeds (1966)
“7 and 7 Is” – Love (1966)
“I’m Not Like Everybody Else” – The Kinks (1966)
“You’re Gonna Miss Me” – The 13th Floor Elevators (1966)
“Talk Talk” – The Music Machine (1966)
“I’m Waiting for the Man” – The Velvet Underground (1967)
“Doctor Please” – Blue Cheer (1968)
“Sister Ray” – The Velvet Underground (1968)
“Fire” – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968)
“Jigsaw Puzzle” – The Rolling Stones (1968)
“Kick Out the Jams” – MC5 (1969)
“I Wanna Be Your Dog” – The Stooges (1969)
“Little Doll” – The Stooges (1969)
“TV Eye” – The Stooges (1970)
“Paranoid” – Black Sabbath (1970)
“Get It On” – T. Rex (1971)
“School’s Out” – Alice Cooper (1972)
“Suffragette City” – David Bowie (1972)
“Raw Power” – Iggy & The Stooges (1973)
“Search and Destroy” – The Stooges (1973)
“Personality Crisis” – New York Dolls (1973)
“Jet Boy” – New York Dolls (1973)
“Urban Guerrilla” – Hawkwind (1973)
“Violence” – Mott the Hoople (1973)
“Cum On Feel the Noize” – Slade (1973)
“Editions of You” – Roxy Music (1973)
“Ooh La La” – Faces (1973)
“Subway Train” – New York Dolls (1974)
“Hey Joe” – Patti Smith Group (1975)
“Piss Factory” – Patti Smith (1975)
“Roxette” – Dr. Feelgood (1976)
“The Next Big Thing” – The Dictators (1975)
“Chez Maximes” – The Hollywood Brats (1976)
“After Eight” – Neu! (1975)
“Ghost Rider” – Suicide (1977)
“Little Johnny Jewel” – Television (1975)
“30 Seconds Over Tokyo” – Pere Ubu (1975)
“Burn My Eye” – Radio Birdman (1976)
“Politicians in My Eyes” – Death (1976)
“Cherry Bomb” – The Runaways (1976)
“Roadrunner” – The Modern Lovers (1976)
“She Cracked” – The Modern Lovers (1976)
“Shake Some Action” – Flamin’ Groovies (1976)
“Blank Generation” – Richard Hell & the Voidoids (1977)
“Anarchy in the U.K.” – The Sex Pistols (1976)
“Sonic Reducer” – Dead Boys (1977)
“Neat Neat Neat” – The Damned (1977)
“Chinese Rocks” – Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers (1977)
“Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads (1977)
I used Tune My Music to import it to Spotify from a text file, then copy to Amazon Music from there. I tried to go to Amazon first, but it messed up quite a bit of the songs. I did have to add “7 and 7 Is” by Love manually as it shows as “Seven and Seven Is” on Spotify. It weirdly plopped a Bob Marley song in that spot. Amazon was full of weird covers and the wrong songs when trying to import from text.
So, what do you think of the list? What’s missing? What needs added? Are my parameters skewed? Do you not accept anything past the date of what parameters were set? What obscure band that 14 people heard at the time is missing from this list? Don’t come at me with the Sex Pistols over the Ramones. Should we whittle it back to 25? Only have 1 song per artist? Come at me with healthy discourse.
Die, slugs! Die! Recently I had an issue with what appears to be slugs going to town on the bean & pepper plants in my vegetable garden. It has been rather wet lately. It certainly could be other nefarious garden pests, but I may have a prejudice for these creepy little mollusks thanks to my shellfish & mollusk food allergies.
In with the shellfish thing, I’m weird about diatomaceous earth. It; seems like breathing it in can be sus, and it can be harmful to bees. I have crushed up some egg shells and strewn them about, but I’m not certain how effective that is. I try to always rinse them well & add to my compost anyway.
I decided to make some slug traps out of stuff from the recycling bin & a PBR. It was weird to buy 1 can of beer. I rarely drink any more & didn’t need a case or a 6-pack. I did finish off what was left of the 24 oz. can after I baited the traps though.
🚫🐌
I used two empty sour cream tubs, an empty cottage cheese tub, an iced tea jug, & a coffee container. We are perpetually excepting rain, so that’s why I made the covers. I made the cuts very quicky & very sloppy with my pocketknife because I’m impatient at times and of course decided to do this as the sun was going down.
I probably should anchor the covers somehow… but they have not blown away yet.
This morning, I counted 3 slugs overcome by a compulsion to consume delicious fermented hops.
Pour one out for the dead slugs, and drink to their memory as you listen to my Beer 🍻 playlist. Or, if you wanna get crazy, I have a Pabst Blue Ribbon 🥇 playlist. Why are there so many songs that name drop PBR? All I can think of that mentions Yuengling is Nerf Herder’s “New Jersey Girl.” Do any songs mention Straub?
What has proven to work well for you to repel garden pests? I have a small garden this year. I do like to keep the pollinators happy, and the birds n’ squirrels too.
The latest one is Contradictions / Companions and it’s made up of songs that contradict or compliment each other. I mainly listen to Amazon Music, but this one was fun so I copied it to Spotify too.
I have a bunch more weird ones. Sometimes I reach out to Oddly Specific Playlists on Facebook or r/punk for help. Some have a specific order, some are designed for chaos goblins who always choose random.
Here’s some fun ones if you listen to Amazon, let me know if you want me to copy them to Spotify! (I usually do that with Tune My Music):
Halloween has the coolest music. I have made some playlists on various platforms over the years, Amazon & Spotify being the most recent. I thought I’d not only put them all in once place, but also share. I’m always adding to them and changing. I’m listening to the 1st list now.
This stated as a Twitter post/thread, and is ending up here.
Streaming services like @spotify and @amazonmusic need a feature that adds in related bands. I can tell @alexa99 to play Rancid, but I also wouldn't mind Lars Frederikson and the Bastards being in there, or Transplants, or Tim's solo stuff. Or even Rancid covers.
Streaming services like Spotify and Amazon Music need a feature that adds in related bands. I can tell Alexa to play Rancid, but I also wouldn’t mind Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards being in there, or Transplants, or Tim’s solo stuff. Or even Rancid covers.
Streaming needs to get smarter already. The Spotify “super grouper” feature picks the absolute worst songs from each selected artist.
Of course, I could just make a playlist. But, with a band like Blink-182 in the news, I wanted to dig into Angels & Airwaves, Boxcar Racer, & +44. I don’t know which songs to add to a playlist.
Also, if I want to listen to ALL, I could want to listen to the Descendents too. What about Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds, Loaded, Neurotic Boy Outsiders, Slash, Slash’s Snakepit, Miles Kennedy & The Conspirators, all of it.
Snuff, Duncan Redmonds, Dogpiss, Guns ‘n’ Wankers would be another example. As would Misfits, Danzig, Samhain, Son of Sam, etc.
Saying one phrase or typing one into a searchboith to be able to bring them all up.
Is that bandtoband.com still a thing? That could be a reference for connected bands.
Teenage Bottlerocket & the Lillingtons. Screeching Weasel & The Riverdales. Ann Beretta, Foundation, Rob Huddleston, & Sixer. Metallica & Megadeth. Green Day, Foxboro Hot Tubs, The Network, & 300 other bands.
Even unrelated bands. Can I just say “Alexa play songs by Flogging Molly and The Dropkick Murphys” and not confuse the shit out of it?
I have an Ozzy/Black Sabbath playlist on Spotify with a ton of great stuff, including a plethora of killer covers. It took time to curate. I have similar ones for Metallica, Misfits, Guns N’ Roses, & Rancid. I need to transition them all to Amazon Music… we have the family account there since we’re using the firestick. I like Spotify’s suggestions better… but I can listen to Amazon sans commercials. I refuse to subscribe to another service, sorry Spotify. Oddly, most of those transfer services have a paywall once you surpass an unreasonably low amount of songs. I don’t even my remember my Pandora logins.
I would think AI could have probably pretty quickly picked up what I was putting down & fleshed it out.
I wouldn’t expect it to go this deep, but it could link Flogging Molly to Fastway.
With Hip Hop too… say all the solo projects of the members of N.W.A.? All that in one would be awesome.
Does something like this exist and I’m just not aware of it? I miss WinAmp.
I need to rip all kinds of older, local, & obscure stuff and put it on my own damn streaming server. I understand Google Music would let you do that before it collapsed? There is really a lot of stuff out there that you can’t stream, and some of my favorites don’t have their entire catalogs available to stream.
Help me out, audiofiles, music nerds, and techno geeks!
World (and Lunar) Domination 