Mixtape Mondays

Mixtape Mondays: Contextual Rickroll

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. For those of us in the US, it was Mother’s Day and I hope that went off swimmingly for everyone. Me… well we spent some time on the side of a very busy turnpike because we had a spectacular flat. For anyone who might not be used to this feature of my blog, Mixtape Mondays are where I create a number of mixtapes and share them with you. As a kid, I was a prolific maker of mixtapes and loved the structure of lining up songs in a specific order to convey a feeling. The original series ran for 20 episodes before I ran out of creative juice, and now we are on week three of this revival. Who knows how long I will keep it going this time, but I still have a bit more ammunition ready to go.

Contextual Rickroll

The internet has a proud tradition of bait and switch tactics, and one of the proudest of these traditions is hyping something up and then linking the Never Gonna Give You Up video by Rick Astley. I am not sure why this one artifact of a bygone age came to represent the epitome of cringe, but it did. However too often it seems like folks view this one video as some sort of isolated incident or an odd happening that makes no sense. However friends… I am here to tell you that the theme song of the Rickroll, was absolutely an element of the times in which the song was created. I’ve kicked around the notion of creating a playlist for a while that places the song in its proper conditions. When I was in seventh grade I had fairly major sinus surgery and spent quite a bit of time laying in the hospital. Given that I grew up with cable… and as a result without MTV… I consumed as much as I could possibly watch. Never Gonna Give You Up was a new song at this time, and I present to you the auditory landscape of this era.

Track LIst

  • Heaven Is A Place On Earth – Belinda Carlisle
  • You Keep Me Hangin On – Kim Wilde
  • Tonight, Tonight, Tonight – Genesis
  • Higher Love – Steve Winwood
  • I Heard a Rumor – Bananarama
  • So Emotional – Whitney Houston
  • Heart And Soul – T’Pau
  • Breakout – Swing Out Sister
  • Glory of Love – Peter Cetera
  • Someday – Glass Tiger
  • Broken Wings – Mr. Mister
  • Holding Back the Years – Simply Red
  • Tell It to My Heart – Taylor Dayne
  • Never Gonna Give You Up – Rick Astley

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

That friend brings to close the third Mixtape Monday in this new series. I can’t say that I am going to be listening to this one a ton, but it served a very specific purpose. Think of this as an auditory time capsule to place the Rickroll in its original context. For those who might be finding this as your first Mixtape Mondays post, I keep an archive of all of the mixtapes I have created shown below. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and I hope I manage to finish up a few more mixes before next Monday.

Mixtape Mondays: Immaculately Overwhelmed

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had an excellent weekend. Last week was fairly dominated with guide posts about Mastodon/Fediverse, but hopefully this week we can get back to the regular sorts of nonsense that I provide. Today however I am bringing you the second new mix of what I am at least mentally thinking of as “season 2” of this project. For anyone tuning today fresh, I was one of those kids who constantly made mixtapes for myself and for my friends… even used them as a wildly ineffective way of trying to flirt. There is something about the art of placing songs in a specific order that I love, and I even go overboard enough to create some custom fake album art.

Immaculately Overwhelmed

Something that I realized in the time between my previous mixtape spree and now, is that I never really plumbed the depths of Emo Rock. I was way the fuck too old to adopt this as a style and way of life, but I spent plenty of time listening to this music. While as a Gen X I mostly viewed Emo as a resurgence of the Goth roots of The Cure and Bauhaus mixed through the party hard ethic of Blink-182. The end result was an extremely enjoyable rock phase from the mid to late 2000s. As frat rock began to fade it was replaced by this more deeply introspective version that honestly I related to quite a bit more. The scene kids that followed, even felt quite a bit like my little skater punk era. It is funny as you age, how you can clearly seen the connective fabric between different movements in music and culture. The only problem is you age out of being relevant to the oncoming generation, and as such those attempts at wisdom fade into the void. The cycle repeats for eternity.

Track List

  • Welcome to the Black Parade – My Chemical Romance
  • The Kill – Thirty Seconds to Mars
  • The Diary of Jane – Breaking Benjamin
  • Misery Business – Paramore
  • Savior – Rise Against
  • Until the Day I Die – Story Of The Year
  • I Write Sins Not Tragedies – Panic! At The Disco
  • Scars – Papa Roach
  • Face Down – The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
  • Miss Murder – AFI
  • Dance, Dance – Fall Out Boy
  • MakeDamnSure – Taking Back Sunday
  • Can’t Be Saved – Senses Fail
  • Move Along – The All-American Rejects

Listen On Spotify

Listen On Youtube

Listen On Tidal

Well folks that is it for another round of Mixtape Mondays. I hope this playlist hits the spot as much as it did for me. This would be number twenty two in total, and for those just now catching up you can check out the full list over at my archive page. I have a few mixes that are in a fluid state right now, and I will need to spend some time this week to dislodge them from the logjam they are in currently. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and we will continue this nonsense next week.

Mixtape Mondays: Zombie Sexfiend

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Good Morning Friends! First off sorry for the complete lack of a podcast this weekend. We were experiencing some severe weather and it seemed like a really bad idea to be sequestered up in my office as it was hitting. Next up I am bringing back Mixtape Mondays! For those who did not experience this last year, I had a semi-weekly running series where I gave you a brand new mixtape each Monday morning. I made it through twenty of them before my inspiration ran out, but recently I have been crafting Mixtapes again, and you my readers are benefiting from it.

For some backstory… I was one of those kids who was constantly making mixtapes. Since I was one of the few that had a stereo with dual cassette tapes, I had the ability to easily dub things. Growing up in a small town, when anyone got something… it was passed around heavily which lead to me crafting a lot of custom mixes for my friends. I have a specific love for the way songs flow together on an album, and I think the art of album creature has suffered in the era of buying individual songs on iTunes. So this series was my attempt to bring back the mixtape via Spotify and YouTube playlist. Since I have personally moved on to Tidal I am including those now as well.

Zombie Sexfiend

Most of my mixes have a starting point, and for this one it was Rob Zombie. I am cheating and including both a song from White Zombie and a song from his solo career… which is still more or less White Zombie. One of the things that I have had to do with this second generation… is go through all of my previous mixes and log them in a spreadsheet because it is getting too freaking hard to remember if I have used a song before or not. I have a few personal rules… never repeat a song I have used before and never repeat a band in the same mix. However I have found creative ways to cheat before… like on a mix that was Blink 182 focused I also included a bunch of things from Blink 182 adjacent side projects. This mix however is things that fit neatly into the auditory realm of White Zombie. I hope you all enjoy!

Track List

  • Jurassitol – Filter
  • More Human Than Human – White Zombie
  • The Chemicals Between Us – Bush
  • Guilty – Gravity Kills
  • Save Yourself – Stabbing Westward
  • The Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails
  • Just One Fix – Ministry
  • After the Flesh – My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult
  • Dragula – Rob Zombie
  • Sleep Now In the Fire – Rage Against The Machine
  • Zero – Smashing Pumpkins
  • Mudshovel – Staind
  • Stitches – Orgy
  • Pepper – Butthole Surfers

Listen On Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen on Tidal

That begins what is hopefully the second generation of Mixtape Mondays. This would be number twenty one if you count them sequentially however. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep this going, but I do have several mixes that I am actively working on as well as a few that I have completed. I have a few things that I am working on that sort of stretch the boundaries of my musical tastes, so it will be interesting to see how those work out. As always if you are new to this series and want to catch up, you can check out the full archives here:

Mixtape Mondays: Melancholeidoscope

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Good Morning Friends! It is time once more for me to present you with a blend of music for the week ahead. For those who might be new to my blog, every Monday for the past several months I have been presenting you with a new Mixtape. Sure it is actually just a YouTube or Spotify playlist, but I assembled it in the loving manner that I used to assemble custom mixtapes for my friends. I am uncertain how long inspiration will keep this section of the blog alive, but it has done so for twenty posts thus far.

Melancholeidoscope

Lately, I have been struggling a bit with melancholy, but it isn’t like it has just been one unified feeling but more a kaleidoscope of feelings. So there you go… this one is a portmanteau of those two words. Sometimes you listen to down songs because you are down… but also you are not looking to be cheered up and are fine with staying down. This journey all started when I heard something on the radio that I had not heard in years… and started to piece together an album around that song… and then proceeded to edit it out of the mix in the first place. It is funny how the creative process works sometimes, and your original inspiration is chucked aside for something new. Essentially this album is a mixture of some of my favorite melancholy songs. Some have hope for better days, and some just wallow in that feeling and that is okay. Sometimes we have to be down, but it helps to have friends along for the journey. A song can be like an old familiar friend that you have not visited in a really long time, and it similarly is amazing how many emotions come rushing back as soon as you open that door.

Track List

  • Everybody’s Changing – Keane
  • Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
  • A Long December – Counting Crows
  • Romeo And Juliet – The Killers
  • Someday? – Concrete Blonde
  • One – U2
  • You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty
  • Walking After You – Foo Fighters
  • Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
  • Yellow Ledbetter – Pearl Jam
  • Patience – Guns N’ Roses
  • High and Dry – Radiohead
  • Brass in Pocket – Pretenders

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

And that friend is my twentieth mix, and I gotta be honest I was not sure this series would have lasted this long. I am not sure how many more of these I have in me, but I am going to keep creating when the inspiration strikes me. Sometimes an album builds itself. For this one each time I thought of a song to add, listening to it would make me think of another song and then I simply had to cull what no longer worked. I think at one point I had almost thirty songs on the list and whittled it down to the blend that I present today. As always if you are tuning into this series late and wanting to catch up you can check out the archive below.