Culture
WOUB Halloween ’18 Playlists: News Team
By: WOUB News Team
Posted on:
Allison Hunter: Tracks 1-4
I’m not a fan of Halloween or anything scary or suspenseful but I’m trying to be a good sport. These are some of the not-so-obvious songs that come to mind when, I (forced to) think of ambiance setters for this time of year.
“Freaks Come Out At Night” – Whodini
“Put Your Lights On” – Santana ft. Everlast
“Superstition” – Stevie Wonder
“The Boogie Monster” – Gnarls Barkley
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Susan Tebben: Tracks 5-8
“Yearbook” – Hanson
I know, I know, but walk with me here. The booming minor-key piano intro, the lurking strings, the splashy cymbals like puddles on a rainy night. The lyrics talk about a boy’s picture missing from a yearbook, but with lyrics like “it’s lying in your silence, rumors of Johnny’s mystery,” something just doesn’t seem right with this disappearance. I just recently heard them play this with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and the full orchestra made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. My partner is still so creeped out by the song she made me hold her hand while they played it.
“Other Side” – Bruno Mars feat. Cee-Lo Green
This song came as a complete surprise as I listened to a mix of Bruno’s pop hits. It’s catchy, but then it’s gets you with the creepy content and voice modulations and suddenly it’s Halloween.
“Werewolves of London” – Warren Zevon
I’ll admit, I’m not a big Halloween person, but I can never take this song seriously, so it’s a fun take on the holiday.
“Psycho Killer” – The Talking Heads
A little serial killer content melded with some French. What could go wrong? I may even choose David Byrne’s huge-shouldered blazer as my costume this year.
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Atish Baidya: Tracks 9-11
“Thriller” – Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson’s Thriller was my first every album as child. I remember playing that cassette tape over and over again.
“Monster Mash” – Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers
Predictable, yes but no less catchy.
“I Put a Spell On You” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Hocus Pocus is one of my favorite movies.
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Aaron Payne: Tracks 12-16
“Corpse Disposal for Dummies” – The Flaming Tsunamis
The Flaming Tsunamis are a band that put out a couple of albums during their run. While I enjoyed them all, Fear Everything stays in my rotation today.
This song is a good example of why: Bouncing back and forth between high octane ska-core riff and funky hooks nearly seamlessly.
Bang your head and tap your toe to this spooky tale of a corpse disposal gone wrong.
“Everyone I Know Has Fangs” – He Is Legend
I like to describe He Is Legend as “If you southern deep fried Metallica and then made them read a bunch of gothic horror.”
Many of the songs lead singer Schuylar Croom croons have eerie vibes that you can dang near taste.
This song is a head banger dedicated to the feeling of isolation in the midst of people you feel you can’t trust.
“George Romero Will Be At Our Wedding” – Showbread
Showbread was a self-proclaimed “Raw Rock” band that was heavily influenced by the horror genre.
Other songs in their discography directly reference the Evil Dead franchise, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Kafka, and numerous other staples of the horror genre.
But I picked this song as the standout because it’s a zombie love story with one of my favorite lyrics being
“I don’t believe that love will rot away
So first aim for the heart then aim for the head
If true love last forever, then love doesn’t die
It just becomes the living dead”
Hold your best ghoul close as you sway to this one.
“Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” – deadmau5 feat. Rob Swire
Get your Halloween party bumping with this electronic dance music jam.
I think it’s one of my favorite songs of all time. But I also believe its inclusion on a spooky playlist has merit.
The title conjures up imagery of the macabre, lackadaisical though it may be.
The music video is about deadmau5 dying and becoming a dancing bed sheet ghost.
The synth that drives the song sound a bit like a theremin at times and a spooky organ at others.
The lyrics are about going to and EDM concert with a potential romantic partner, taking drugs in hopes of making a better connect but failing after the partner loses their high.
What’s scarier than navigating the social anxieties that make up the dating scene?
“A Nightmare on My Street” – DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
There are a lot of things we encounter in this life that simply make you ask “Why?”
Then there things that make you ask “Why?” and the understanding that there will never be an answer torments you until the day your bones turn to ash in the grave.
This song does that for me.
DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince made the song for consideration to be included in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.” The producers of the film passed, however.
But the two decided they would put the song out on their own.
It was released as a single in 1988 and was later the lead song on their album “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper.”
So basically, these two men sat down and decided that:
- They needed this song about Nightmare on Elm Street
- They didn’t need to ask for permission to release it.
- It was a better attention grabber for their album than “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” “Here We Go Again,” and “Let’s Get Busy Baby.”
- They should release the song around the same time as “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master” was in theaters.
There is something to be said about these decisions as the song hit a high of #15 on the Hot 100 chart.
New Line Cinema, however, sued Smith and Jeff’s record label for copyright infringement. The two parties settled out of court.
I don’t think this song gets made if artists other than DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince try to make it.
I’ll forever be haunted by the fact that I’ll never understand why these two made the decisions they did for this song. And that it worked out pretty well for them.
It does slap, though.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk about “Nightmare on My Street.”
Emily Votaw: Tracks 17-21
“Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” — David Bowie
This is the eponymous tune from the 1980 Bowie album, the first he released after the famous (and hard to beat,) Berlin trilogy. The whole record is fantastic, and you should check it out, even if it’s not terribly seasonally appropriate more than any other Bowie album is “Halloween-y.”
What defines “Halloween music” as a genre, anyway?
Is it the subject matter? Is it lyrically supposed to be compromised of images of ghouls and goblins and ghosts? Is it supposed to “sound funny?” Does there need to be a zany soundscape involved? I have more to say on this as my list of Halloween tunes continue, but I will say that Robert Fripp’s guitar work on this one certainly sounds uncanny, and that the synthesized percussion lends an odd feel to something that was obviously recorded in analog.
Bowie sings the whole thing in an exaggerated Cockney accent, and the song itself follows what seems to be a women’s dissent into mental illness following a claustrophobic romance — a subject that comes up again and again in Bowie’s work, especially on those fantastic Iggy Pop records he contributed to heavily on in the late ’70s — Lust for Life and The Idiot.
“Excitable Boy” — Warren Zevon
This tune is a very scary one. I remember listening to it for the first time on the 1978 hit record that it serves as the title track for with my father when I was in high school, and being struck by how terrifying this song is. It’s one of several obvious Halloween hits, namely “Werewolves of London,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” on this album.
Just check out these lyrics:
“He took little Suzie to the Junior Prom
Excitable boy, they all said
And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable boy
After ten long years they let him out of the home
Excitable boy, they all said
And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable boy”
I needn’t say more!
“You and Oblivion” — Robyn Hitchcock
As I mentioned earlier, the question of what defines a “Halloween” song is a tough one, unless you go by my personal definition, which states that it simply must illuminate something scary.
This tune illuminates something quite terrifying indeed — the quiet guy who is always hanging out in the back of the room: Death!
The song also has some trippy Halloween-esque imagery, mostly of “sitting alone by the tombs,” “under the obelisks,” “leaves on your Ouija board,” and the like. The song is from Hitchcock’s 1996 album Moss Elixir, which he crafted after the devastating loss of his father, and you can really feel that on this song.
I’ve seen Hitchcock live in concert twice, and the best instance was the second, which was on a chilly November night on the shores of Lake Erie (in the warm embrace of the Music Box Supper Club) with my dad. Hitchcock waxed poetic about November being the “month of the dead,” but not in a scary or sinister way — in a really sincere sort of way that just made me realize that someday I’ll know a lot of people who have passed on, and how much I miss those who already have.
“Halloween Spooks” — Lambert, Hendricks & Ross
This is just a classic in my opinion. The scary sound effects are so organic and silly, and depending on whether you’re driving alone late at night, maybe kind of spooky. I don’t have a lot to say about this one other than I really like it, and it always ends up on my Halloween playlists. Maybe because of it’s old-timey instrumentation and vague lyrics, it’s especially eerie in a sort of effervescent way.
“S.I.B – Swelling Itchy Brain” — Devo
Even when it’s not the Halloween season, I turn to Devo for my spooky music needs. The band was founded on the tenants of de-evolution, the belief that instead of progressing, human beings are actually regressing, which serves as an explanation for herd mentality and astounding cruelties that abound in American culture. The concept was a joke at first between the band members, who were art students who met at Kent State University in the late ’60s. It became serious after the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970.
“S.I.B.” is one of the best artistic depictions of a panic attack, in my opinion. At the same time, it feels like a vaguely comical and kitschy take on a science fiction-y disease — a painful yellow headache, followed by all the pictures, in all the magazines, coming to life. Sounds pretty spooky to me.