The Verge Playlists

As you may have heard, it has been two years since the Snapchat-turned-Twitter video “Damn, Daniel” changed the way we think about viral content, white sneakers, and Weezer.

If you haven’t heard, all you need to know is that two years ago, two boys became very famous for a short period of time — a period of time with ups and downs and baffling surprise twists — after one of them filmed the other one wearing a pair of white sneakers. Observing the white sneakers, he shouted, “Damn, Daniel! Back at it again with the white Vans.” It was silly, and it was good.

Last year, I asked a friend for some advice. He admitted, first, that he was underqualified to give it. (This is how happy people preface everything.) Then he sent me a lyric from a Los Campesinos! song from 2008, implying that I should go ahead and consider it applicable to my present romantic imbroglio.

It went like this: “I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love / is to like the other slightly less than you get in return.”

Something we don’t talk about enough is American football.

Just kidding! Something we don’t talk about enough is that period of time between September 2016 and December 2017 when Dutch police were training eagles to hunt drones. They had to stop doing it because the eagles didn’t really always feel like hunting drones, and they definitely didn’t feel like following orders from cops. It never really seemed like a great idea, and falconer Robert Muster told the NL Times at the outset: ”If an eagle can not catch his prey, he may become so frustrated that he picks up something else. Eagle talons are so strong that it can easily pierce a child’s head.”

What’s the worst that could happen tonight, the most loaded night of the year? You could have no one to kiss or no one to get drunk with, or worse — you could have both and still not have a good time. It’s so much pressure and even the nicest things you can think of will likely involve so much “walking outside” and “being in a crowd” and “money,” that it couldn’t possibly be worth it. A new year? I’ve seen 940 of them already. An alternate plan that I believe is very good is to sit at home and watch a warm, non-challenging movie about love and friendship and wearing turtlenecks under blazers. For example: the best New Year’s Eve movie of all time, Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, which features an unhelpful explanation of the song “Auld Lang Syne.”

Okay! Sure, you two.

One of the best parts of summer is drinking alcohol outside. It's pretty cool to do anything outside in the summer, but with drinking, you can convince yourself that you're doing something without actually doing anything. This playlist is for when you start your day drinking outside and end your day drinking outside (hopefully with someone else's varsity jacket around your shoulders). It's for those days when you have nothing to do except reapply sunscreen, because SPF is important, no matter how drunk you are.

Don't play this on shuffle, because it's got an order to it. It kicks off with Fetty Wap's garbled love song "Trap Queen," which is the 2015 song of the summer (no question), and slows down as the sun sets into some nice mood music for when that night chill makes you wanna find a body.

It has been a glorious week for the internet. We were perplexed by the color of a (kind of tacky) dress, we got emotionally invested in a high-speed llama chase, a new season of House of Cards is on Netflix, and, most importantly, the FCC has officially voted in favor of Title II classification for the internet. Let’s raise our glasses to Tom Wheeler with this playlist of tracks by supporters of net neutrality and songs that capture the tenacious spirit of the open internet.

If you’re in a revolutionary mood, I suggest you start with "Try Out Your Voice" by Big D & the Kids Table. Revel along with Deniece Williams’ "Let’s Hear It For the Boy," which I can only imagine was intended to laud Chairman Wheeler. Or maybe just take a cue from the FCC, and get funky with the Menahan Street Band.

Today is a very special day. Today is a day we celebrate love and hope and love and kissing and sex and hearts and candy and having someone who will care when you die. It's very real, and very serious. Some people don't have that person, and for those people, I've made the only playlist you'll ever need.

There's the pinnacle of loneliness: Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" (based on a true story). There's a desperate torch song: Dusty Springfield's truly pitiful "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me." There's Drake, alone and drunk in a basement: "Marvins Room." There's the Violent Femmes' pleading, self-loathing "Please Do Not Go." A few loops should take you through the night. I tried to end the playlist on a high note with Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You in the End," but you can decide for yourself if that's actually optimistic.

Because I am insane, four months ago I decided to start writing my own custom Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition campaign. And starting on Friday, February 13th, my efforts will be tested when I lead two groups of my colleagues from The Verge through a nightmare of half-drunkenly written lore. It's going to be a blast.

But as fun as it is to write thousands of words about fantastical places and people, the sheer scope of the task was daunting. So help came in the form of aural inspiration — just not the kind from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. After work, I'd pop on a pair of headphones, sink into brooding beats, and craft quests of intrigue and horror. Let's go.

At some point on Sunday, if you’re watching the Super Bowl, you’ll hear a familiar sound. Not the sound of a referee making a bad call, or the sound of an abandoned hot dog falling to the floor, or the sound of half-drunk fans growling at other half-drunk fans. No, I'm talking about the sound of jock jams; the only sound capable of satisfying an entire stadium of aggressively competitive people with a lot of money. There's "Tootsie Roll," "Pump Up The Jam," "It Takes Two." Even if you haven't listened to those songs in years, I bet you can hear them in your head right now if you try.

Inspired by the mid-90s compilation tapes of the same name, I’ve put together a playlist of "Future Jock Jams." Not songs that will be jock jams in the future, but songs that already are jock jams of the future. It’s mostly a collection of polished future-funk sprinkled with enough sucrose to make your dentist hate you, but there’s also Makonnen and his lounge-singer drawl, one muddled Travis Scott remix, and a gurgling rework of Popcaan, the Jamaican dancehall artist who put out one of the best albums of 2014. Personally, I’ve got no love for the NFL, but this playlist will make you feel like you could pull off a 27-yard interception up-the-middle reverse-sweep at the fourth down. Or whatever.

CES is all about sensory overload. Everything we see, touch, and even taste is amplified here, all in service of products that line these halls for as far as the eye can see. And what do we hear? A chorus of clashing melodies riding atop the din of excited press, buyers, and fans waiting for just a glimpse of the near future. If you're not at some keynote or event, it's easy enough to let this noise wash over you as you turn your gaze to the future. But if you listen closely, you'll get a sense of what moves the minds behind CES right now.

They, too, are into Apocalypse Pop.

There are two things I love in this world: breaking news and songs that reference outdated technology. So given everything Sony-related this week, my playlist therefore had a very simple rule from the onset: every song must reference the Walkman. That's it.

Nicki Minaj's third studio album The Pinkprint officially drops on Monday, and as of this writing there's a good chance you may already have it on your computer or audio listening device. If so, carry on; let's regroup after the weekend and chat about our feelings. If not, now's as good a time as any to get hyped and remind yourself why a new Nicki album is something to be excited about.

Nicki's pop leanings are still controversial among those who fell in love with her in her mixtape days. I tend to believe that she should pursue whatever sound she wants to pursue, but I get the frustration with the fact that the massive popularity of 2012's "Starships" would inevitably overshadow her more out-there stuff; that it would become the first Nicki song you think of instead of, say, "I Get Crazy." The early word on The Pinkprint is that it's neither Pop Nicki nor Mixtape Nicki. But regardless of where that verdict lands, let's just take a moment to appreciate all Nickis, especially the underrated and/or too quickly forgotten Nickis (When's the last time you listened to that "Bottoms Up" verse? Probably not recently enough.) This is a "Starships"-free playlist, but it's also a "Monster"-free one (which you should hopefully already know is one of the best verses of all time.)

The last few years has seen a big return of two particular music scenes: emo and pop-punk. Both had big moments in the recent decades — emo in the '90s, and pop-punk at the turn of the century — but the early aughts saw the most popular bands from each scene "make it" while the rest of them broke. Now the scenes are bigger, they’re more openly progressive, and the bands that comprise them are good. The wonderful mix of young talent and veteran bands blend being clever with the flat-out bizarre — especially in the way they name things. From the bands' names (Tigers Jaw, A Great Big Pile of Leaves, Andrew Jackson Jihad) to the album titles (Have You Seen My Prefrontal Cortex?, Chicago Bowls), and especially the song titles below, you couldn’t get any weirder if you cut up a dictionary and stirred up the pieces.

Now before you say what I know you’re going to say, let it be known I’m casting a really wide net on purpose with these genres here. People get really touchy when you throw these terms around or claim that the scenes ever really went away. Genres are imperfect methods of classification, but it’s the best we can do save for wasting our breath hyphenating 10 words to accurately describe a band’s sound. So let go of that nonsense and have some fun with these strange and beautiful bands.

People tend to think of love and hate as opposites. Truth is, the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. Caring deeply vs. not caring at all. Love and hate are in fact two sides of the same emotional coin. Positive and negative forces each with the capacity to jolt otherwise rational humans into fits of insanity.

If you've ever truly loved someone then you've probably hated them with proportional vigor. This playlist is for anyone who dared open their heart to the first rays of dawn like a dewy little daffodil, only to have it caulked shut from scorn's fetid excretions. It starts foreboding with a sinewy violence that slowly crumbles beneath the weight of deceit and despair; leaving you coiled upon yourself, exhausted — just like any good relationship.

"Horror films are great for composers for all the obvious reasons." said Charles Bernstein, the composer of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, in 2012. "These kinds of pictures provide a wide range of stylistic and experimental musical possibilities."

No time of the year is as frightening as Halloween. Indeed, the thought of strange children ringing my doorbell, demanding processed sugar is enough to make me shudder. Call it clairvoyance, but I see the ghost of diabetes hovering over their tiny shoulders. But it’s also the perfect time to celebrate horror films, and the soundtracks that give them life. So here we go, a playlist of terrifying tunes from Halloween’s greatest pictures.

If you told me Richard D. James — better known as Aphex Twin — was an alien, I’d believe you. He makes beats from the inside of a bank vault, he owns a tank, and when Madonna begged him to remix a song, he said he'd only do it if she agreed to record a variety of sounds with her genitals (she did not do it). Music of late is often centered around bass drops. With Aphex Twin, the bass isn't "dropped," it's swung, torn, spun, fermented, and sent into space. We will look back at his work as some of the most important music of our time. He's often referred to as a pioneer, and I agree. But while most pioneers are followed by settlers, Aphex Twin camps alone.

Here's a bite from a recent interview with Richard: "My 5-year-old's made loads of totally insane music on his computer, and I'm just like, 'What the fuck is that? What have I done to him?' He’s using Renoise. I didn't tell him how to use it, he just downloaded a crack off Pirate Bay."

There was a New Yorker article, published over the summer, explaining how musician-producer Brian Eno allowed randomness to take control of his work, which by now has directly or indirectly touched some of the greatest bands in the popular music canon — he's produced albums for David Bowie and Talking Heads, and created solo works that are strange little gems of their own. The article went on to argue that certain projects may have been worse off for having Eno's sensibilities — ambient tones, electronic instruments, some other elements I can't easily identify — in the mix. Maybe. Things get pretty weird with the guy around. But it's never a novelty: for all the randomness, there's a method, even with the odd track best described as "men's choir chanting while asynchronously dropping their keys." Anyway, lately I've been into more music either created, produced, or partially inspired by Eno. Here's what I've got.

Look, there's nothing wrong with being excited about the next Apple product. The new iPhones are sure to own the market, and are already breaking records for pre-orders. But how about we take a minute for the crazy ones not buying into the hype? How about saying something for the people buying a Moto X or HTC One M8 for Windows?

The point is, it's been a long week of Apple news, so we can finally start to shut the fire hose off. There are good phones for everyone, and they weren't all designed in Cupertino. If you felt like you were drowning this week, this is for you. And you know what? Let's keep it going. What songs are you listening to to drown out the Apple noise?

Verge Hack Week starts tomorrow, and we're letting everyone in the company go crazy building and experimenting with new tools on the site. It's going to be fast and messy and a little bit insane — so basically, punk rock. I can get down with that: the internet has always been about restlessness and attitude and DIY spirit, values that are rooted firmly in the punk rock I grew up listening to.

I grew up with all of these bands on repeat — especially The Clash, so I'll start and end with them.

No band defined my high school experience more than Belle & Sebastian. The ups, the downs, the awkwardness. I knew that no matter how dark things got, I could put on B&S and feel better. I'd be immediately transported to a sunny field in Glasgow, hugged by their modern but pastoral sound. I'm on my back, looking up at the sky. A mosquito bites my ankle. A bead of sweat trickles down the side of my forehead. I turn up the music. Everything's going to be okay.

When most folks think of country music, they hear the twangy guitar, too earnest vocals, and simple driving beat that have come to typify the genre on mainstream radio. But there is another side to country music, a weird underbelly that mixes in funk, soul, rock and roll. This playlist is a collection of my favorite tunes from a genre a good friend once called "country fried." Geographically it takes us from Texas to Los Angeles to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It would be easy to argue some of the artists on here aren’t "country" but the fun is finding finding tracks that defy easy categorization, giving a respectful nod to Nashville before cutting a path for some unexplored territory in a backwoods Delta swamp or California coastline.

I inherited a lot from the 1980s: early development motor skills, a profound appreciation of naps, and absolutely amazing taste in music. There's no nonsense in this playlist. No Katy Perry. No Phil Collins. Just pure, essential, mostly synth-infused, 80s movie soundtrack musical genius.

I mean, it was Eddie Murphy's best decade. What else is there to say?

I inherited a lot from my mom: writing skills sufficient to merit employment, a profound appreciation of red wine, and absolutely terrible taste in music. She used to listen to this local radio station, Lite 96 FM, that played a consistent rotation of adult contemporary hits — Elton John, Celine Dion, Jon Secada, Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey. She loved all of it, and so I loved it too. There was nobody we loved more than Phil Collins — prolific hit-maker, master of the overwrought love song lyric, and (in our opinion) handsome-as-fuck bald dude.

As I got older and tried to get hipper, my musical inclinations eventually branched out to incorporate some (but not much) cool person music. But to this day, for every indie jam on my playlists (indie is cool, right?) there’s at least one Phil song to balance out the mix. I love Phil Collins because his melodies are catchy as hell. I love him because his lyrics are often unintentionally hilarious and he just owns them anyways. I love him because that 3:40 drum crash on "In The Air Tonight" gets me every damn time.