The Playlists
Babyboomer’s favorite Rolling Stone has a nice special this holiday season: The Playlist. It features the favorite songs of many famous (old) artists. Most of the playlists are pretty predictable. Ozzy’s adoration of The Beatles, Bono’s love for Bowie and Mick Jagger’s fascination with blues, it’s all pretty well-known. Other lists are more interesting though. Keith Richards, for example, has put some effort in a list with relatively unknown blues, spirituals and reggae, and Erykah Badu’s list has some great 70′s soul. The best lists for me however are MGMT’s list of psychedelia, which was “inspired, variously, by an encounter with a Beach Boy and numerous encounters with recreational drugs”, Elton John’s playlist of “new pop classics” and I especially dig The Edge’s list of post-punk. Not only does The Edge have the coolest artist name ever, he also has a great taste in music. His playlist features The Buzzcocks, The Cure, Talking Heads, Siouxsie and the Banshees and much more good stuff. Bono’s and The Edge’s lists give a good overview of all of U2′s influences. It’s a shame they stopped making music which shows all these amazing musical influences some time ago.
Brian Wilson’s playlist consists solely of Beatles tracks, which is also not a big surprise, since Paul Mccartney and Brian Wilson started their “mutual appreciation society” a long time ago. In the 60′s The Beatles served as both inspiration and frustration for Wilson. Some say it is Sgt. Pepper’s which led him to stop working on Smile, because he thought he would never be able to beat it. Now he is just full of love for Paul. He also says: ”the first real mind-blowing Beatles record I heard was Rubber Soul. I was so blown away that I went to my piano and wrote some of the melody of ‘God Only Knows.” Mccartney considers Wilson to be the best pop songwriter of all time and God Only Knows the best song ever written (a while back we got a peek into Mccartney’s playlist).
Below is some great stuff I discovered browsing throught the various playlists.
From MGMT’s list, a very cool trippy track by George Clinton and his Funkadelic from 1970:
The number one in The Edge’s list:
From Erykah Badu’s list, Rick James – Mary Jane (which isn’t about a girl):
I also share Badu’s love for the song That’s the Way of the World by Earth, Wind & Fire by the way! “When I heard this, it was like there was something that burst out of the ground and surrounded me — like children and flowers and Africa were appearing out of nowhere. And those horns! When Maurice White’s voice comes in, it sounds like the voice of God.”
Check out the playlists on Rolling Stone for yourself here.
