Dear listeners,
Hello from your guest playlister for the day — I’m Dave Renard, an editor on the Culture desk who writes about music occasionally and tries to keep his record collection from outgrowing its allotted shelf space (currently failing).
Let’s just get this out of the way first: Halloween has the best music of any holiday and it’s not even close. Christmas may be the sales leader, but its canon is too tied to a tight list of classics and standards, and if you have the bad fortune to encounter a repetitive earworm like “The Little Drummer Boy” or (shudder) “The 12 Days of Christmas,” there goes your whole day. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to throw on some soul music while you mash potatoes, but like most other holidays, it doesn’t have much of a musical tradition of its own. Fourth of July, we’ve got Galaxie 500 and what, Katy Perry? (My editor offers a star-spangled dissent, but I think the point stands.)
Halloween, on the other hand, has a huge range of spooky sounds to draw from. (If you know the old joke about hell having all the good bands, it’s kind of like that.) My playlist strategy is to surround the typical novelty favorites like “Monster Mash” or “Ghostbusters” with a critical mass of songs that are, you know, actually good. I can only listen to DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince do “A Nightmare on My Street” so many times before I start to lose it. If you think “Saw” is terrifying, try revealing to your teen daughter which songs drive you nuts and then — jump scare! — remembering she can control the sound system from her phone.
A bigger pool of shared Halloween favorites makes that prospect less hair-raising. I lean heavily on black-clad ’80s punks, goths and post-punks, like the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with ’60s garage rockers and their descendants. But really any song with a creepy edge to it, or lyrics name-checking a wide range of October signifiers, will do the trick. Here are an unholy 13 selections to soundtrack All Hallows’ Eve.
I’m a human fly and I don’t know why,
Dave
Listen along while you read.
1. Roky Erickson: “Night of the Vampire”
Roky Erickson, the frontman of the pioneering psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators, went through harrowing ordeals in his personal life, including being held in a prison for the criminally insane where he underwent electroshock treatments. He emerged singing about zombies, demons, two-headed dogs and, on this track from 1980, vampires who hunt by night and leave a slickened trail of blood in their wake.
2. Siouxsie and the Banshees: “Halloween”
When it’s this obvious, you don’t fight it: “Trick or treat, trick or treat, the bitter and the sweet,” goes the chorus of this anthem from “Juju” (1981), Siouxsie and the Banshees’ fourth album. The sharp attack of the guitars over propulsive drums and a brooding bass line casts a spell that can still be heard echoing through today’s post-punk. (This track narrowly beat out the Misfits and John Carpenter for the coveted “Song Called ‘Halloween’” playlist slot.)
3. Outkast featuring Kelis: “Dracula’s Wedding”
André 3000 and Kelis play out an undead courtship on this funky bop from “The Love Below,” André’s half of Outkast’s 2003 double album. Would Dracula want peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Unclear, but if he does, Kelis has him covered.
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: “Heads Will Roll”
Is there any scenario where this song doesn’t kill? This standout from the YYYs’ “It’s Blitz!” (2009) injects some driving, danceable fun into the costume party. A music video that features a wolfman leaving a slew of dead clubgoers in his wake is just a bloody bonus. (Is it just me, or does wolf guy have vaguely Michael Jackson “Thriller” moves?)
5. The Cramps: “Human Fly”
One of the funnier developments in the last couple of years is the rise of the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” from pretty obscure cover tune to ubiquitous Halloween hit, inspiring young trick-or-treaters to dance up the sidewalk declaring, “I love Wednesday!” (True story.) So let’s go with one of the Cramps’ many other creepy-crawly songs, “Human Fly,” a reverbed-out piece of punk rockabilly that’s also dead funny: “I say buzz, buzz, buzz / and it’s just becuzz.”
6. Dead Moon: “Graveyard”
These D.I.Y. legends from the Pacific Northwest not only have the most Halloween-appropriate band logo this side of the Misfits, but the frontman Fred Cole was such a rock ’n’ roll lifer that he had it tattooed on his face. They kick up a racket to raise the dead on this leadoff track from Dead Moon’s first LP.
7. Black Sabbath: “The Wizard”
I love the picture Black Sabbath paints here: just a chill wizard walking slowly down the road, casually throwing off magic and frying demons. Somehow the addition of harmonica makes the stop-start riffs land with even more supernatural force. This song rips.
8. Lone Ranger: “Barnabas Collins”
A reggae tribute to the vampire star of the original “Dark Shadows,” a campy and macabre soap opera that ran on daytime TV in the late 1960s. The song’s campy fun, too: “Barney chew your neck like a Wrigley’s,” Lone Ranger toasts over a beat sprinkled with high piano notes and higher-pitched screams.
9. The Cure: “Lullaby”
Eaten by a thousand million shivering furry holes? Bruh.
10. Billie Eilish: “Bury a Friend”
The scare quotient of a song that includes the lyric “staple your tongue” (uhh-ughh) and samples a dentist’s drill is fairly obvious. But it was really driven home by the accompanying visuals on Eilish’s latest tour, where she stood with hands raised in front of columns of stage pyro, “Firestarter”-style, before creepy black-and-white imagery flickered across the arena’s video screens.
11. Broadcast: “Black Cat”
The death of the singer Trish Keenan in 2011, at just 42, brought the psychedelic pop band Broadcast to a too-early end; excavating a trove of demos, Warp Records just issued what it says will be the final release from the group. But we’ll always have “Tender Buttons” (2005), where a stripped-down lineup of Keenan and James Cargill wove atmospheric synthesizers and otherworldly vocals into minimal pop masterpieces. The lyrical imagery of “Black Cat” nods at “Alice in Wonderland,” superstition and love’s occult mysteries.
12. The Sonics: “The Witch”
This 1964 single from the Sonics, a raw garage-rock combo out of Washington State, isn’t so much about cauldrons and pointy hats — it’s a warning about a girl with “long black hair and a big black car” who’s hell on wheels. But the singer Gerry Roslie sure shrieks and wails like he’s got a few voodoo pins stuck into him.
13. Geto Boys: “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”
“This year Halloween fell on a weekend,” Bushwick Bill starts off on his classic “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” verse, riding an unbeatable Isaac Hayes sample. His trick-or-treat tale of “robbing little kids for bags,” before snapping back to reality confused and alone with bloodied knuckles, is the clearest tie to the holiday. But Scarface’s paranoid opening verse (“Candlesticks in the dark / Visions of bodies being burned”) is just as nightmarish.
The Amplifier Playlist
“13 Scary Good Halloween Songs” track list
Track 1: Roky Erickson, “Night of the Vampire”
Track 2: Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Halloween”
Track 3: Outkast featuring Kelis, “Dracula’s Wedding”
Track 4: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll”
Track 5: The Cramps, “Human Fly”
Track 6: Dead Moon, “Graveyard”
Track 7: Black Sabbath, “The Wizard”
Track 8: Lone Ranger, “Barnabas Collins”
Track 9: The Cure, “Lullaby”
Track 10: Billie Eilish, “Bury a Friend”
Track 11: Broadcast, “Black Cat”
Track 12: The Sonics, “The Witch”
Track 13: Geto Boys, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”
Bonus Tracks
Just to prove we’re not completely against novelty songs, here’s “The Blob” by the Five Blobs — a weird ’50s hit written by Burt Bacharach (!) and Mack David for the film. And for a hilarious “Monster Mash” parody, check out the “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” sketch from “30 Rock”: “Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves!”
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