Blog Posts by Robert of the Radish

An Influence Chain playlist can start with any song you wish. In this case we begin with "The Stand" by The Alarm. For the next selection we choose a song by a band that is known to have influenced the previous band. So I've selected a song by The Clash, who were a big influence on The Alarm. The third song is one that influenced The Clash, and so on. Continue with the playlist until you cannot come up with any more influences.

Create your own or expand on the following list in the comments!

Influence Chain Playlist: The Alarm To Guy Lombardo

1.
The Stand - The Alarm - Declaration (1984)
The Alarm were directly influenced by The Clash, therefore The Clash will be the next selection in our influence chain playlist. The Alarm were formed after seeing the electric way that The Clash delivered their political messages on stage. During their heyday in the 1980's, The Alarm were compared more to U2 than any other band, but I would say that besides the big hair and spiritual fuzziness they

Backmasking in popular music became infamous in the 1980s when fundamentalist preachers started saying that Satan was speaking to teenagers through subliminal messages hidden in rock music. One only needed to play the record backwards to hear such diabolical ranting as "It's fun to smoke marijuana", "I am Satan", "Serve the beast for money", "I love Satan", "Satan knows I love Him" and who can forget the famous, "Glory, glory to my sweet Satan, there was a little child born, it makes me sad, whose power is Satan", from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".

There were 3 trains of thought at the time in regard to backmasking in popular music:

1. Satan was using musicians as demonic pawns. The messages were put in the music unwillingly by the devil himself.

2. The musicians were Satan worshipers who purposefully planted the messages into the songs.

3. Hogwash

The controversy instigated teenagers across the country to play their records backwards in search of the next new "Satanic

In the 1990s, the music world saw an up tick in the number of short, one syllable band names; Tool, Cake, Pulp, Ride, Lush, Curve, Phish and others jumped on the simplicity bandwagon. As in most things musical, trends change quickly, and in the aughties we've seen a substantial increase of long band names and song titles.

For this playlist I wanted to feature songs by bands who have adopted a complete sentence as their name. Of course, the full-sentence band name has been around a lot longer than the current decade (It's A Beautiful Life, They Might Be Giants, Johnny Hates Jazz), but lately it seems like it's become the "in thing" to do, with bands like And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, I Am Kloot, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, I Am The World Trade Center, We Are Scientists, Be Your Own Pet, A Place To Bury Strangers, and These Arms Are Snakes reaching larger audiences. Bands are now trying to outdo each other with increasingly ridiculous

Mice and rats have somehow entered my life in an unprecedented manner lately, so I did what most music-obsessed people would do. I built a playlist.

I have just returned from a week in Walt Disney World, so the most famous mouse of all (Mickey) has been looming large in my life. My family has also watched the new rat-centric Ratatouille DVD three times in the past week.

But in addition to this, rodents have crossed my path elsewhere. One of which has me feeling immense amounts of guilt. You see, I am a mouse killer. I fear my Peta contributing friends may disown me, but I need to get this off my chest. It all started as I was getting ready for work one morning. When I put on my shoes I noticed one of them had a handful of dry dog food inside. Our dog, Winslow P. Caloomper's food bowl is in the master bath, but how did his kibble get into my shoe? Of course the only answer was my four year old daughter. When I asked her if she did it, she said, "no daddy, maybe it was Winslow". I

As I have pointed out previously, the blues is notorious for elevating the sexual innuendo to an art form. Many great blues songs use food to get an "R" rated point across without resorting to profanity.

Today, on Thanksgiving eve, we are focusing the sexual innuendo blues playlist further by selecting songs that use foods traditionally eaten for dessert. This gives the bluesman the opportunity for double entendre as well as espousing the "sweetness" of the opposite sex. The list contains an album's worth of material by some of the world's great bluesmen and blueswomen singing the virtues of the jellyroll, chocolate, peaches, bananas, sugar, pie and other tasty treats.

When I first started crafting playlists I was thrilled with the thought of theme-based lists. I could envision a day when anyone could search for any subject imaginable and find related music. I still have this goal in mind, but I've discovered that when you hone the playlist down by only selecting songs from a

Thanksgiving is a great holiday, but it tends to be eclipsed by the larger and more flamboyant celebrations that surround it.

Namely, Halloween and Christmas.

As you're surely aware, Christmas leads in dramatic fashion when it comes to music.  In fact, Christmas music is considered its own genre due to the sheer number of Christmas songs that have been recorded. After all, one only needs a good three chord hook, some jingle bells and some winter imagery for a hit Christmas song.

Halloween, although much smaller than Christmas, still offers a plethora of songs to choose from when crafting a playlist.

But Thanksgiving is more difficult.

Yes, I have included no-brainers like "The Thanksgiving Song" by Adam Sandler, "Alice's Restaurant Massacre" by Arlo Guthrie and "Thanksgiving Day" by Ray Davies, but I've also included a smattering of overlooked tracks that fit perfectly within the Thanksgiving theme. Some speak directly to the spiritual aspects of the holiday as with Bob Marley's

Numbers are an interesting subject for songs. They can represent all kinds of things, and as such, can be used as a lyrical device to give significance without over speaking. Here at the Radish we've already done playlists on the numbers 666, 3 and 7. Most of us are aware of the significance these three numbers have, mostly because of their religious or spiritual context.

For this playlist I have chosen songs that use the number 99 to get their points across. The most obvious use of 99 is to convey a sense of impending change as in Prince's 1999, which looked forward to the year 1999 as an event that would spur serious celebration. 99 can also be used to convey a sense of being close to perfection. If 100% is a perfect score than 99% is just a hair shy of perfect. If someone is 99% sure, they are conveying certain odds while leaving themselves room to be incorrect.

It's also interesting because it's a palindromic number, a repdigit and a Kaprekar number. However, finding these