Five Rules for Creating a Summer Road Trip Playlist

Five Rules for Creating a Summer Road Trip Playlist

By Dan Seitz

As summer wears on, inevitably, you’ll be going on road trips, whether it’s to the beach or across the country. And, thankfully, we’re no longer dependent on the wasteland that is terrestrial radio. Instead, we can listen to music on the iPod and avoid whatever manufactured garbage is supposed to be “the song of the summer” altogether.

That said, there are still plenty of pitfalls for assembling a list, including ones that make the rest of us…how to put this…homicidal. To wit, here are five rules to keep you and your travelling buddies from murdering each other.

1. Know Your Audience

We could offer some sort of treacly platitude about how everybody has different tastes and that’s OK, but it’s not, especially for the few million people that bought a Nickelback album, who are actually having a new ring of hell being built for them as we speak. But you will be trapped in a car for at least a couple of hours with these people who have wretched taste in music, so you should accommodate them as much as you possibly can.

Not that you should hold your nose and download the crap they like, just choose music you think they’ll enjoy.

2.Gag Songs Should Be Avoided

Yes, that parody of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” that does nothing but list dong synonyms is hilarious. Or, rather, was, because everybody’s heard it about a thousand times. The same goes for the “Star Wars” raps, “Bed Intruder,” and above all, “Friday.” Putting “Friday” on a playlist is automatically a firing offense. Especially if your trip is on Friday.

It’s not funny anymore. It probably wasn’t funny to most people when you discovered it. Let it go.

Special exception: Weird Al, who at this point has kind of earned his cred as a musical artist. Thirteen albums and three Grammys (seriously) will do that for you.

3. Avoid Top Hits

We could go into payola and how the songs that are “hits” are rarely the songs everybody wants to hear. But the reality is, if you want to hear the hot songs right now, you can do that anywhere. Find something else that people would actually enjoy. Even album cuts are a better choice.

Except for Nickelback.

4. Themes Are Evil

Theme playlists are amazing if you’re a twelve-year-old girl, but you are, hopefully, not reading this if you’re twelve. If you are twelve, we take no responsibility for what happens when your mom catches you on this site. Also, check out Ian Cheeseman’s column about beer, it’s never too early to learn.

Anyway, theme lists are like making everybody at a party a custom name tag. They betray the fact that you have no life and far too much time on your hands. Also that you’re kind of a dork.

5. Use Three Times As Many Songs as You Need

One of the biggest problems of friendships is reconciling your taste in music. For example, some of us have an appreciation for Neil Young’s masterpiece “Trans” that for some reason is not shared by the general public. It’s an error that can only be rectified by giving away copies and playing it as much as possible.

Since for some reason insisting on playing selections of this album without skipping will result in your being banned from assembling a playlist and a few public beatings, you’ll have to be ready to let go of certain selections. So budget accordingly: make the playlist three times bigger than actually needed to accommodate skips. Even if it does pain you to see a brilliant classic given such short shrift.

Just saying.
 
 
 
Originally appeared on TheSmokingJacket.com