Punkin' Pandora

So earlier in the week I decided to see if I couldn't create a Halloween-themed station on Pandora. I knew that this would be a challenge, given that Pandora creates playlists based on musical - not thematic - similarities between the songs that you initially select. But I wanted to give it a try, if nothing else as an every fifteen-minute brain-stretching exercise - a palate cleanser, if you will, whilst I drafted restrictive covenants for an industrial park. (Yeah, that's as exciting as it sounds, people.)

I loaded an initial playlist including Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You," Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," "Devil Went Down to Georgia" and "Abracadabra." Oh, and Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Can't have a Halloween playlist without that. Pandora bit on MJ and played "I Want You Back." Great tune but, um, no. I let it play, but I did not give it a thumbs up.

Then I loaded more content:

"Witchcraft" - Frank Sinatra

"Weird Science" - Oingo Boingo
"Tubular Bells" (AKA "The Creepy Music from The Exorcist") - Mike Oldfield

"The Time Warp" - Cast of Rocky Horror

"Somebody's Watching Me" - Rockwell

"Monster Mash" - Bobby "Boris" Pickett

"I Want Candy" - Bow Wow Wow

Pandora responded with "Sweet Home Alabama" - not the Lynyrd Skynyrd version, but something off of a compilation CD by The Hit Crew. I guess because "Monster Mash" no doubt appears on a Hit Crew seasonal CD? Yeah, okay, so points for logic, Pandora, but I gotta ding it.

I added more suggestions:

"Freaks Come Out at Night" - Whodini

"Ghostbusters" - Ray Parker, Jr.

"Every Day is Halloween" - Ministry

"Dead Man's Party" - Oingo Boingo

"Devil in My Car" - B52s

"The Munsters Theme" - Los Straightjackets

"Sympathy for the Devil" - The Rolling Stones

Pandora panicked - and defaulted back to MJ. "Wanna Be Startin' Something" - again, good tune, so I'll let it play, but we're definitely still off-topic. At this point, Pandora must have sighed a computer-generated sigh and said, "Aha, notwithstanding the weird s*&^ she's been throwing at me, she really just wants me to default to her standard R&B." Hence Selections 4 and 5, "September" by Earth Wind and Fire and "Brick House" by "The Commodores." I let these two pitches sail by as well, while I loaded still more "variety" onto my station:

"Psycho Killer" - Talking Heads

"Purple People Eater" - Sheb Wooley

"Red Right Hand" - Nick Cave

"Spiderwebs" - No Doubt

"Witchy Woman" - Eagles

"Devil with the Blue Dress" - Mitch Ryder

"Vampira" - The Misfits

Pandora panicked again - and Rickrolled me. Yup, "Never Gonna Give You Up," Rick Astley. A song that evokes memories of laying out on the beach with half of my high school drill team - but those are not scary memories, given that we were seventeen, danced upwards of twenty hours per week and really rocked the swimwear back then. (Now if I think back to how I looked in a swimsuit THIS PAST SUMMER, the hairs start to prickle on the back of my neck . . . .)

Selections 6 and 7 were pretty easily explainable - "Luck Be a Lady" (because I'd tagged Sinatra) and "Time Warp" (because it was actually on my list). Then came Selection 8: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Sam the Sham. It kind of has a sinister sound to it, so I thought, hmmmmmm, we may be on to something.

Selection 9: "The Monster" by Bobby Please. Hope is dawning.

Selection 10: "Devil in Disguise" by Elvis Presley. Bingo.

My elation was short-lived, as Pandora quickly backslid into non-spooky musical territory. But the experiment was worth the time and trouble (total elapsed time - forty two minutes), for the following reasons:

1. I brainstormed quite a good Halloween playlist. Actually, not sure if that's a good thing or not, because now I am fighting the urge to drop a booty load of cash on iTunes downloads. I also think I torpedoed my own experiment by suggesting EVERY POSSIBLE SONG IN THE GENRE, leaving Pandora with very little room for growth.

2. But apparently, I left room for a little bit of growth, because over the next few hours of radio listening Pandora - randomly or not - added a few clever suggestions to my growing playlist ("Mama Told Me Not to Come, No Doubt's "Six Feet Under").

Here are some other selections to spookify your October:

"The Mummy" - Bob McFadden

"Hell" - Squirrel Nut Zippers

"The Boogie Monster" - Gnarls Barkley

"People Are Strange" - The Doors

"Bark at the Moon" - Ozzy Osbourne

"Black Cat" - Janet Jackson
"Candy Everyone Wants" - 10,000 Maniacs

"Runnin' With the Devil" - Van Halen

"Spirits in the Material World" - The Police

"Helter Skelter" - The Beatles

"Devil's Haircut" - Beck

"Evil Woman" - ELO

"Dead Pumpkins" - Insane Clown Posse

I'll end this post on Insane Clown Posse, I think . . . .