As someone who claims to brush their teeth with Jack Daniels in the morning, Ke$ha certainly knows how to start a party. The gritty pop star, an unofficial representative of hard party rocking, gave Rolling Stone her top ten party-starters for our new Playlist Issue.
The list demonstrates that she lives up to her reputation — hitting strip clubs, giving and receiving homemade tattoos, and drunkenly chasing her idols around LA. “That’s why I do what I do,” she says. “I like seeing people lose their shit and not give a fuck about what other people think of them.”
—Meredith Olson
When it comes to Seventies Era Soul, Erykah Badu favors the “happy, funky love songs” — like Stevie Wonder’s “As.” “Even the shyest person, if they got any kind of taste, will be up on the floor,” Badu says.
Check out the rest of Badu’s Seventies Soul playlist for more dance-floor grooves, including Rick James’ “Mary Jane” and Parliament’s “Aqua Boogie,” at RollingStone.com.
Mark Ronson was oblivious to the music of Stevie Wonder until his college days—a fact he admits with great remorse. Now, Ronson idolizes Wonder, whom he regards as “the only musician I know who touches every single person I’ve ever met, from punk kids to indie kids to hip-hop kids.”
Ronson’s Stevie Wonder Playlist covers essentials like “Living for the City” and “I Was Made to Love Her,” as well as go-to picks from his days as a DJ. Check it out at RollingStone.com.
Reading Patti Smith’s account in the Rolling Stone Playlist issue of her duets with Bob Dylan on “Dark Eyes” during their tour together in 1995, it’s no wonder the song made her playlist of Dylan’s Best Love Songs. ”We sang it side by side, so close that at times beads of sweat dripped from his lashes to my cheek,” Smith says. Indeed, from “Dark Eyes” all the way back to her first encounter with Blonde on Blonde in 1966, Smith’s experience of Dylan’s music has been a unique and longstanding one.
Check out all 16 Dylan songs that Patti Smith chose for her playlist at RollingStone.com.
How does rapper Drake pump himself up before a show? By watching Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, he says in the Rolling Stone Playlist issue. “He had to play around 8 a.m., after a huge storm, but he went out there and put on one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen,” says Drake. “I love watching that before I go onstage.”
Check out the list of Drake’s favorite Jimi Hendrix Songs — including ”House Burning Down,” “Little Miss Strange,” “Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady” — on RollingStone.com.
Nas wants to make one thing clear: “When I said ‘hip-hop is dead’ a few years ago, I felt we’d gotten away from the great wordplay and storytelling.” He backs up his statement with his list of Hip-Hop’s Best Lyricists and the tracks that made these MCs stand out from the rest in the Rolling Stone Playlist issue.
Some of his picks include Ice Cube’s “A Bird in the Hand,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s “My Downfall” and 2Pac’s “If My Homie Calls”; check out the rest at RollingStone.com.
When Rolling Stone asked Keith Richards to make a Roots and Reggae Playlist, he said he didn’t want to come up with the obvious stuff. “We know the classics. We’ve seen thousands of those lists. I was trying to think of stuff that’s slipped between the cracks,” he says.
His choices include songs like Erma Franklin’s “Piece of My Heart,” Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” and Little Walter’s “Key to the Highway,” which Keith says is “the best version of the song ever.”
See the rest of Keith Richard’s Roots and Reggae Playlist — including songs by Jesse Fuller, Big Bill Broonzy, Elmore James, and more — at RollingStone.com.
The new issue of Rolling Stone—the Playlist Issue—started with an idea from Roots drummer ?uestlove. We asked him to tell us his favorite songs, but he said he wanted to go deeper. “In my eyes, what defines a true artist is their filler,” he said. “I happen to like the Stevie Wonder songs that aren’t hits. I can say the same thing for Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Prince’s hits are like a red carpet that he lays out to lead you to the good stuff.”
The Playlist Issue features fifty artists sharing lists of top ten songs from artists and musical mini-genres that they know, and love, deeply. Highlights include Yoko Ono on her favorite John Lennon songs, My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on the best glam rock tunes, Win Butler on Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith on Bob Dylan’s love songs. Over the next five weeks, RollingStone.com will post these and bonus, online-only lists, with streams of many of the songs as well as audio from interviews with some of the best-known list-makers.
This week we’re posting the following playlists:
• Bono on David Bowie
• Jack Johnson on Bob Marley
• Chris Robinson on the Rolling Stones
• Rufus Wainwright on Leonard Cohen
• ?uestlove on Prince
• Peter Wolf on R&B
• Dave Grohl on Eighties hardcore punk
• Ezra Koenig on U.K. Pop Hits
• Cee Lo on Dirty South Hip-Hop
• Annie Lennox on women with soul
• Jenny Lewis on Seventies California rock
