Origin Stories Mix

I recently contributed to the excellent Tumblr One Week One Mix with a playlist about musical origin stories.  I've decided to repost what I wrote here.  I hope you enjoy.

Every superhero needs an origin story.  Sure, an audience willing to suspend disbelief about a man with the powers of a spider or a scientist who turns into giant green rage monster probably should not care too much about why these men can do these things, but what can you do? These origin stories help unravel the mystery surrounding the motivations of these people, why they are who they are and why they do what they do.

Looming equally large in popular mythology as superheroes are musicians, who seem to have superpowers of their own.  Since we don’t really know too much about the lives of these musicians, people try to color in the lines, embellishing the details that we know.  Did Robert Johnson really sell his soul to the Devil to become a great guitar player?  Probably not, but it doesn’t matter because that’s the first thing anybody talks about whenever anyone brings him up in conversation.

The playlist I made for this week takes a listen to what happens when musicians create their own mythology, and how it colors the listener’s expectations of the artist.  Some of these songs are not exactly origin stories in the strictest sense, but statements of purpose, an attempt to instill a message into a larger body of work.  Or they could just be theme songs, rallying cries for the artist’s fans.  I have used a lot of “brand names” in this playlist (particularly in Hip-Hop), because the type of artists that generate reverence and mythology are either popular or cult favorites.

Even though this is a concept playlist, it is still a collection of great songs that sound great together and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I have.