TRACK #402:

Supernature by Cerrone

To be completely honest, I have no idea how long I’ll keep doing this or how long the playlist will end up being when it’s all said and done.

Early on, some of my more inclusive lists had the total topping out at around 250 tracks. As such, in 2015 I claimed Track #120 (This is Halloween) was the center of the playlist. Yeah, that was 10 years ago and we’ve added almost 3 times that many songs to the playlist since. For those playing at home, we actually hit that end point 4 years later with Halloween by 220 Volt in 2019. Now, it’s 6 years from even then and we’ve put another 160 songs on top of that.

What can I say? I kept finding cool songs I thought needed adding.

That very same year (about a week prior, it seems, in the The Monster Mash post) I said I’d love to get the playlist’s total runtime to 24 hours, then your Halloween couldn’t possibly hold anymore music. I’m proud to say that, without really thinking about that goal much since writing it, we hit that marker just last year. About a minute into Track #368, Igor At Midnight by Cagé, The Shindig officially broke the 24 hour mark.

And yet here we are, 400 songs in the rear-view and we’ve got a playlist that’s entirely too long for any party and literally can not be listened to in a single instance of Halloween. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but it’s certainly a thing.

Should I keep going? Should I keep adding music to this playlist, because hell, isn’t October really just a perfectly structured 31 day countdown to Halloween anyway and now there’s a shuffle button and we got all the Mini-Playlists and people can cherry pick what they want and leave the rest and walk out knowing that regardless of what they came away with they were presented with a serious list of classic and obscure tunes appropriately suggested for their holiday festivities? Yeah, we’ll keep diggin’ up tunes a little while longer I suspect.

Well, at the very least there’s the rest of this year’s tracks, and whatever else I have sitting in the bullpen that can scratch its way out onto the field. Is that another 100 songs? Roughly 3 seasons worth of tunes?

I couldn’t say, but after 400 tracks, we need a little reset. We need something epic to recenter things and usher in a new phase of the playlist. We need something…supernatural.

And what better tune to fit the bill than the dystopian dance floor disco ‘digger, Supernature?

From French drummer Marc Cerrone’s 1977 album of the same name, comes a song about how scientists in the future basically use GMOs to battle starvation but unwittingly transformed creatures below the surface into hideous monsters that rise up and terrorized mankind back into the Stone Age. Ok, disco, let’s get fuckin’ serious, I guess.

Apparently this song enjoyed some popularity last summer when it was used by France during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics. I was unaware. I’m not tapped into the Olympics like that. Or at all. Like not even slightly. I kind of hate the Olympics, if I’m being honest.

My apologies if you’re an Olympic fan, an Olympic hopeful or even a former Olympian yourself (as my visitor data fully leads me imagine you probably might be) but the whole business has never sat right with me.

I have conceptual interest in the strongest and most accomplished humans from all over the globe competing in good natured feats of skill and strength. That sounds nice. Sounds nice. In practice though, it doesn’t really seem to be that and it mostly causes people to just be irritating.

And maybe this is me just living in the United States. Maybe it’s different in other parts of the world, but when my fellow countrymen, who couldn’t be arsed for the proceeding 4 years, suddenly won’t shut up about curling, are suddenly all experts in the pentathlon, or become inconceivably invested in the various athletic performances of underage girls or  – its annoying.

I don’t care. You can’t make me care. I have no appetite for some nebulous surge in pride I’m supposed to feel cause “our” guy swam .2 seconds faster than that “their” guy. Yeah, you can miss me with this nationalistic horseshit.

And that is to say nothing of the legitimate economic, political or human right issues associated with the either the games themselves or the IOC. But realistically, it’s not going anywhere. I’m not even saying it should, or needs to, go anywhere. I obviously don’t patronize it and I will continue to do just that. I’m just saying, this is why I had no idea this song was making the rounds last year.

Which is probably good. This should make the rounds, cause this song is awesome. And it’s dance-able as all get out. So c’mon!

You’re not getting tired already, are you? It’s only been 400 songs! The night is still young!