Best new music of 2013: A 24-hour Spotify playlist

Photo via Shane Morris, BroJackson.com. Follow him on Twitter @Iamshanemorris

Ramon Ramirez is a writer for FanSided partner BroJackson.com. For more great content, head on over to Bro Jackson and check out Ramon’s work.

Summer jams are a moody beast because there’s no loose set of sonic qualifiers. You just need to feel it, and oftentimes that evocative nature is only there because of its default affiliation with specific memories. There are, of course, songs about summer—from “Summertime Blues” to the Grease soundtrack to Sublime covers. But writing a song about summer isn’t interesting and when this theme latches onto that rare transcendent track, the memory becomes too broad to feel personal or more importantly, meaningful.

The quest to identify the “songs of the summer” in 2013 is short: Robin Thicke’s campy Marvin Gaye ripoff, “Blurred Lines,” has competition only from Daft Punk’s retro-fitted disco burner “Get Lucky.” Interestingly both songs feature guest vocals from Pharrell, a man that made his biggest summer splash in 2003 when his Neptunes ensemble produced cuts by Beyonce, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake; in addition to Kelis’ “My Milkshake” and Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful.” I’m hoping Miley Cyrus’ giant “We Can’t Stop” catches fire soon because of its honest, nihilist Solo cup M.O.—we’ll know in a few weeks.

A strong summer playlist needs to be multi-faceted—it has to win over a poolside lounge and then a cookout and then bleed into the pre-party hours before midnight while radiating enough post-sun energy to get you psyched to go back outside for night life. But how many textbook summer nights do we actually get as adults? Maybe 10 a season? Mostly, it’s music for walking to the metro or an alternative to when sports talk radio goes on about football players doing things unrelated to our beautiful game like murder and unsolicited photography.

With this in mind, I spent the last month making the best summer playlist: 360 songs, 24 hours of music (give or take on the running time). It’s a calculated presentation, segued in blocks. We open with the latest in hip-hop; then 15 new electronica singles from my friend Josh Bradshaw inspired by the bland nature of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories; then some palette cleansing comfort rock before diving into a block of reggae programmed by Bro Jackson contributor John Meller; then some moody noise for the early morning; then a dash of doom and gloom from my trusted metal advisor, Sir Andy O’Connor; then some breakfast rap with a regional nod to my home state of Texas and the South at-large; then we fill the working hours with the year’s most interesting indie rock before heading to the cookout with early ‘90s r&b; a brief detour to the summer of 2001 during which I’d tear ticket stubs at the movies; and to close, we turn up with the year’s most memorable pop.

Special tastemaker thanks also go to Billboard’s Reggie Ugwu and his stellar column that spotlights independent record labels; and The Daily Dot’s Austin Powell who has this great running checklist playlist called “Best of 2013” that I unabashedly raided.

As this mix is basically a series of specific playlists, pick and choose dependent on your governing activities. You have fuel for house parties and introspection for starry nights plugging away on a laptop. You have bass for the road trip and bass lines for the brownies. As a whole, it’s meant to be started at midnight on a summer night you’re staying in. But that doesn’t really matter. It’s called Long Player II, because it’s the second time I’ve employed this 24 / 360 format. This is Long Player II.