The band has always displayed such an appetite for its own self-destruction, it’s incredible that Guns N’ Roses ever made it in the first place. Even the question of what to put on the cover of Appetite for Destruction—the debut album that turns 30 this summer—threatened to put them outta the race before they’d even gotten out of the gate. Axl Rose initially wanted a picture of the Challenger explosion on the cover, but Geffen 86’d that as fast as possible. Then the band wanted (and got) a lurid cartoon image—based on the same 1979 painting by cult comix and hot-rod art great Robert Williams that was the source for the album’s name—of a robot rapist menaced by a multi-armed contraption as a female victim lies slumped against a fence. When retailers said there was no effing way they’d rack that, Geffen hastily revised it, shifting the image to the inner sleeve, where it would mess with the minds of impressionable teens forever more. They replaced it with a cross-and-skulls image by Billy White Jr. representing each of the band members (hence the black top hat for the Slash skull on the bottom).Despite the label’s efforts and the band’s sweat and toil in the two years since its membership had coalesced out of some of L.A.’s scrappiest hard-rock acts, Appetite for Destruction debuted at No. 182 in its first week on the Billboard charts in August 29, 1987. A year later, however, the story was very different. Driven by the band’s relentless touring and the ubiquitous radio and video airplay for “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City,” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” Appetite for Destruction would eventually rack up over 18 million in sales and become the all-time best-selling debut album.Thirty years later, it’s easy to hear how the music was more than just what they needed to surf past their troubles and penchant for self-sabotage (at least for a while). Part of what made GNR so thrilling was how they took a disc sander to all the glam and pop elements that prevailed in the hair-metal era of the ‘80s. Their sound was so much gnarlier, drawing from hardcore punk heroes like the Misfits, the primo biker metal of Motörhead, and—first and foremost—the bluesy, boozy rock of Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones. Just as crucial was the ability of producer Mike Clink to present it all with a minimum of clutter and maximum force.Yet at the same time, GNR were unafraid to provide some hooks or show off a more vulnerable side. Indeed, Rose had way more ballads ready to go after “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” but they decided to stick with only one for the debut. “November Rain,” the singer’s first full-bore expression of his love for Elton John-sized grandeur, was one of several early songs that had to wait for release on Use Your Illusion I and II, the 1991 double set whose bloat was a far cry from GNR’s ruthlessly action-packed debut.The live tracks that would surface on the stop-gap album Lies—which was the first time most folks heard Live… ?!*Q Like a Suicide, the demi-legendary self-released EP that came out the year before Appetite—and the unabashedly ragged ’87-’93 compilation served as further proof of just how exhilarating GNR were in their late-‘80s prime. The best of them are here along with early tracks by the proto-GNR band Hollywood Rose and songs by other bands whose impact on Rose and Slash was obvious even without the regrettable existence of The Spaghetti Incident? And at the heart of this playlist is Appetite for Destruction, still one of the most ferocious, most bad-ass, and most unabashedly rock ‘n’ roll rock ‘n’ roll albums ever made. So wake up, sleepyheads… it’s time to diiiieeeeee.

Is it weird that the Haim sisters seem to all love the same songs? Anyone with a sibling who shouldn’t go anywhere near a Bluetooth speaker knows that the sharing of DNA has virtually no correlation with musical taste. At least a little disparity should be par for the course for Este, Danielle, and Alana, too. But on the matter of musical taste—as with so many other areas for the harmony-loving trio—HAIM are far more in the tradition of the Osmonds and Hanson than Oasis and the Kinks, putting the lie to myths about sibling acts and the likelihood that their members may attack each other with drum cymbals.Indeed, the women of HAIM present a surprisingly unified front in the opportunities they’ve had to present their predilections to the world. In the four years since they broke through with the irresistibly hooky contents of Days Are Gone, the playlists they’ve either curated together or individually are very much on the same page, with the sisters expressing their solidarity through their shared love of ‘70s and ‘80s pop, soul and disco crowd-pleasers (with an emphasis on all the ladies they love), party-starting hip-hop, more introspective singer/songwriter fare, and vintage California sounds from either coastline. (Their hero Tom Petty may live in Malibu but he’s still pure Florida.) They sound just as snug in the same pocket when performing covers, a diverse array that ranges from Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” (performed with Stevie Nicks, no less) to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” to Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” to songs by pals-slash-inspirations such as Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas.Their savvy when it comes to mixing the old with the shiny and new is all over their second album Something to Tell You, too. To celebrate the arrival of what will surely be a summer soundtrack for the ages, we’ve got an extensive slate of HAIM-approved songs that you can enjoy with the relative of your choice.

Santa Claus is a proudly blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who never leaves the house without his black leather boots and who never fails to get the job done in the toughest of circumstances. So when he’s hurtling from house to house with a bunch of amped-up reindeer on a sled full of Hatchimals and Marvel action figures — all traveling at a velocity that would be dangerously reckless on any other night of the year — you can most definitely believe he needs to hear something harder than Michael Bublé to get through his shift.Thankfully, there’s a legion of metal dudes and hard rockers who know that no season is complete without a very different kind of holiday music. They’re responsible for a valuable counter-tradition of Christmas songs, the kind that combines long-loved tidings of joy and fellowship with the sounds of wicked guitar solos, monster riffs, and blast-beats. Twisted Sister, those legends of Long Island-style mayhem, have arguably been the most enthusiastic purveyors of hard-rock holiday action. After all, the band’s reliably frank frontman, Dee Snider, was always quick to fess up that their biggest hit — 1984’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” — was partly inspired by the tune for “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”Snider and his bandmates made the somewhat unlikely connection between the two songs perfectly clear when they opened 2006’s A Twisted Christmas with a rowdier version of the 18th-century carol than you’ll ever hear at midnight mass. Just as much fun are Twisted Sister’s gnarly takes on “White Christmas” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which Snider and Co. revamped to include such rocker-appropriate gifts as skull earrings, quarts of Jack, cans of hairspray and, of course, “a tattoo of Ozzy” in place of the lame-ass partridge. As sacrilegious as they may seem to those who believe the holidays can only be shiny, bright, and holy, Twisted Sister’s assaults on the holiday-music canon actually do something very worthy. They bring the sounds and sentiments of the season into lives and households that may not fit any cookie-cutter conception of seasonal good times.As such, Dee Snider’s tidings get pride of place in this playlist of songs that range from exuberant (Skid Row’s “Jingle Bells,” Cheap Trick’s “Christmas Christmas”) to sinister (Venom’s “Black Christmas,” Apocalyptica’s “Little Drummer Boy”) to irresistibly crashing (Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Wizards in Winter,” Kamelot’s “We Three Kings”). All get the job done on a cold winter’s eve lit only by cheap strands of electric lights.

Few filmmakers ever displayed as much savvy about music—or were so eager to show off their sheer love of it—than Jonathan Demme. The director, who passed away on April 26 at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer, established his impeccable and impressively diverse tastes long before indie-movie hotshots like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson followed suit in the 1990s. Of course, he did that most prominently in his many music docs, a rich bounty that ranged from his epochal Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense (1984) through the sorely underrated Robyn Hitchcock curio Storefront Hitchcock (1998), his three lovely films on Neil Young, to one of his final projects, the JT Netflix spectacular Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016).That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Demme’s music mania. The soundtracks of his early efforts were the handiwork of a deep fan—who else would’ve loaded up a road comedy like Melvin & Howard (1980) with Crazy Horse, Faron Young, Eddy Arnold, and the Sir Douglas Quintet? For Something Wild (1986), he lived up to the film’s title with a brilliant hodgepodge of killer salsa and dub reggae tracks along with the Fine Young Cannibals and the Feelies. Appearing on screen as a cover band playing a high school reunion, the latter group were one of many faves Demme actually used as actors, a tradition he’d continue with Chris Isaak in Married to the Mob (1988), his pal Hitchcock in The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe in Rachel Getting Married (2008). Don’t forget the many music videos that bear Demme’s imprimatur, too, including “Streets of Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen—originally commissioned for his 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia—and New Order’s haunting “The Perfect Kiss.”It’s no surprise that music often a played a major part in his characters’ lives, too. One such signature moment comes in Demme’s biggest hit, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), when actress Brooke Smith’s ill-fated character drives down the highway hollering along to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” happily unaware of the nastiness that awaits when she stops to help ol’ Buffalo Bill. (Demme used songs by The Fall, Gang of Four, and Wires Colin Newman to enhance the horrors to come.) Demme evidently loved the Petty classic so much, he put it in the repertoire of Meryl Streep’s Chrissie Hynde-like rocker character in the 2015 comedy Ricki and the Flash. That’s why both versions deserve pride of place in this tribute to a man who may have loved music even more than he did movies.

Of all the many artists and songwriters who cited the Doors’ mercurial frontman as an inspiration, no fan may have been quite as ardent as Patti Smith. “Jim Morrison probably got the closest to being an artist within rock and roll,” she once said. “His death made me sadder than anyone’s. He was really a great poet.”That last word is an especially significant one. When the Doors’ career as Elektra recording artists was launched with the release of “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” on the first day of 1967, the idea that a poet had any business being in a rock ‘n’ roll band was still a radical one. Claiming Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as his own heroes, Morrison was determined to bring a sensibility that was both unabashedly literary yet as sexy and dangerous as you’d hope for from a guy who looked so good in tight black leather pants. As a rock ‘n’ roll poet, Morrison had also introduce explicitly adult content and subversive themes into a musical form that was still marketed first and foremost to teenagers. No wonder that “Break on Through” sparked the first of many controversies for the Doors when Elektra balked at releasing it with its original lyric “she gets high” lest such a blatant drug reference offend radio programmers. The single flopped anyway, only later becoming one of the Doors’ signature songs.That first single also served as an opening salvo for a band whose musical ideas proved just as influential as Morrison’s lyrical provocations. Robbie Krieger’s spidery guitar lines were as distinctive as the Ray Manzarek keyboard sound the band used in place of bass guitar. And while drummer John Densmore was capable of supplying all the required force and momentum, his rhythms were equally suggestive of non-rock influences like bossa nova and German cabaret music. The latter influence signposted when a cover of “Alabama Song” showed up alongside that debut single and the band’s first true hit “Light My Fire” on the Doors’ self-titled album.The wild, passionate and daring music that followed the Doors’ first recordings was bound to make a strong impression on musicians for generations. Sometimes this influence was glaringly obvious. That was certainly the case for vocalists who’d perform with the surviving Doors in the years after Morrison’s death in 1971, starting with the fellow rock legend who very nearly replaced him: Iggy Pop. Such was Iggy’s admiration for Morrison that he smuggled many of the Lizard King’s lyrics inside his own songs, including “The Passenger”. Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland and the Cult’s Ian Astbury were two more Morrison devotees who fronted later versions of the Doors.Despite the punks’ oft-stated disdain for hippies, many of the blank generation’s key acts were Doors fans, too. Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen even described the band as “the most perfect and compatible four musicians in the history of time.” Siouxsie & The Banshees considered them a core inspiration, later covering “You’re Lost, Little Girl” and “Hello I Love You.” Legendary Manchester producer Martin Hannett modeled his productions for Joy Division on the sound of Waiting for the Sun. Meanwhile, the Stranglers’ use of keyboards explicitly evoked Manzarek’s and the spare, eerie feel of “The End” was closely studied by Bauhaus. Then there was the example Morrison set with his rich baritone and literary gravitas for heavy-duty singers and songwriters like Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan. X and the Gun Club were two of many later bands from the Doors’ hometown of Los Angeles acknowledged their stylistic debt.More recently, retro-rockers like Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Allah Las have been equally brazen about their devotion. Indeed, the realm of the Lizard King is and always has been a crowded one – this playlist serves as your passageway.

You may not be as excited as a lot of people are to have Kesha Rose Sebert back in action. But even the very worst of haters ought to give her a chance to make a second impression after what she’s been through.After she spent the first years of the decade establishing herself as pop’s preeminent hard-rocking, fast-talking, tik-tok-ing party girl, things came off the rails when her already rocky relationship with producer Dr. Luke took a toxic turn in 2014. The charges and counter-charges—including sexual assault and battery, unfair business practices, and much more from her side—put her in the starring role in a legal drama so ugly, it made the “Blurred Lines” case seems like 10 benign minutes in traffic court. Though that drama is hardly over, developments earlier this year freed her from the conditions that prevented her releasing any new music for three years.During that time, she did her best to convey her feelings through other people’s songs. Of course, that was far from ideal for a singer who’s long prided herself on being a songwriter, too— she clearly took far more satisfaction in her co-writing credits for Britney Spears and Big Time Rush than for any hook-up with Flo Rida. But at least Kesha’s choice of covers on recent tours—a smattering that ranges from Lesley Gore to Eagles of Death Metal—has proven she has a wider, more surprising set of musical tastes than was evident from the over-abundance of would-be club bangers on her two albums. Nor should the abundance of Bob Dylan tributes over the years—like her exquisite cover of “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” from 2012’s Chimes of Freedom tribute—be quite so surprising given the number of times she’s namedNashville Skyline as her favorite album.In fact, Kesha’s been eager to show off her affinities for classic rock, punk, and alt-rock since well before it all went sideways. When not citing The Damned as heroes, she was palling around with Alice Cooper and getting assists from The Strokes, The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and Iggy Pop. And while that fabled Flaming Lips/Kesha collaboration—nicknamed Lip$ha—may have been sucked into a legal void from which it has yet to escape, we still got a tantalizing taste thanks to her mind-bending appearance on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.So as for all those haters and doubters who didn’t miss her, I say: You don’t know what you were missing. To mark the arrival of her third album Rainbow, here’s a set of her most adventurous and most surprising songs, and many more she loves, which should demonstrate there was always more to her than she got credit for… though maybe that’s about to change.

The borders around whatever constitutes country music were awfully loosey-goosey long before hick-hop was a thing. Everyone from the original hillbilly and rockabilly cats of the ‘50s through the Californian hippies of the ‘60s to the outlaws of the ‘70s all stepped back and forth along the genre’s boundaries in their own music. In the ‘90s and beyond, country artists began to reach across the proverbial aisle to their brethren and sistren in the rock and hip-hop worlds. Of course, the crossovers flourished in the other direction as well, with former rock-world types like Kid Rock and Hootie & The Blowfish’s Darius Rucker finding warm homes on the state-fair circuit. Those traditional distinctions have never seemed as blurry as they do today, in an age when even the most seemingly unlikely cross-genre matchups—whether it’s Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg or Carrie Underwood and Ludacris—hardly raise an eyebrow. The success of Uncle Kracker is a big reason why country got to be such a broad church (and sometimes a weird and wild one, too).Uncle Kracker’s buddy and former employer Kid Rock may have busted the field wide open with his redneck-MC routine on 1998’s “Cowboy,” but Uncle Kracker’s own pair of smashes with “Follow Me” and “Drift Away” in the early 2000s may have been even more influential. Here was a sound that somehow spiked a down-home and eminently country brand of mellow with the brasher edge of hip-hop. Around the same time, a scrappy Timbaland protégé by the name of Bubba Sparxxx was scoring hits with rawer variations on this new hybrid.You might expect that artists in the country world would not take too kindly to these incursions into their traditional terrain. But if anything, it was a cue for them to get bolder, too. The swagger brandished by superstar duo Big & Rich suggested a greater kinship to Jay-Z than with any old-timers at the Grand Ole Opry. Hell, Big & Rich even have their own Wu-Tang-like posse in MuzikMafia, a loose collective that has dominated country music for much of the century thanks to the duo’s own hits and those of friends and sometime collaborators like Gretchen Wilson and hick-hop icon Cowboy Troy. Given that overall spike in badass attitude, the rise of bro-country stars like Jason Aldean and a new wave of proudly redneck MCs like Colt Ford and Upchurch was inevitable.So where this kind of hybridization still seemed like a novelty in 2004 when Nelly and Tim McGraw delivered “Over and Over”—still the quintessential country-rap slow-jam—it’s now a testament to the fact that American popular music might as well be one giant purple state. And Uncle Kracker helped make it all possible, which is why he belongs in this playlist of essential songs and artists that forced open the rusty gates of country music’s corral.

Fancy-pants scientist types with glasses and clipboards have been telling us this for years: Dancing is good for you. Along with improving the condition of your heart, lungs, muscles, bones, and many other bodily bits, it can increase your agility, flexibility, and endurance as well. And then there are the psychological and emotional effects thanks to the release of all those delicious endorphins. Most importantly, dancing can transform you into a stone-cold fox who feels like one, too. And who the hell doesn’t need that right now?

Though we can’t be there to help move your furniture or do anything else that needs to be done to give you the room to move, we can supply this set of supremely fun and funky favorites that will get you up on your feet and ready to channel that cabin fever into a far more positive outlet. You’ve gotta dance like no one’s watching, although if you do feel like getting out on the balcony or the front porch to share with your neighbors, we’re not standing in your way.

Photo Credit: Matthew LeJune on Unsplash

For all his antics, gags, and occasional pantslessness, Mac DeMarco has always been a sensitive soul. Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who’s ventured past his wild-goofball stage persona and dived into the dreamily intimate and playfully askew pop songs that fill all of the Canuck’s releases. DeMarco’s first full-length album in three years, This Old Dog, may be his richest and smoothest to date, showcasing his growing love for vintage synths and his increasing skill in using them to enhance the shine and shimmer of his deceptively casual melodies.The candor he displays in many new songs—in which he reflects on a fraught relationship with his father—is one element that evokes his ‘70s singer/songwriter heroes, a pantheon that includes James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Harry Nilsson. Yet the music’s effervescence and spirit of playfulness demonstrate his deep devotion to mavericks like Jonathan Richman and Yellow Magic Orchestra just as clearly. All the while, he inches closer to his long-stated ambition to make an album as strong as his favorites, with Neil Young’s Harvest and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as a couple he often cites.Any way you slice it, This Old Dog is a shockingly mature effort for a guy who remains famous for interrupting a gig to stick a drumstick up his butt. Several key Mac tracks show how he got here, along with songs by the icons who inspired him and some from friends and collaborators like Ariel Pink and Walter TV.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the mystique of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer, just seeing her face on the cover of her new album may be startling enough. Of course, just like the music on Fever Ray’s Plunge, the grisly nature of the image (seen above) demonstrates her determination to be something far bolder and more provocative than the more passive, pliable, and predictable female stereotypes on which the music industry so often thrives.Taking a plunge into Dreijer’s sound world can be as unsettling as it is exhilarating. Even though the sometimes brutal yet oddly buoyant electro-pop of her (now-defunct) sibling duo The Knife remains a fundamental element of the songs she creates as Fever Ray, the project continues to expose her broad range of influences, from dark metal to African music to the soundtracks of David Lynch and Miami Vice to the work of Meredith Monk and Kate Bush (two other women who’ve been similarly fearless when it comes to demolishing conventions and exploring the properties of their astonishing voices). And while the cumulative effect can be as chilly as a New Year’s Eve party in Göteborg, there’s always a charge—and sometimes even a warmth—thanks to the stormy emotions and vulnerabilities that exist just below the surface. Hit play on our mix to hear the music that’s inspired her and catch the same fever.