You might not be aware that April 7 is National Beer Day, but do you know who probably would be? Country singers, that’s who. Why? Two reasons. First of all, when it comes to drinking songs, there’s no style of music that has a higher percentage of them than country. Sure, blues has plenty of them, and rock has its share, but none can compare to country. So nobody spends more time singing about drinking than country singers. And drilling down to a more specific level, although there has yet to be an official scientific study of the subject, it seems safe to say that when it comes to country drinking songs, beer is most often the beverage of choice.

So when National Beer Day rolls around, you can be sure it’s not going unnoticed in the country-music world. In that spirit, it’s only right to offer up a playlist that’s chock-full of suds-focused tunes in the genre, ranging from the ubiquitous to the little-known, reaching all the way back to the golden era of honky-tonk and coming right up to the present moment, while making plenty of stops in between along the way.

For instance, you’ve got three generations of Hanks leaning in to bring beer fully into focus. Western swing king Bob Wills represents the old school one moment with “Bubbles In My Beer,” and modern-day Nashville hitmaker Luke Combs delivers “Beer Never Broke My Heart” the next. And whether it’s a low-key ballad like Luke Bryan’s “Drink A Beer” or a roof-raiser like Toby Keith’s rocking “Beers Ago,” odds are that you’ve never heard so many variations on the topic at hand in one place before. In other words, if you’re about to lift a tall, cool one, you could do a lot worse for your soundtrack.

Photo Credit: Photo by mnm.all on Unsplash

"Strange days have found us, and through their strange hours we linger alone" – Jim Morrison"Beauty always has an element of strangeness" – Charles BaudelaireThere was always something dangerous about The Doors. From the very beginning it was blindingly obvious that they stood far apart from the rest of the 60s Sunset Strip scene, not to mention the entire rock world. Sophistication? Sure. Darkness? Undoubtedly. Sensuality? You bet. Blend all of the above with a generous dose of transgression and you start to zero in on The Doors magic mixture. Not coincidentally, that same confluence of elements is pretty much the definition of 19th century Frances Symbolist poetry movement, as epitomized by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. It was an influence that is obvious to any fan of both The Doors and the French Symbolist, but it’s also an influence that Morrison spoke to when he mailed French literature expert and Duke professor Wallace Fowlie, thanking him for producing a translation of Rimbuad’s complete poems, and relaying, "I dont read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me."If course, Morrison was hardly the only singer of that era to be influenced by poetry. The second half of the 60s saw a giant evolutionary leap for rock n roll lyrics, one that inspired fans to append the "poetry" label to rock for the first time. Bob Dylan got that ball rolling, followed closely by The Beatles, but the arrival of The Doors gave the rock-as-poetry concept an even bigger boost of an entirely different kind. Jim Morrison was rocks first real poetic enfant terrible, an heir at last to the moody mien of poetrys original dark princes, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It was all right there in The Doors very first introduction to the world at large. The first line of their first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," which was also the opening cut on their debut album, immediately served notice of Morrisons intentions. "You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day" was both a world away from what was coming out of most rock singers mouths and an entirely different kind of enhanced lyricism than that of Dylan or John Lennon.Dylan and Lennon dazzled their disciples with phantasmagorical, LSD-aided imagery perfectly in tune with the psychedelically stimulated times. But while acid undeniably acted as a launching pad for some of Morrisons lyrics, The Doors werent wowing fans with "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" or gently calling to Mr. Tambourine Man in search of a "jingle-jangle morning." Sure, Morrison was a lyricist who liked to paint vivid, sometimes psychedelic pictures with words. But he was also a libertine who loved nothing better than to line up taboos and, well, break on through to the other side. In all of these things, he was blazing his own trail on a path begun a century earlier by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and company. Like The Doors singer, the French Symbolist poets were iconoclastic hedonists for whom nothing was more important than the derangement of the senses in the service of experiencing lifes absurd carnival to its fullest and finding an artful way to describe it. The bad boys of their eras literary scene, they might have been rock stars if the possibility existed at the time. But their visions burned as deeply and brightly as anything to emerge since. Morrison drew as much from these transgressive poets as he did from John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He was an avowed admirer of their dark visions, from Baudelaires deliriously decadent Flowers of Evil to Rimbauds daring A Season in Hell. There was even a book dedicated solely to the topic of Morrisons relation to Rimbaud. But if you want to pick up on the connection all you need to do is listen.Its not so far a leap, for instance, from The Doors "End of the Night" to Baudelaires "Death of the Poor." The former finds Morrison crooning:

Realms of bliss, realms of lightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to the endless night

In the latter, Baudelaire declares:

It is death who gives us life in excitationIt is the end of life, the one hope, the one delightThat, divine elixir, is our IntoxicationAnd which gives us the heart to follow the endless night

Parallels between Morrison and Rimbaud arent tough to spot either. Take the opening of the latters legendary A Season in Hell:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I founder bitter. And I cursed her.I armed myself against justice.I fled. O Witches, Misery, Hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted!

It doesnt require a great contortion of sensibility to draw a line between that and "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)," where Morrison cries:Listen to this, Ill tell you about the heartacheIll tell you about the heartache and the loss of GodIll tell you about the hopeless nightThe meager food for souls forgotIll tell you about the maiden with wrought iron soulMorrison never seemed to be aping his influences, but its certainly possible to imagine that he and the poets he admired were reporting from the same spiritual/psychological precipice. Of course, Morrison wasnt content to be considered merely a "rock poet" either; he published two books of his own verse, eventually combined as The Lords and The New Creatures. But The Doors singular mix of music and imagery remains the most intoxicating indication of the Symbolists sway over Morrison.

A guitar hero in the terms truest sense, British axeman Mick Ronson distinguished himself with dazzling riffs for Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Bob Dylan, and others, but it was his early 70s work with David Bowie that really made Ronson a legend. Over the course of three years and four milestone albums, Ronson and Bowie gave rock n roll a radical facelift. When they were finished refashioning the music in their own image, it bore a passing resemblance to its former countenance, but its features were forever changed.Ronson was Bowies right-hand man from the revolutionary art rock of 1970s The Man Who Sold the World to the idiosyncratic songcraft of 1971s Hunky Dory, the glam-rock glory of 1972s Ziggy Stardust, and the arch, almost unhinged future-rock of 1973s Aladdin Sane. Its no coincidence that those albums form the backbone of Bowies legacy—without Ronson on hand for all of those milestone sessions, each of those albums would surely have sounded significantly different. By extension, its totally within the realm of possibility that Bowies breakthroughs, both artistic and commercial, might never have happened at all if the lad from Hull hadnt been by his side for them.Bowie made a big jump from the trippy ballads of Space Oddity to the bristling rock and bruising riffs of The Man Who Sold the World. It’s important to note that Ronson wasn’t just some random session dude wandering in for the date; he and drummer Mick Woodmansey had played together in a band called The Rats and were specifically recruited to be part of Bowie’s new band, as was Rats bassist Trevor Bolder, who would replace Tony Visconti on bass on the next album. Ronson led the charge that brought Bowie into a whole new realm, with not only immortal riffs (like the regal but foreboding one that defines the title track) but also the hard-rocking roar of less-celebrated, equally intense tracks like “Black Country Rock” and “She Shook Me Cold.”By the time Bowie cut Hunky Dory, with producer/bassist Visconti gone, arrangement chores fell to Ronson on top of his guitar duties. Ronson was more than prepared to help usher Bowie into his next remarkable evolutionary leap. The guitarist’s orchestrations helped make the reflective ballad “Changes” not just touching but transcendent, and gave the dizzying “Life on Mars” just the right air of grandeur, shining a spotlight on Bowie’s increasingly complex compositional powers. And Ronson’s lyrical licks on deeper cuts like “Song for Bob Dylan” showed his nose for nuance.If the Bowie-Ronson team hadn’t already assured its place in rock history by that point, their status was cemented by 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Not only was it the quintessential guidepost of glam rock, it was one of the primary influences on the next generation of mavericks that peopled the punk and New Wave revolution. Remaining resolutely anti-flash, Ronson propels Bowie’s conceptual tale of an alien rock star with short, sharp blasts of power. “Suffragette City” and the less ubiquitous “Hang On to Yourself” are punk five years ahead of time, attitude-laden bursts of streamlined rock ‘n’ roll stripped to the bone and spoiling for a fight. And Ronson’s simultaneously martial and magisterial riffs on the barnstorming title track remain among rock’s most goosebump-inducing moments.If Ziggy was the iconoclastic charmer gleefully leading his disciples down a merrily hedonistic path, 1973’s Aladdin Sane was its sociopathic sibling, setting fireworks off in your ear for the sheer twisted joy of it. While the former anticipated punk, the latter, still years ahead of that style, feels like a calling card for post punk. Bowie’s lyrics were at their wildest, and Ronson’s axe matches him step for step, deconstructing rock ‘n’ roll before your very ears on the edgy, off-kilter “Cracked Actor” and giddily reconstructing old-school signifiers like the blues riff at the heart of “The Jean Genie” and the Bo Diddley groove of “Panic in Detroit.” Ronson even works his wild squalls into the arch, postmodern cabaret rock of “Time.”This astonishing four-album flush of brilliance was obviously far from the last blast of greatness for either Bowie or Ronson. But not counting the arrestingly quirky covers album Pin Ups, it was their final creative surge as partners. All these years later, that partnership still stands as a brightly beaming moment constantly imitated but never even close to equaled.

Over at the Brooklyn Vegan blog, Andrew Sacher recently took on the task of selecting 30 Essential Psychedelic Soul Songs. The psych soul sound emerged when straightforward R&B artists tapped into the late-‘60s/early-‘70s countercultural vibe with trippy arrangements and often socially conscious lyrics. But it can be a slippery beast: On the early end of the timeline, it can be tough to draw the line between progressive but still relatively straight late-‘60s R&B and its turned-on, tuned-in cousin. On the later end of the timeline, all the wah-wah floating around tends to blur the border between acid soul and the realm of blaxploitation.But Sacher does a fine job hitting plenty of the genre’s highlights: The Chambers Brothers’ loopy, barnstorming epic “Time Has Come Today” and The 5th Dimension’s flower power harmony-pop classic “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” rub shoulders with the heady swirl of Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” and Terry Callier’s hypnotic, jazz-kissed psych folk saga “Dancing Girl,” along with a healthy batch of contemporary tracks. But as satisfying as the list is, it largely sticks to marquee names and iconic cuts, and as Sacher rightly points out, there’s plenty more territory to be explored.In that spirit, here’s an addendum to the BV playlist; think of it as a psychedelic soul annex. You’ll find more esoteric acts like Black Merda, Madhouse—not the Prince side project—and William S. Fischer, as well as unexpected artists like Muddy Waters, Chubby Checker, and jazzman Stanley Cowell dipping a toe in the psych soul waters. Closing the list with a cut from Childish Gambino’s 2016 tour de force Awaken, My Love! underscores the fact that this sound needn’t be tied to a single era.

“Break On Through (To the Other Side)” is both a feral howl of desire and dislocation and a sleek, supple creature that darts and pounces in a manner at once sinuous and sinewy. The Doors’ 1967 debut single, urging a shattering of society’s constrictions, served notice that there was something new happening, the likes of which no one had seen before. Its simultaneously explosive and seductive power embedded it irreversibly not only in the mood of the moment but also in the very fabric of American culture forever after. We recently reached out to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger about the songs origins and heres what he told us:“We were working up “Break on Through” in rehearsal. John came up with this bossa nova beat. I didnt think it would work, but he said it would, and he was right. I had the idea to use the type of riff that Paul Butterfield used on Shake your Moneymaker. I wouldn’t say I stole it, just borrowed it. With Ray’s vox organ, it was sounding good! The lyrics were some of Jim’s best. As we played it at more and more gigs it got better and better. The only regret i had was that we let them cut out the word high from ‘she gets high’ on the single version. I guess that was too controversial for the AM radio, but we made up for that on the Ed Sullivan show (by singing), ‘get much higher.’ LOL”While its origins are relatively modest, its impact is far-reaching. Below, we’ll look at how the song changed The Doors and rock ‘n’ roll forever.Arrival of the Rock Gods"Break On Through" was The Doors introduction to the world—their first single as well as the first track on their debut album. It was the opening salvo of a four-man rock n roll revolution that would fill the collective cultural consciousness with a heady brew of sex, poetry, anger, beauty, and indelible tunes. The songs urgent entry into the publics ears marked the auspicious arrival of a group that would remain real-deal rock deities even decades after disbanding.The Real Start of the 60sThe Doors anthem of social sedition, fueled in part by Jim Morrisons use of LSD as a mind-expanding tool, arrived at the start of 1967, the year the 60s really became the sixties. The blend of gritty garage-rock tonalities and lithe, bossa nova-influenced grooves that rippled through “Break On Through” framed an invitation to abandon the cage of convention and leap headfirst into a bold, burgeoning countercultural realm. In that sense, for many it heralded the onset of the Aquarian age.Rock n Roll PoetryArriving ahead of game-changers like Sgt. Peppers and Songs of Leonard Cohen, "Break On Through" brought the world a brand of rock poetry that had nothing to do with Dylan. From its very first lines—"You know the day destroys the night/ Night divides the day"—it gave a glimpse of the possibilities still in store for rock n roll lyrics, possibilities Morrison fearlessly explored for the rest of his tragically short life.Trail of TributesIts a sure sign of a songs staying power when it appears in all sorts of disparate circumstances generations after its release. Any tune that can be covered by metal supergroup Adrenaline Mob, grunge gurus Stone Temple Pilots, power-pop heroes The Knack, and avant-garde guitar god Marc Ribot, as well as being sampled by hip-hop stoners Cypress Hill and Danish neo-garage rockers The Raveonettes, has got some serious shelf life.The Ultimate HonorIt would be absurdly easy to unfurl a laundry list of the countless times “Break On Through” has been used in movies, TV shows, and video games. And do you really need to know much beyond the fact that it was belted out on The Simpsons by Krusty the Clown himself, clad in Morrison-esque attire and writhing on the floor à la The Lizard King?

The propulsive James Jamerson bass lines, Benny Benjamin’s funky-but-precise rhythms, the elegant, atmospheric orchestrations — given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want to assimilate all those elements at the intersection of pop and soul and assemble their own Motown pastiche? We’re not talking about artists covering classic Motown tunes, either. From the “You Can’t Hurry Love” groove of The Jam’s “Town Called Malice” to the New Jack-meets-Jackson 5 vibe of New Edition’s “Candy Girl” and Amy Winehouse’s brassy, sassy “Rehab,” these tracks take the Motown template and go someplace with it.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Let it never be forgotten that some of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll records in history were made on the most modest equipment, from Elvis Presley’s Sun sessions to The Beatles’ early albums. In the ‘90s, a new generation of rockers emerged who took that lesson to heart. For some, the lo-fi approach to indie rock may have been born of necessity and for others it might have been a more aesthetic choice, but whatever the impetus, bands like Pavement, Sebadoh, and Guided by Voices applied a sort of cinéma vérité sensibility to recording. Half-mumbled (or half-shouted) vocals, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, shambolic drums, spacious productions, and a seeming disinclination towards excessive rehearsal gave their records a raw, visceral quality that’s been at the heart of great rock records from the beginning.

Back in the stormy ‘70s, when Brian Eno was inventing ambient music in England and Tangerine Dream was mixing Moogs with Krautrock, a crew of electronic individualists in France was busy crafting some singular synthesizer tapestries of their own. Sometimes they were influenced by the aforementioned trailblazers and their ilk, but often they were finding their own idiosyncratic way into previously unexplored electronic thickets, without stopping to worry about what the end result might be or what anybody would think about it. With the notable exceptions of Jean-Michel Jarre, who found fame with his 1976 classic Oxygène, and Moog pop pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey, these artists were working well under the radar, largely unnoticed in their own country and all but invisible on an international level. (And that remains the case today—a lot of this music isn’t available on Spotify, so I’ve created a YouTube playlist instead.) But the frequently quirky electronic vistas they created deserve their own chapter in the saga of synth music.

Paul Putti’s short-lived Pôle label achieved underground renown releasing albums by his project of the same name as well as fellow travelers like Philippe Besombes, freely utilizing minimalism and avant-garde techniques. Composers like Jean-Pierre Decerf and Teddy Lasry crossed over from the world of “library” recordings for film and TV but ultimately made intoxicating, atmospheric music that stood on its own. On tracks like “Speedway,” the duo Space Art came off like a Gallic version of Autobahn-era Kraftwerk. If there’s ever a synth-assisted apocalypse, Fredric Mercier’s doomy, titanic “Storm” would certainly make a suitable soundtrack. And Philippe Féret has all but vanished into the deep pockets of time, but his 1978 debut album nevertheless found him at the front lines of the ambient movement. Take a deep dive into a French river filled almost to overflowing with visceral analog electronic tones and maverick notions about what music could be.

The standard boilerplate narrative maintains that synth-pop is all about the Brits, but look a little closer and it becomes apparent that Germany deserves just as many synth-pop props as England, if not more. In fact, it was the Germans who switched the whole thing on.Sure, the UK was full of early adopters like Gary Numan, OMD, Human League, et al. But when it comes down to determining the true originators of synth-pop, nobody would argue against Kraftwerks status as the fount from which everything else flowed. While the Düsseldorf quartet were immersed in experimental Krautrock exploits as early as 1970, it was their international 1974 hit "Autobahn" that definitively married electronics and pop for the first time, daring to dream of what The Beach Boys might have sounded like had they been born a decade later in Deutschland and with oscillators instead of guitars.Alongside Kraftwerk, electronically inclined Krautrock peers like Cluster and Harmonia were making inroads in that direction as well. But the British synth jockeys of the late 70s and early 80s all took their cues from Kraftwerk, whether they owned up to it or not. And as the UK New Wave and post-punk scenes blossomed in that era, Germany was having its own musical revolution with the NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle) movement, with game-changing Teutonic knob-twiddlers like Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), Pyrolator, and Der Plan hitting the same sonic targets.By the time the first generation of German synth-poppers had broken ground, it was anybodys game, and plenty of early-80s Deutsche electronic artists were going for the gold, combining synthesizer technique and drum-machine beats with a seemingly endless supply of infectious pop hooks. Bands like The Twins and Propaganda earned attention on the homefront, while Taco (who struck upon on the novel gimmick of setting American Tin Pan Alley tunes to a synth-pop style) and Peter Schilling even broke through in the U.S.But it was a band that came along just years later that would make one of German synth-pops most passionate, cinematic statements, which resonated all over the world. Alphaville emerged from Münster in 1984 with their debut album, Forever Young, the first single of which—the party-starter "Big in Japan"—was a huge international hit. But it was the soaring, larger-than-life track "Forever Young" that brandished their most outsized hooks and emotional gravitas. Born of Reagan-era nuclear paranoia, the song spoke from a place of fear, courage, desire, despair, and determination all at once, upping the ante on rocks "live fast, die young" ethos by proposing that the proper response in the face of existential angst was simply to stay young in perpetuity.Plenty of other German synth-poppers would follow in the years to come, from Camouflage and Modern Talking to Chicks on Speed and Stereo Total. But when you hit a peak like Alphaville’s classic, you can pretty much claim your immortality right there.

The sound of go-go was born on the streets of Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, a mutant variation of the funk and R&B grooves that had been evolving over the course of the decade. At its core, go-go is all about the beat—and while one of its chief calling cards is a primal, butt-shaking feel, the go-go groove is also an extremely precise and specific sort of beast, adorned in just the right way with congas, timbales, and Rototoms accentuating the bone-deep rhythm the drummer is dropping. It’s music for getting a good, sweaty party going all the way through the wee hours, and its been embedded in the culture of the Baltimore/D.C. area for decades, transcending all sorts of borders. For instance, in the ’80s, D.C. punk pioneers like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye eagerly left their comfort zone behind for the city’s black clubs to catch go-go heroes like Trouble Funk in action.

But partly because it’s always been such a regionally focused scene, go-go has usually remained a cult phenomenon for the rest of the country. One of the only times it even came within spitting distance of the national mainstream was when E.U. was featured performing “Da’ Butt” in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. Even the ultimate go-go anthem, Chuck Brown’s 1979 tune “Bustin’ Loose”—generally credited as the genre’s flagship track—only reached the middle of the pop charts. (Nelly fared far better with his 2002 blockbuster “Hot in Herre,” which borrowed its hook from Brown’s song.)

But on February 19, 2020, go-go truly became part of American history when D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser signed a bill into law declaring it to be the official music of the city. Let’s take the long view of how go-go grew. Look back to the early influences of the scene, from the fiery funk of Young Senators to the jazzy jams of Grover Washington, Jr., and the sweet soul of The Moments, then shift to the giants of the go-go game like Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk, and Rare Essence, and run up to hip-hop/Go-Go crossover kings like DJ Kool.