End Of The World Playlist

If we are going down, might as well go down blasting some sweet tunes.globalpost.com has listed off a few of their favorite tunes to rock out to for the end of the world. For the 20 song playlist, click the link. Add your own in the comments!

London Calling,” The Clash, 1979.

The title track to the Clash’s double-album masterpiece is three and twenty seconds of marauding, paranoid menace. From the indelible sturm and drang of its bass line to Joe Strummer’s sneering pronouncement that “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust,” “London Calling” is the sound of a band hell-bent on either saving the world or destroying it, whichever comes first.

“No Depression in Heaven,” The Carter Family, 1936.

We’ve generally tried to steer clear of religious music on this list, if only because there are so many songs about the biblical apocalypse it’s essentially a genre unto itself. That said, the Carter Family’s “No Depression in Heaven” is such a wonderfully weird and powerful piece of music that it warrants inclusion. The song casts the 1929 Crash and its aftermath as divine punishment, and its simple refrain — “I’m going where there’s no Depression” — is so beautifully evocative it feels like found poetry. Alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo recorded the song on their 1990 debut, fittingly titled No Depression. Sometimes history is timeless.

“God Save the Queen,” The Sex Pistols.

The Sex Pistols are an undeniably important band whose reputation rests more or less on three tracks, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Holidays in the Sun,” and this, the song that turned “no future” into an anthemic rallying cry. For all their musical ineptitude and self-destructive tendencies, at their best the Sex Pistols were smart as hell and “God Save the Queen” is so good it would have left them legends if it were the only thing they’d ever recorded. If it ever strikes you as ridiculous that this song was banned from the BBC you just haven’t listened to it recently.

“1 + 1,” Beyonce, 2011.

Written and produced by The-Dream, the only artist to appear on this list twice. Apocalyptic love songs are a rich genre (“Stand By Me” could have gone on this list as well), but the ferocity of Beyonce’s vocal matched with The-Dream’s songwriting and production make this one hard to top. A melodrama of ravishing beauty and a masterpiece of subtle evocation and strange menace. “I don’t know when I’m gonna die / but I hope I’m gonna die by you.” Yikes.