Zombie Apocalypse - dance

Seventy-five tracks for the October 2012 Halloween party — the dance-side tape, with the slower dark-crawl companion that ran later in the night. The party was at a friend’s house with a real backyard and a Bluetooth speaker that we’d just gotten and that we were testing the limits of. About thirty people showed up. Costumes were optional but most people committed.

Flo Rida “I Cry” opens because the song was the structural anchor of the year’s pop-radio dance rotation. Anyone who was in any club, any party, any reception in 2012 heard “I Cry” probably four times a night, and the playlist is committing to the fact that the song earned that rotation duty even when the critical consensus had moved on. Karmin “Brokenhearted” follows. The pop duo had broken through to mainstream radio earlier that year and the song was the cut that sat at the top of every pop-radio rotation through the summer.

Kesha “Die Young” was the song of the party. The track had dropped in September and was inescapable by October. At about hour two of the party, somebody connected the speaker to the kitchen amp and turned the volume up past the point that the speaker was rated for, and the entire backyard sang the chorus for the full three and a half minutes. The placement at the front quarter is doing the work of capturing how the song landed at the actual party.

Owl City with Carly Rae Jepsen “Good Time” is the deliberate-saccharine pop pull that the rotation absolutely commits to. The collaboration shouldn’t work — Owl City is an electropop project, Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop singer working through her “Call Me Maybe” moment — and somehow the pairing produced one of the year’s best pure-pop singles. The placement is honest about how the song lived in the rotation.

PSY “Gangnam Style” was the wildcard of the night. The song had dropped in July and was inescapable globally by September. At about hour three of the Halloween party, somebody put it on, somebody else did the dance, and within ninety seconds the entire backyard had committed to the same dance regardless of costume coordination. I’d like to claim some methodological insight about the cross-cultural moment but the actual situation was that everyone was four drinks in and the song’s chorus is a permission slip.

Hot Chelle Rae with New Boyz “I Like It Like That” carries the deliberate-camp pop-radio block. The track is the kind of song that aged into being slightly more impressive than it seemed at the time — the production holds up, the chorus still works, the band’s catalog has been undervalued in the streaming-era’s working-rotation. Ellie Goulding “Lights” sits mid-rotation as the late-2012 alt-pop-radio anchor. The song had been on the alt-radio rotation since the previous year and crossed into mainstream pop in 2012 in a way that’s now hard to overstate.

Alex Clare “Too Close” is the dubstep-pop crossover that the year’s rotation specifically committed to. The dubstep wave had been working its way into pop-radio for a year by then and “Too Close” was the cut where the genre crossed all the way over — soul vocal, wobble bass, pop-radio production. The track was inescapable through 2012 and the placement in the rotation is the right one.

Mid-rotation pulls in the year’s other pop-radio anchors — Maroon 5 with Wiz Khalifa, Pink, Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” peak, the Carly Rae Jepsen “Call Me Maybe” run that had been inescapable since spring. The back half leans harder into the dance-floor commits — David Guetta tracks, Calvin Harris singles, the festival-EDM cuts that the year was producing in volume.

Seventy-five tracks. About four and a half hours. The right length for a Halloween party that ran from sundown through the early-morning hours, with the playlist doing the work of being the room’s energy management without anyone having to touch the laptop. The cooldown companion tape took over around midnight when the dance-floor peak had passed. Built for that specific party, that specific year, that specific group of friends in costume in a backyard. Still works at any Halloween party where the volume can go past polite.

The back third runs the deeper EDM-festival cuts from 2012 — Avicii, Calvin Harris, the Skrillex catalog that was about to peak. The cooldown tape took over around midnight when the dance-floor energy passed. The two-tape methodology worked because the friend group had built enough collective listening trust to commit to a single party across multiple rotation registers.