The End of the World 2020 Pandemic Megamix

(Scroll down for the embedded mp3 remix!)

As some of you know, I’ve been teaching a religious studies course this past year at CSU, Chico called The End of the World. As you can imagine, 2020 has been a wild time to be teaching a course about the end of the world, particularly when some of our weekly readings have touched in issues such as fear in America, conspiracy theories, and global pandemics.

For anyone interested, you can see a sample course syllabus on my teaching page. I’ve also written a bit about teaching this class in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus was just starting to take shape around the world, in the context of pandemic pedagogies. 

One of the class activities I had my students do this semester related to artificial intelligence (AI) as an end of the world scenario. I asked them to generate a series of different media using AI engines, including a band name, a song and accompanying lyrics, and a small audio riff, using Google’s Mixlab, which is an AI for playing around with musical composition.

My original plan had been to use the lyrics and audio samples they generated to put together an end of the world mixtape. But also, best laid plans and all that, the resulting content just wasn’t usable in the way I had hoped or imagined. I even designed an album cover to go along with the project, which included AI-generated art and the associated band names and songs, which you can see here if you’re interested. So after a few days of editing all of the related media I had to cut my losses, but I still wanted to do be able to salvage something from this class project. Fortunately, I had included one aspect of the class assignment, which was as follows: “Imagine you are putting together an End of the World mixtape–something like the Awesome Mix Vol. 1 from Guardians of the Galaxy. What is the one song you would have to include in your personal mixtape?”

Using the responses from that prompt, I was able to put together an alternate mixtape. In my younger years I used to be a dj and spent a lot of time playing around with audio mixing, but it’s been many years since I’ve done this, and working on this made that really clear. Of course, I would also never intentionally put together a playlist like this, because some of these songs were such a pain to get mixed together–as you will hear in a few places. But all in all, after a week’s worth of editing work.

So with no further ado, I’m please to present you with The End of the World 2020 Pandemic Megamix!

I hope you will enjoy it.

 

 

For those interested, here is the full track list for the remix in order of appearance, including the sample tracks as well.

Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around

Kelly Clarkson – Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)

Satellite Stories – Campfire

Blackway & Black Caviar – What’s Up Danger

Bill Withers – Ain’t No Sunshine

Cage the Elephant – Cold Cold Cold

Electric Light Orchestra – Mr. Blue Sky

Jon Bellion – Human

Cypis – Gdzie jest biały węgorz (Zejście) [* Polish translated roughly to ‘Where is the white eel (Descent (or) Death)’]

Ennio Morricone – The Ecstasy of Gold (Bandini Remix)

Lord Huron – Until the Night Turns

Tame Impala – The Less I Know the Better

Gary Jules – Mad World

Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

Rush – Tom Sawyer

Thundercats – Them Changes

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dani California

The Cure – Disintegration (Live)

Harry Styles – Fine Line

Tyler Childers – Feathered Indians

Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around (samples)

Chief Keef – Love Sosa

Monty Python – And now for something entirely different; Shut up (samples)

Whitewolf – Social Distancing (Extended Mix feat. Darkroom) (samples)

Eric Clapton – Layla (Unplugged)

The Church – Under the Milky Way

Atmosphere – God Loves Ugly

X-Files: The Conspiracy (** see note below)

R.E.M. – It’s the End of the World

 

** I’m a big fan of The X-Files, and have been dropping in “spooky Mulder” and other select X-Files references in my lectures, so I couldn’t pass up a final inclusion in this mixtape, especially since it fit well many class themes–aliens, conspiracies, bioengineering, etc.).