Best Songs for Your Jukebox Money
You’re hanging out with friends in a joint with an electronic jukebox and you’re about to play some jams to get the joint feeling a kinda way. Alright, bet. The juke probably has a search function that allows you to access the entire history of recorded music, but that’s NOT a license to go play some folk music from the 1930s on Saturday night in your local watering hole. Don’t do that. I have some advice.
You CAN play the 17-minute version of O.A.R.’s Crazy Game of Poker, but that doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Sleep’s Dopesmoker is over an hour, but that would somewhat monopolize the mood. Stairway to Heaven is right out of the conversation, so don’t start with me. Pink Floyd is a collection of spectacular musicians but that does not mean Saturday Night wants their love and affection. What you need to do is cultivate a mood but also not violate social contracts. That’s a precarious wire to walk. You want to get your money’s worth while also fueling the vibe. This is a tall order.
With that in mind, I present the best bang for your buck at the jukebox on a Saturday night.
Detroit’s own The Spinners with the full-length Rubberband Man. Seven and a half minutes of funky groove with a pop culture connection to the Marvel films. It’s more than twice the length of a normal hit and sustains the vibe. This is the way to start your hostile takeover of the jukebox.
The Mighty Meat Loaf’s Paradise By the Dashboard Light. It’s just old enough to be kitschy and fun without being corny, and that’s another hard line to walk, but this does it well. It follows The Spinners well and is even longer. You’ll be amazed at how many people sing along to it.
Now we have to update the timeframe a wee bit, and Green Day’s Jesus of Suburbia is perfect for this. Most of the people in the bar will have heard the album this appeared on - it’s sandwiched between American Idiot and Holiday/Boulevard of Broken Dreams on Green Day’s magnum opus American Idiot. It’s slightly over nine minutes long and the crowd is going to know every damn word.
Take that same recipe from Green Day and work backward through the rock catalog and you’ll find Sonic Youth’s Teen Age Riot. The end of Jesus of Suburbia and the beginning of Teen Age Riot dovetail beautifully and you’ll find most Green Day fans dig on Sonic Youth. This is another seven minutes for your cash and you’ll see old and young heads getting into it over their pints.
Now you need something more modern, more accessible. This is when you change things up with Kanye’s Monster, which clocks in at over six minutes. Despite all Kanye’s issues, this is still a banger by any measure, so let it rip.
For flow’s sake, and your money, you have to keep the same production value in the air. This is when you turn to Frank Ocean’s Pyramids, which is almost 10 minutes long and is just as exciting as Monster. It also has the benefit of being dead sexy, and frankly, no barroom has ever suffered from being too sexy.
We’re going to call on a classic, a bonafide banger before they started calling them bangers. It’s a legendary track that slides in comfortably after Frank Ocean and that’s Tupac’s California Love. You thought you had a vibe before??? Dre AND Tupac for almost six and a half minutes? Yeah… this is that shit and everyone knows it.
Dr. Dre was thoroughly informed by George Clinton, so it only makes sense to follow up Tupac and Dre with Parliament’s Flash Light. We’re just going to keep the deep groove going for another six minutes and no one will get upset about the matter. If they do, you know immediately who you don’t want to fuck at the end of the night.
These eight tracks put us at an hour. This is well worth your money, but for the sake of overdoing it, and all about it, let me give you another hour. Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing - moderation is for cowards.
We’ve built in a break, and now it’s time to get the light-skinned folks involved again, which means we need to call on Freddie Mercury and Company. Yes. It’s time to play Bohemian Rhapsody and let the Wayne’s World generation headbang at the right moment. Never not worth it.
Rhapsody ends on a piano melody and fade out, so you can’t start the next track with a killer riff or drum beat. What you need is a spoken-word intro, and here’s when we call on a man who has purified himself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. It’s time for the Purple One, Prince, and 1999. Clocking in at more than six minutes, but never letting up once, 1999 is the jam we all need regardless of its place in a playlist.
Prince’s jam ends exactly where Madonna’s Like a Prayer begins, and since it clocks in well over five minutes and offers up just the danceable groove we need, it’s on the list. Watch all the white girls lose their shit and dance around the pool table. Then you’ll know you made the right choice.
Since we’ve got ‘em dancing, it’s time to go even harder on the dance groove and hit ‘em with Mike Jackson’s Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, which has almost the same bass intro and is equally unrelenting. Completely worth every dollar and it’s not a debate.
There’s never a bad time to play Chic’s Good Times on a Saturday night out unless you’re at a metal bar, in which case any early-period Metallic track would take the place of Chic. Hopefully, you’re not at a metal bar but at a place with some funk built into the clientele. Then you play Chic and watch the young and old heads lose their minds and let their backbones slip.
Nile Rodgers was the brainchild behind Chic and his leadership and thoughtfully funky riffs opened a million hip-hop doors. Two young DJs went crate diving and built an entire album out of samples of his comprehensive work. Those two DJs are Daft Punk and they joined forces with Nile like the NWO joined forces with Hulk Hogan and they created Get Lucky. Play that next.
Yes, we’re dancing and the playlist has everyone else dancing, so maybe we dial up a dude who had an open invite to the cookout. David Bowie was never not cool, and Let’s Dance is guaranteed to keep them going. Do not hesitate. David Bowie is rarely the wrong choice given the breadth and depth of his storied career.
If David Bowie, Chic, Freddie Mercury, and Madonna had a love child through some wild in vitro fertilization, I can only imagine Lady Gaga would appear in a bassinet somewhere between the East and Hudson Rivers in lower Manhattan. Her Bad Romance is the best pure pop song since Like a Prayer and it’s not close. Play it and test my theory.
Now you have a choice. Do you end your two-hour set on the downtempo or do you leave with an explosion? I’ll give you the option, but my thought is you leave ‘em with a climactic finale that makes the person following you up exposed to how weak their taste is. Beck’s Where It’s At is the jam they all need and can sing along too. You already know what’s coming: two turntables and a microphone. You’re welcome.
And that’s how you get your money’s worth out of a jukebox without being a shithead.
It's only 5:20 but, given the post title, I was thinking I might see "Love Shack" on the list.
This lists many of my all-time favorite pop icons. The Madonna>Bowie>Prince>Gaga lineup is positively mind blowing. I cried when Madge played Like A Prayer in Detroit , her 2024 homecoming. I think she did, too!