The devil has been on my mind lately. Can’t imagine why.
No one knows for sure if Satan is real. But temptation and sin have been around as long as humans. In Milton’s telling, the devil is a charismatic sort, vengeful but disarming, aggrieved but persuasive, jealous but attractive. A loner. A rebel. An antihero worthy of his own HBO series. Like a Scorsese protagonist, he’s drawn to wrongdoing, but he makes it look fun. He’s a charlatan, to be sure, but the kind that we mortals fall for again and again.
Not coincidentally, music and the devil have a long and tortured history, from Robert Johnson trading his soul for success at the crossroads to the scandal over secret Satanic messages allegedly embedded in heavy metal albums, which could be heard if you played them backwards, something I never figured out how to do. (Alas, as George Carlin put it, all messages from Satan are played forward and are in standard American English.)
The following playlist collects 371 songs in which the devil plays a starring role. And this is after I made some key choices to pare things down. The songs had to be about the devil specifically, not just hell. (My apologies to the Squirrel Nut Zippers.) The songs couldn’t just be about someone or something that was devil-like, as in the tired trope of the “devil woman” that litters the history of recorded music. I bypassed metal, mostly, because that feels its own thing. And I offered up a couple covers of probably the best known songs about the devil2, just to keep it fresh.
What remains are songs in which the devil:
Lives inside every single one of us; represents the music industry (I think?); embodies the firearms industry; dresses up; loves you; gets to work; pleads; chases; pursues; takes the form of a cat; drives like a maniac; kills the Kennedys (among others) and oversees Pilate’s hygiene; runs; runs some more; falls in love; crashes on your couch and smokes all your cigs; tempts you with opioids; sells you questionable Tex-Mex; steals your woman and then your soul.
In these songs, these trespasses aren’t altogether unwelcome. Some singers even invite the devil in, seduced by promises of a good time. Still others warn of temptation, and even threaten Beelzebub with a comeuppance. In this playlist — as in life, perhaps — you’re never quite sure what to make of the devil, and you’re never quite sure what the devil makes of you.
They say idle hands are the devil’s plaything, but for better or worse my hands have been plenty busy with work lately. So here’s an abridged version of liner notes:
Nick Cave took inspiration for this song from Paradise Lost, and evidently filled a notebook with illustrations and maps related to the song. I love it when songwriters create a whole world for their relatively short creations; I think that’s why this one has resonated across Peaky Blinders and many, many cover versions (including one at the end of this playlist).
Thanks to Eddie Vedder for clarifying whether he would fellate Mephistopheles. (He wouldn’t.)
This R.E.M. fan should listen to more of their fellow Athenians, the B-52’s. “Devil in My Car” was a welcome discovery.
Just think: Daniel Johnston, Austinite, wrote “Devil Town” before all the tech bros moved here.
I miss funny Beck songs.
Feeling uninspired? This Shirley Caesar song will fix that.
Cat Power / Chan Marshall can inhabit a song like few others. You believe her when she says she must be one of the devil’s daughters.
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine,
-P.L.U.
I couldn’t quite get to 666.
The one concerning sympathy and the one concerning ye olde bells o’ hell.
Per IMDB: “Donald Trump's private residential multi-level apartment at Trump Tower was used as Alex Cullen's home [in The Devil’s Advocate]. Trump's landmark gold decor, and classic view of Central Park, provide a familiar New York City backdrop. Appearing on the WTF podcast, writer Tony Gilroy said, ‘We needed the ugliest, most garish, horrifying real estate developer apartment you could possible have and Trump threw his apartment at us.’”