Gym Songs for the Indie Rocker
posted in: Music News
For discerning music fans, there’s no more frightening experience than visiting the gym. Not only does it mean your pasty-white thighs are exposed to outside air for the first time in weeks, but you’re generally faced with two choices: bring your iPod, and experience the certain thrill of constantly re-stuffing a white piece of plastic into your ear while trying to figure out the best way to wrap a cable around a leg-extension machine. Or be subjected to 24 Hour Fitness’s satellite radio”which no doubt is playing techno, or hip hop or Top 40, or, well, anything other than then new Arcade Fire album.
Thankfully, some mainstream music isn’t as horrible as others”or, conversely, is just so horrible that it becomes music you want to run away from, which is exactly why the treadmill was invented. Below is a (totally subjective) list of songs that you actually want to hear in the gym:
Cooler Than Me (Mike Posner): A smooth-voiced, overproduced popster sings about NOT getting laid, for a change; you can relate.
Airplane (B.o.B. featuring Hayley Williams): A slow-building hip hop song with a soaring chorus from the Paramore girl” and an instrumental track that, sans drums, you could convince yourself is actually unreleased, sampled Radiohead.
Bulletproof (La Roux): Perhaps the least-guilty guilty pleasure of them all: originally an 80s-sounding indie-dance hit, now a remixed techno classic; if you do have your iPod, check out Steel Train’s acoustic-rock re-re-reinvention.
OMG (Usher featuring Wil.I.Am): Nerdspeak from the Black Eyed Peas guy and that dude who dances like Michael Jackson, at exactly the rate of your bike-pedaling.
Whip My Hair (Willow Smith): There is something totally wrong (and yet, alarmingly right) about Will Smith’s pre-teen progeny singing the best stripper song of the year. Seriously.
Rockstar (Nickelback): Actually, no. This is the worst song ever recorded.
Love the Way You Lie (Eminem featuring Rihanna): Fortunately, a great chorus; unfortunately, you’re the only person in the gym who understands the irony in Rihanna singing the lyric “I like the way it hurts.”
Any remix with Sweet Disposition (The Temper Trap) or Use Somebody (Kings of Leon): the more techno-y, the better: “Cause you know what they’re supposed to sound like.”
Dynamite (Taio Cruz): A no-apologies ode to self-awesomeness, which can be good for self-motivation, especially if you yourself are also awesome.
I’m Yours (Jason Mraz): No matter how overplayed (or how many Overstock.com commercials it makes you think of), there’s something ultra-satisfying about watching all the sweaty people around you try to pretend they’re not singing along too.
By Jeff Miller
Jeff Miller is the LA editor of Thrillist.com and has been writing about music professionally for over a decade for publications including the Los Angeles Times, Relix and Esquire.com.