Yesterday, the immortal WPRB DJ Jon Solomon asked his Twitter followers for their favorite songs under 60 seconds, his own nominee being the Angry Samoans' Lights Out. That's a fine candidate, but for me, the indisputable champions of the sub-60 form were the (aptly named) Minutemen, the only question in my mind being which of their dozens of qualifying songs to declare as my favorite. It took some deliberation, but I finally went with Ain't Talkin' Bout Love, their 42-second distillation of the Van Halen ‘classic’ (specifically, the live version included on their 1984 Tour Spiel 7-inch, which loomed large in the musical landscape of my freshman year of college).

By that time, though, I had ultra-short songs on the brain. And sure enough, I found myself combing my library for good sub-60-second songs to turn into a playlist. In keeping with the spirit of the genre, this was slapped together quickly with little regard for the subtleties of sequencing. A few arguably deserving tracks had to be left off in order to comply with 8tracks' rule of having no more than two songs from any one band or album—the only one that caused me real pain was omitting Minutemen's Futurism Restated (it was narrowly edged out by Ack Ack Ack). I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the mix. Although it is predictably dominated by punk scorchers, hiphop, jazz, and even klezmer all manage to be represented as well.

So, with no further introduction, I present my Gone in 60 Seconds mix. in all its 24-songs-in-19-minutes glory: