What do Rammstein, The Dixie Chicks, Rick Springfield, The Beatles, U2, Uriah Heep, Toots & the Maytals, Talk Talk, Shiny Toy Guns, Primus, APC, the band that eventually turned into (shudder) Maroon 5, and a bunch of other bands, many of which you never heard of (445 in all) have in common?

That’s right – they’re all included in Dr. Sammy’s Ultimate Bitchin’ Badass Trans-Genred Playlist From Hell.

This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for awhile. Like many of you, I have a variety of playlists on iTunes and Spotify, keyed to certain styles or moods. What I thought would be interesting was to wade through my iTunes library and add my favorite tune by each artist (most of them, anyway) to a playlist. No more than one song by any band (although you get some cases where an artist was in a band, then went solo, and hence turns up twice). This proved tough. In some places there were one-hit wonder acts, so that was simple enough. In others I had to consider my favorite artists and pick from among literally hundreds of songs.

The results are in some cases predictable enough. In others I wound up selecting tracks that might surprise you. In all cases, though, the songs are bitchin’, as indicated by the playlist’s title.

So here’s the list, and if you’d like to listen, it’s on Spotify here. (Note – there are 445 tracks on the playlist proper, but Spotify doesn’t have all of them (because it sucks), including absolute must-hears like Jeffrey Dean Foster’s “Summer of the Son of Sam.” Nothing I can do about that except encourage you to give it a listen at Jeff’s Facebook page.)

And now, here’s the list. Feel free to do the same kind of thing yourself and post your results in the comments.