Sunday, November 11, 2012

Episode 7: Playing God


In this episode we discuss another neglected aspect of music: album sequencing.  When you're making an album, what goes first and what goes last?  Obviously you should put the worst song first!

Bonus All-Time Great album word cloud: Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd!

Categories covered:
  • 20 great song which is the shortest one on a sub-40 minute album
    • Turner: Breaking Glass - David Bowie - Low
    • Jon: Intro - Bad Brains - Bad Brains
  • 51 & 52: Best one-two punch on an album (consecutive songs that just hit you hard)
  • 59 song that gets much worse when taken out of its album context
Cultural reference links:
  • Even though Stylus is dead, they still provide an archive of their old postings.  Here's the column 'Playing God', which inspired and named this episode.
  • Dramatic structure, which is Turner's archetypal method of sequencing albums.
  • The lyrics to Fitter Happier, because they're just so cool and full of anticapitalist ennui 
  • And speaking of anticapitalism, we mentioned Naomi Klein and her book No Logo, which was a big influence on Radiohead during the recording of OK Computer.

No comments:

Post a Comment