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.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Episode 6: Steve Albini For President


Production is a vital but infrequently discussed aspect of making music.  We aim to fix that, so we're spending a whole episode on various aspects of production!


For listening at your convenience, a direct download is HERE and a torrent download can be found HERE.

Your weekly All-Time Great Album word cloud: Let it Be by The Replacements!



Categories covered:

  • 14 Rap song where the beat is much better than the rapping
    • Turner: POWER - Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    • Jon: The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - The Breaks
  • 15 rap song where the lyrics are much better than the beat
  • 87 song that benefits from bad recording/production
  • 88 song that is harmed by good recording/production
Cultural reference links:

Episode 5: I Am A Scientist


It's time to apply the scientific method to our musical taste and try to frankly assess some songs we have never heard before or didn't like in the past.

For your listening convenience, a direct download and a torrent download of this episode.

Your weekly bonus All-Time Great Album word cloud: Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros!  Obviously this one is not in English.


Categories covered:
  • 34 Your most-played song in the last year that I have not heard
  • 57 song you've never listened to (don't listen to it while picking)
  • 66 song you totally hated until you didn't
Cultural reference links:

Episode 4: The Anxiety of Influence


Turner and I rip apart some remixes, covers and mashups as a means to discuss the way musicians use the influences of artists and styles that came before them.

Because we love our listeners and want you to take The Eternal Playlist with you wherever you go, here's a direct download and a torrent download of the episode.

Your bonus All-Time Great Album word cloud: The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips!


Categories covered:
Cultural reference links:

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Episode 3: Loud, Fast, Slow, Sad: Key Qualities in Music


In this episode we discuss the key qualities that music can have: volume, speed and emotive content.

Take The Eternal Playlist on the road with you: a direct download and a torrent download of this episode is only a click away.

Bonus All-Time Great Album word cloud: Illmatic by Nas


Categories covered:

  • 38 "Loudest" song
  • 39 "Fastest" song (not to be confused with shortest)
  • 40  "Slowest" song
    • Turner: Maggot Brain - Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
    • Jon: Words - Low - I Could Live in Hope
  • 41 Saddest, most depressing, soul-crushing song
  • 42 A song of fragile beauty that makes you feel contemplative
    • Turner: A Stone - Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
    • Jon: Nightswimming - R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
Cultural reference links:

Episode 2: Who Needs Lyrics in Rock Music Anyway?


In this episode we talk about the place of lyrics in modern music.  Are good lyrics required?  Optional? Totally pointless because no one cares about them anyway?  Join us as we settle this important question for all eternity.

Take The Eternal Playlist with you: download this episode directly or by torrent.

Bonus All-Time Great Album word cloud: Graceland by Paul Simon


Categories covered:
  •  32 Best-written lyrics
    • Jon: It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) - Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home
    • Turner: The Splendor of the Bender - The Deadly Gentlemen - The Bastard Masterpiece
  • 45 Song with great instrumentation but terrible lyrics
    • Jon: Live Forever - Oasis - Definitely Maybe
    • Turner: Goldie - A$AP Rocky - Long. Live. A$AP
  • 69 best vocals that aren't saying any words (ululations and such)
Cultural Reference Links:

Episode 1: You May Manipulate the Prompt


In our first ever episode, we discuss what the scavenger hunt playlist is and why it's so damn much fun.  Join us, won't you?
For those who don't want to listen via this site, here's a direct download and a torrent download of this episode.

Bonus All-Time Great Album word cloud: Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices!

Categories Covered:
  • 70 best misdirection of the listener
    • Turner: Sweet Jane - The Velvet Underground - Loaded
    • Jon: Smoke it the Pot - Gene Marshall - I Like Yellow Things: MSR Madness Vol. 5
  • 77 song that reveals a weird obsession of the author
  • 90 song about a murder
  • 106 song that incorrectly describes science or natural processes
    • Turner: Buggin' Out - A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory
    • Jon: Miracles - Insane Clown Posse - Bang Pow Boom
Cultural Reference Links:

Required Reading: The Scavenger Hunt Master List


Jon and I are constantly making reference to the numbers of prompts and telling everyone to do their own scavenger hunt.  Well I never want to let anybody down, so here it is:
The Master List!  

This will be updated from time to time as the number of prompts grows.

As you can see the prompts are arranged in a totally nonsensical order - #1 has nothing to do with #2 and so on.  That's because we just kept adding more and more categories and never tried to group them in any sensible way until I came up with the idea of doing just a few songs per episode.  You'll notice that our prompts get more intricate as we go on, mainly because we've used up most of the obvious good ones.

This is a test post, to test the posting.


Hello World!

...And so a brand new baby blog is born!  Welcome one and all.

We are Turner and Jon Scavenger Hunt, a duo of professional music lovers and strictly non-professional music critics.  We're here to share our opinions on the marketplace of ideas so that you, the listener, can disagree with them.

Some Logistics:

  • Schedule: There is no schedule.  New episodes come out whenever I record and finish them, which probably means in groups of two or three at a time.
  • Legal: All clips of songs in the podcasts are property of their respective owners.  Turner and Jon own only their own voices.  Because we are doing critical analysis of the songs featured, the clips of copyrighted material we use come under the Fair Use exception.
  • Copyright: All episodes are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.  This means:
    • You may remix, edit or repost any episode so long as you attribute the original to us
    • You may NOT use any remix, edit, repost etc. for commercial purposes
    • Any work derived from any of our episodes must be distributed under the same Creative Commons license that we used