Michael's Top 40

DATE WEEKS May 21, 2005 10 It's no secret that the 2000s were some fertile ground for political songs from across the ideological...

DATE WEEKS May 14, 2005 1 It's fucking spooky. How else can I describe that this will be the second column discussing a band with almost...

DATE WEEKS April 30, 2005 2 If you're on the outside looking in, industrial music can seem kinda intimidating. It's aggressive and...

DATE WEEKS March 12, 2005 7 The relevance of American Idiot over the last 20 years is that the idea of the United States as a global...

DATE WEEKS March 5, 2005 1 When grunge went supernova in the early 90s, record labels scoured the country for any band that could deliver...

DATE WEEKS January 22, 2005 1 The idea of a punk band performing a ballad should be incongruous. It doesn't make sense. Punk is...

DATE WEEKS January 15, 2005 1 When I went to Stuyvesant High School in the early 2000s, I'd take the A train from my house in Queens to...

DATE WEEKS December 11, 2004 10 One night, my wife and I were out and about when we decided to go to a bar in Bushwick that has karaoke. ...

DATE WEEKS November 20, 2004 3 It starts "one, two, three, fourteen" in Spanish. If any other artist tried to start a song that way, I...

DATE WEEKS October 30, 2004 3 Whenever an artist or artists come along to define a particular sound from a particular region, there's...

This column should not exist. That's not to say I don't like this song, or that there's anything illicit that happened with this song. ...

DATE WEEKS October 2, 2004 3 At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama gave a speech...

The story of alternative rock in the 2000s shouldn't have had room for the The Killers. It was supposed to be about a bunch of weirdos...

It's not fair that I only get one post to write about the Meteora album cycle. It was a significant album for me during the last two...

It was a big deal when I was accepted into Stuyvesant High School in the spring of 2000. Stuyvesant is considered the most prestigious...

If you're a basketball fan, then you're familiar with the concept of a supergroup. Rather than build a team from the ground up, just...

George Orwell is not a guy I feel like writing about right now. Considering we're just months away from an election that feels incredibly...

I don't really remember my high school having cliques. I'm sure they must have existed somewhere, at some time. Films like The...

Sometimes a song is just undeniable. If you hear it enough times, it just wears you down, like the ocean eroding a boulder. I think...

I think it was around 2001 when I realized most Adam Sandler movies were the same. Sure, there were different plots and characters, but...