Michael's Top 40

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...

When I turned 21, I remember thinking, "I don't feel 21; I feel like I'm somewhere between 14 and 28." At the time this is published,...

Here's one thing I remember very clearly about the 2000s: George W. Bush was not a good president. He surrounded himself with lying...

In 2006, the conservative magazine The National Review published a tongue-in-cheek list of its top 50 rock songs, and predictably, the...

There really is no rationalization behind music genres. Classifying songs in different genres can often be tedious and possibly...

So yeah, these fucking guys. Look, I don't believe you should apologize for liking a song or an artist when you did. And I don't think...

I honestly believe that everyone has at least one novel inside of them. Few people are able to get it out into the world. Fewer still...