Michael's Top 40

DATE WEEKS October 26, 2002 4 I don't remember where I was when I learned Kurt Cobain had died. Actually, I don't even remember being aware of the news when it happened. I was in second grade at the time, and was just beginning to dip my toes in the pop music world. Artists like Gin Blossoms, Counting Crows, and the Cranberries were who I was starting to obsess over. I don't think I had heard Nirvana's music when it was current, and I'm not sure what 7-year-old me would'v

DATE WEEKS October 5, 2002 2 Eurodance enjoyed a serious moment with me in the early 2000s. It was starting to break through overall in...

If you looked at the music charts at the beginning of the 21st century, it was a rather apolitical landscape. Then came the September 11...

One thing I find interesting when I look back on my old personal charts is how they don't always fall in line with what the rest of the...

What if the Beatles didn't break up? What if Kurt Cobain didn't commit suicide? What if Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison...

I knew this girl in my Spanish class in high school who liked to wear tank tops and neckties. She looked like a punk rocker, which meant...

DATE WEEKS May 11, 2002 2 The feeling of riding in a car and singing the hell out of a favorite song is an exhilarating one. Even better when friends are in the front or back seats. Driving songs are fun when they come on the radio because they put you in the moment and make it feel like you can just keep going forever. It doesn't matter if you're on a cross-country road trip, or taking a 15-minute drive to the mall. You want that feeling to last forever simply because yo

DATE WEEKS March 16, 2002 1 I feel like nu metal has always occupied an uneasy place in the pop music landscape. There was too much...

DATE WEEKS January 19, 2002 8 Being an American sounds great on paper, but there's always trade-offs. I could go on a political rant...

Sometimes there's an imbalance between how much you love an artist versus how much the public loves them. After the massive success of...

DATE WEEKS November 17, 2001 5 It's inevitable that as time passes some of the artists we liked in a particular moment can become punchlines to jokes about that time period. A band like A Flock of Seagulls, for example, who had some really excellent songs in the early 80s, at some point became shorthand for new wave weirdness, due in no small part to the haircut the lead singer sported in their video. But then their run lasted just a couple of years. Then there's Nickelback

It's easy to look down on people who listen to pop music because the impression, sometimes fair, sometimes not, is that the music is a...

I guess when you're around 15 years old, you have to go through a phase of angst. How long that phase lasts probably depends on your...

We never feel like we have enough time with our parents. If we're lucky, we'll get 50-60 years where we have them in our lives to make us...

Most times the build-up to a new song becoming your favorite is gradual. You hear it for the first time and decide it's pleasant enough...

DATE WEEKS February 17, 2001 2 You never know where you're going to find your favorite songs. Of course, it wasn't as easy in 2001 to discover unknown artists as it is today. For teenagers in the early 2000s, if file sharing services weren't an option, that generally left the radio or music video channels, at least the ones that were still showing music videos. In my case, I had an ace in the hole. In addition to MTV2 and VH1, another channel on my parents' DIRECTV subscr

DATE WEEKS February 10, 2001 1 By 2001, Aerosmith really had nothing left to prove. They had been a cautionary tale about the excesses of rock and roll, until an unlikely comeback brought them to even greater success. They got their only #1 on the Hot 100 with an out-of-character ballad that's one of my least favorite songs of the 90s. When they released their 13th studio album Just Push Play in 2001, they were taking a victory lap around the music industry, as they playe

DATE WEEKS January 27, 2001 2 Greatest hits albums were supposed to be victory laps. An artist put the work in releasing album after album, hopefully accruing a few hit songs along the way. Then when they wanted to take a break from recording, or just needed to fulfill a label obligation, they'd put all their biggest hits on one record, sometimes adding one or two new or unreleased songs on there as a bone for fans to buy the album. Those new songs rarely become hits in th

DATE WEEKS January 6, 2001 3 I need to start this column by stressing that I am not a professional music critic. Nor have I ever played music with any competency since I was a teenager. I had aspirations to be a musician, and made my dad buy me both an electric and acoustic guitar. But since I rarely took the time to practice, well, here we are. What I have always been, however, is a music fan. When I was a kid, my dad's car radio always seemed to be tuned to WPLJ, and ev