Michael's Top 40

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 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 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. ...

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

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 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...

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

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...

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 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