Michael's Top 40

Samir Hussein/WireImage In the past I've tried to use this blog to write weekly recaps on the action on the current top 40 and ultimately I found it hard to do at all, let alone consistently. Plus it can be hard to keep writing new things about a song for 20-30 weeks in a row. But this week it feels like I need to call out a very rare occurrence on the chart. "Rein Me In", the duet between ascendant English artists Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, is at #1 this week for the tenth

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

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

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

DATE WEEKS July 12, 2003 6 I don't know how I'm going to write this one. That's the thought that keeps crossing my mind for this column. Because this was Radiohead's only #1 hit on my chart, and while I still really like it, they've done better songs. And Radiohead don't seem like the band to distill into a five or six minute read. They're too prolific and weird and just awesome to do that do. But that's the breaks. One thing I know for certain: America has never fully ap

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...

The nerds usually have the last laugh. By the time you get to junior high school, that notion can seem hard to imagine. You're entering...

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