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...

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 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 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. ...

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...

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...

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...

DATE WEEKS April 17, 2004 3 I think it was around 2001 when I realized most Adam Sandler movies were the same. Sure, there were different plots and characters, but you weren't going to an Adam Sandler movie for a complex or moving plot. You went because you wanted to see Adam Sandler act like a wise-ass with his buddies. Now I'm not counting the exceptions to this rule, namely 2002's Punch-Drunk Love, and 2019's Uncut Gems. And it's not a knock on the quality of some of t

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

I never like when things end. That's human nature, I suppose. But you don't think like that when you're 16 years old. When my parents...

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

I don't need to tell you how polarizing Coldplay have become in the 20-plus years they've been in the public eye. It wasn't always this...