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 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 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 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...

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

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

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 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...