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...

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 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