Michael's Top 40

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 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. ...

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...

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...

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 October 5, 2002 2 Eurodance enjoyed a serious moment with me in the early 2000s. It was starting to break through overall in...

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...

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...

There's something to be said for being bored in school. During my first two years in high school, I was basically checked out mentally. ...

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

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

I guess when you're around 15 years old, you have to go through a phase of angst. How long that phase lasts probably depends on your...

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 27, 2001 2 Greatest hits albums were supposed to be victory laps. An artist put the work in releasing album after album, hopefully accruing a few hit songs along the way. Then when they wanted to take a break from recording, or just needed to fulfill a label obligation, they'd put all their biggest hits on one record, sometimes adding one or two new or unreleased songs on there as a bone for fans to buy the album. Those new songs rarely become hits in th

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