Michael's Top 40

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 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 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 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. ...

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...

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...

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...

DATE WEEKS May 11, 2002 2 The feeling of riding in a car and singing the hell out of a favorite song is an exhilarating one. Even better when friends are in the front or back seats. Driving songs are fun when they come on the radio because they put you in the moment and make it feel like you can just keep going forever. It doesn't matter if you're on a cross-country road trip, or taking a 15-minute drive to the mall. You want that feeling to last forever simply because yo

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. ...

DATE WEEKS March 16, 2002 1 I feel like nu metal has always occupied an uneasy place in the pop music landscape. There was too much...

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

It's easy to look down on people who listen to pop music because the impression, sometimes fair, sometimes not, is that the music is a...