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 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 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. ...

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...

It was a big deal when I was accepted into Stuyvesant High School in the spring of 2000. Stuyvesant is considered the most prestigious...

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...

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...

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 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 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

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...

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 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