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...

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

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...

The nerds usually have the last laugh. By the time you get to junior high school, that notion can seem hard to imagine. You're entering...

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 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...

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

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...

Most times the build-up to a new song becoming your favorite is gradual. You hear it for the first time and decide it's pleasant enough...

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