Michael's Top 40

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 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...

DATE WEEKS October 2, 2004 3 At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama gave a speech...

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 July 12, 2003 6 I don't know how I'm going to write this one. That's the thought that keeps crossing my mind for this column. Because this was Radiohead's only #1 hit on my chart, and while I still really like it, they've done better songs. And Radiohead don't seem like the band to distill into a five or six minute read. They're too prolific and weird and just awesome to do that do. But that's the breaks. One thing I know for certain: America has never fully ap

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...

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

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...