Michael's Top 40

Samir Hussein/WireImage In the past I've tried to use this blog to write weekly recaps on the action on the current top 40 and ultimately I found it hard to do at all, let alone consistently. Plus it can be hard to keep writing new things about a song for 20-30 weeks in a row. But this week it feels like I need to call out a very rare occurrence on the chart. "Rein Me In", the duet between ascendant English artists Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, is at #1 this week for the tenth

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 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. ...

DATE WEEKS November 20, 2004 3 It starts "one, two, three, fourteen" in Spanish. If any other artist tried to start a song that way, I...

DATE WEEKS October 30, 2004 3 Whenever an artist or artists come along to define a particular sound from a particular region, there's...

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...

DATE WEEKS April 17, 2004 3 I think it was around 2001 when I realized most Adam Sandler movies were the same. Sure, there were different plots and characters, but you weren't going to an Adam Sandler movie for a complex or moving plot. You went because you wanted to see Adam Sandler act like a wise-ass with his buddies. Now I'm not counting the exceptions to this rule, namely 2002's Punch-Drunk Love, and 2019's Uncut Gems. And it's not a knock on the quality of some of t

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

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...

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...

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...

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 17, 2001 2 You never know where you're going to find your favorite songs. Of course, it wasn't as easy in 2001 to discover unknown artists as it is today. For teenagers in the early 2000s, if file sharing services weren't an option, that generally left the radio or music video channels, at least the ones that were still showing music videos. In my case, I had an ace in the hole. In addition to MTV2 and VH1, another channel on my parents' DIRECTV subscr

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