Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I’d ever known.
At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure – after ‘Bad Girls,’ nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with ‘Off The Wall.’
Anyone watching ‘30 Rock’ always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She’s the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.
Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.
One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people’s religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.
Hometown Aerosmith fans are different from other Aerosmith fans, and that mainly has to do with Joe Perry. It’s tough to overstate his strange grip on the local psyche. Tyler is a star who belongs to the whole world, but Perry, that dude belongs to Boston.
Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.
Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.
Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.
One of the best moments of any Liars show is hearing the crowd squawk ‘We’re doomed! We’re doomed!’ on cue during ‘We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own.’ Maybe not the most uplifting audience sing-along in the indie rock world, but one of the most reliably entertaining.
But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.
You can’t beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.
We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.
Ronnie Spector’s hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La’s combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade.
But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.
I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
Love dies in many different ways, and it’s natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it’s not a competition; there’s plenty of pain to go around.
I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.