Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs were believable and real life isn’t.
On ‘Idol,’ Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.
Our amour fou with ‘The Sopranos’ is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We’ll never see a show like this again.
It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers’ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers’ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.
Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.
Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she’d retired the day after she recorded ‘I Feel Love’ in 1977.
Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they’ve got.
I’ve built my whole life around loving music. I’m a writer for ‘Rolling Stone,’ so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds.
It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That’s how old hippies became Yanni fans.
Like most fans of ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ I wouldn’t know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.
Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that’s just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that’s been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the ‘Parks and Recreation’ squad, more than just the funniest character on TV – he’s the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire.
When Ke$ha tries to rap like L’Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she’s the star. Ke$ha’s greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
You’d think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America’s sweetheart on the ‘Today’ show. But her ratings have been dismal – she comes in last place every week.
The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.
If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance, nobody’s happy.
That’s the secret of ‘True Blood’ – all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can’t have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.
The 2000s were the time when bromance became a kind of love that dared to speak its name. As a high-water mark of bro culture, nothing can ever top the MTV series ‘Bromance,’ with Brody Jenner and his search for a new BFF.
The first season of ‘Community’ stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline.