I love Rufus Wainwright (and Martha), but I understand his voice not being for everyone. His voice did continue to get stronger and less grating with each album though- he's definitely got a singing with a mouth full of cotton thing going on in his early self-titled record.

Yes! So many of the bands that get derided as "one hit wonders" had plenty of great output, much of it better quality than the one song that happened to get airplay.

Noooooooooo! I had successfully blocked that one out until just now. That was in constant rotation when I worked at a mall music store- barf-o-matic.

I remember hearing the rare spin of Silent All These Years or Cornflake Girl in the 90's, but that was about it for radio play. I learned about Tori Amos when rooming with the "cool, older girls" on a chorus trip during my freshman year of high school.

92.9 in Boston kind of is 1996's radio music in 2016. They throw in a few modern songs that sound vaguely like they could have been released in the mid-90's, but mostly it's the stuff from this article.

"The Oh-needers?"

Yeah, people forget that the Lilith Fair came about because some exec told Sarah McLachlan that touring with another female artist (Paula Cole, maybe?) would be financial suicide. You needed a man on the bill to get people in the seats.

My senior prom in 1996 was not particularly memorable, which I suppose means it could have been a lot worse. My strongest memory of it was looking up and seeing the dance floor flooded with people doing the Macarena and wondering how the hell they all knew it, since I had never even heard it before.

Me too! Haven't heard anything about a high school reunion. I think the internet may have eliminated people's sense of curiosity and subsequent interest in a reunion.

I was seeing him as a cross between Edward Furlong and Leonardo DiCaprio, but now that you mention it, I see the River Phoenix comparison too.

You might have luck checking out local blogs for the major cities for
more of a deep dive- for Boston, Vanyaland is pretty great. There's some
fantastic stuff being produced on a local level that never quite gets
much steam nationally in the current state of the record industry.

I know my will power is not quite that strong, but I am kind of tempted to just completely tune out until November. It's not like anything Trump says will make me willing to vote for him and I may even be approaching saturation point for how much I can dislike him. This election has been hugely exhausting.

Though apparently a lot of Evangelicals are saying that they couldn't possibly support Trump. So maybe the Religious Right will stay home this fall. A girl can dream, right?

There may be some Bernie camp movement toward Jill Stein- she is on the attack now that the Dem nomination is more or less in place. Though that may be offset by a stronger Libertarian presence in this election by conservatives who can't stomach Trump.

I also think there was some subconscious "I really hope this isn't possible" thinking going on that pushed the needle in the incorrect direction before there was much reliable data to work with.

On the subway once, I overheard a woman extolling the virtues of The Da Vinci Code, the primary one being "the chapters are short so it makes you feel super smart."

I like Maggie Stiefvater a lot. She writes interesting and complex characters and her story lines are solid. I was surprised by how much I loved Sinner, the one-off spinoff of her werewolf series- take out the supernatural elements and you have a lovely story about alienation and flawed and slightly broken people…

Stephen King lite. He was very popular with tweens in the late 80s, early 90s and was kind of the precursor to the R.L. Stine/ Goosebumps books.

That was a running motif in Bowie reviews as well. There was a 10+ year span after the release of Earthling where one critic or another declared every new record "his best since Scary Monsters!" He would joke about it in interviews. And there was some fantastic stuff on those albums, but they were mostly aimed at the…

I agree with you there and wasn't thinking of this in terms of "being offended." I'm not supporting the idea of blindly siding with anyone who has very vocal opinions about a thing. My point had nothing to do with being offended. It was that victims of assault are not just "being stupid" for taking issue with the ad…