Has anyone here EVER bought something as a result of a commercial?  The only one I can think of was Good Humor, and that's only because the commercial showed me they still made that brand.

plus a couple of points from this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Football probably derived from the fact it was played on the ground (as opposed to mounted sports like jousting and polo).  Last time I checked American football isn't played on horseback.
Yeah American's don't call association "football", but the…

Here a couple of those all cast promos from 1979 and 1980
http://www.youtube.com/watc…
http://www.youtube.com/watc…

Terre Haute always reminds me of "12 tapes/CDs for a penny" because that's where Columbia House was based out of

You know what the really sad decline was?  VH1.  In the late 90s you'd see a documentary on the making of "Songs In The Key of Life" or John Lennon arguing with audience members on the Mike Douglas show.  Now it's all mind destroying sub-TMZ stuff.

Did TRL even run on 9/11 or did they wait till the next week?  I know that a lot of cable channels didn't run anything, either out of respect or because their transmitters were actually in the WTC.  I do remember the TRL radio countdown didn't air for a week, and when it started back up they had virtually no chatter…

I remember New Kids On The Block's "The Right Stuff" making the countdown for one day as a result of an internet write in campaign.
What I remember most is when Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" had a healthy run on the show.  Watching Carson's disgust that something out of his teen pop comfort zone could make the countdown…

Not really, because the bulk of the rock songs on the Now series are dismissed in a few lines.  Not that most of them deserve any better, but when you spend paragraphs of cultural analysis on the most mudane pop hits it's kinda odd.

Specific idea: extended public domain.  If a tv show or movie has not been on DVD or been available in syndication for, say 15 years, it goes into public domain.  That way we get around the frustrating experience of rights holders refusing to exploit a property but still refusing to let go of their copyright.

Lou Reed's Rock And Roll Animal, Elton John's 11-17-70 (cut at the very start of his career with a piano trio lineup), Coltrane's Village Vanguard recordings, Miles' Dark Magus and Aghartha

It's mostly marketing: radio won't play the longer live cuts like they did in the 70s.  Plus few mainstream rock bands emphasize improvisation like they did then; most casual music listeners want it to sound like the CD.

Do it.  I saw him two years ago, right after his last surgery.  You could tell he was still recuperating and he had to clear out some phlegm balls a couple of times.  (His sax player, Don, looked like he was about to die.)  But somehow he overrode those problems and still did a great job.  It helps that he doesn't…

Well by the end of the nineties the single was pretty much dead, and in the country and album rock fields they were near impossible to find by '92.

And of course there's the old record company trick of shipping a ton of albums, getting your gold/platinum record, and accepting a lot of returns afterward.  The joke about the Sgt. Pepper soundtrack was that it shipped platinum and returned double platinum.

The fact that people willingly shelled out fifteen to eighteen bucks just to hear "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "Mambo No. 5" still boggles my mind.  Yeah I know singles were dead by then, but when I was in college in '98 MiniDiscs were the hot thing and CD burners were making their presence known.  And you could have…

From the free jazz field, we've got Peter Brotzmann's "Machine Gun"
http://www.youtube.com/watc…

Okay I will give you Outkast and Kanye (altho they haven't changed the nature of hip hop nearly as much as we like to think).  But the point remains.  If "affecting pop culture" is important to critical acclaim, 98% of what AV Clubbers like is critically unimportant.

Well the four longest runs at No.1 in the modern era are Thriller, Rumors, and the soundtracks to Saturday Night Fever and Purple Rain.  Plus Adele just passed Sgt. Pepper's and Tapestry which had 15 weeks at the top.

They actually aired "Pretty Woman" right before the 700 Club earlier this week.  Apparently when Pat Robertson sold his network, he made the purchasers legally sign off that the Family Channel would have to have the 700 Club on and have "family" in its name forever.  Yes, forever.  They've tried to buy him out for the…

I don't get why the AV Club worries about whether albums have impact in the greater culture.  When's the last time a critically acclamied album did shift mainstream pop culture?  The nineties, I think.  After all, for all the credit Radiohead or the White Stripes get, their albums had virtually no effect on mainstream…