It would have been, if the music industry had been a lot more forward-thinking around 10-15 years ago. But the die has been cast.

Also, Dire Straits are the ultimate Dad Rock band, for better and for worse. The Eagles are pale pretenders to the throne.

Mike Oxmall: "Thing is, for every commenter on the AV Club who hates the Eagles, there's ten million people in the world who are genuinely happy when their music comes on the radio.
Counter point: Belle & Sebastian will never be that way."
Is it that surprising that taste would follow a Power Law distribution? Many…

Yeah, I'm 38, didn't discover this until I was 25 and more Yo La Tengo-lovin' rockcrit-type than punk rocker, and it instantly hit me as being a stone cold classic. Still does. Back when I was Bob Christgau's press-release monkey boy (2004-ish), this is the one album where I told him if he didn't love it, he was just…

SHE'S BLUFFING. FINISH HER!

Rumor and Sigh has better songs, but it sounds like a Mitchell Froom album, while Mirror Blue sounds like a Mitchell Froom/Tchad Blake album. If you like the bag of tricks on display on the Latin Playboys albums, or Randy Newman's "Bad Love", or even that one pretty good Wendy & Lisa album, you may like MB even…

Great song. Barbara Manning's version on 1212 is also fantastic.

Not that I don't like Al's. But I'd listen to an entire album of artists writing fake Talking Heads songs.

If you think this is a dead-on parody, you should hear Liam Lynch's "Fake Talking Heads Song".

Kevern, go here and, under "Popularity of a name" type "Micheal" and set it to 100 years.

I really like Morrissey's voice—although I like Paul Heaton more—but this seemed like a very sincere and well-thought-out attempt to provide an interesting aesthetic data point. 10/10 Scott Ian.

"Pretentious" has always struck me as a weird insult when applied to rock music, because, as Heller points out, riding that knife's edge of Are You Fucking Serious is such a crucial part of rock that using the adjectively normatively instead of descriptively tells me virtually nothing. I mean, Roxy Music. Pere Ubu.…

I was skimming over this and your description brought me up short and proved irresistible. And, it turns out, totally accurate. I kind of love it, although if I'd ever been exposed to it without volition I'd probably share your hatred tenfold. And note by "love" I don't mean anything heavy, like actually making it…

Let the record show that Robert Christgau was hating on The Eagles a good two or three decades before Lebowski turned all the kids against them:

Watch the last 20 minutes with the commentary track from Wilson on. The meta-documentary implications will blow your freakin' mind, maan. No joke.

Here's a meta-analysis of best practices. http://www.youtube.com/watc…

Art Spiegelman's book MetaMaus is a really interesting time capsule, among other things, of just how little the Holocaust registered in the American imagination before…well, let's just say that the late 70s miniseries "The Holocaust", despite being embarrassing Holokitsch, was actually something of a sea change…

Sorry, I meant the cat next door to Snoopy. Its name is mentioned infrequently, but it's definitely World War II. Also, the team that Joe Shlabotnik coaches is the Waffletown Syrups. Or in other words, I'm an idiot savant, and this is the savant part.

And also: http://s18.postimg.org/70ie…

oops