"Thriller"'s not even particularly great. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and "Billie Jean" are great. Singles artist, obviously, and only up until 1984 or so.

Amen. All four of his Swan Song albums are great, but "Repeat When Necessary" forms a nice little pair with "Labour of Lust".

"Like Flies on Sherbert" and "Live in London" are available on a wonderful two-disc set that makes me smile a whole hell of a lot. These are two of the most wonderfully sloppy records ever released.

How lame does it make me if the only reason I'd heard of such a thing was from reading an unbearably awful Tom Wolfe novel?

Randy Newman deserves credit for - at the very least - "Sail Away" and "Rednecks". Most of the "Good Old Boys" album for that matter. I'm still just stunned by the fact that "Sail Away" is a brilliant, beautiful song that you could almost hear Sinatra singing or something, and it's about a slaver luring Africans to…

"The Dirty South" started me off, and I love it. I've been listening to all their albums in preparation for seeing them next month, can't say where this one fits in yet.

I had a customer insist that "Precious" had "stuff added to it", and I simply said "oh, I didn't know that" and found the one with the red cover. I just don't care enough to argue.

That, and they retitled the book "Precious" and slapped a movie-tie-in cover on it. Because after all, this is America, where we only read if we like a movie or Oprah tells us to.

Fuckity-bye!

My brother's a better guitarist than Joan Jett!

I thought their other…uh…"hit"…called "Chemistry" was actually pretty good. Never liked "Closing Time", though.

Most trade paperbacks are currently of pretty high quality. If you let them sit in the sun for a year and a half, yeah, they're going to look pretty ugly. But so will a hardcovers. Plus, if you look at the hardcovers St. Martin's/Holtzbrinck and Simon & Schuster are putting out now, they're so cheap and poorly made…

For a minute, all I could think of was The Fall's "Touch Sensitive" when you said "That 'hey-hey-hey-hey' song". If that were used in a trailer, I would have to go see the movie regardless of what it may be.

What about Hartford? C'mon…we're…uh…

When he kicked heroin. I would argue that everything after "Layla" is varying degrees of getting worse. If I wanted to listen to J.J. Cale, I'd listen to J.J. Cale, and not the laziest man in rock imitating him. Eric and Rod Stewart should record an album together.

"Transformer" just about half sucks. "Ecstasy" is brilliant and "New York" is good for cranky old-man rock with periodically embarrassing lyrics. However, "Legendary Hearts" sucks apart from "Don't Talk to Me About Work" and a few others. "New Sensations" is much more awesome…er.

Loss Leaders are worthy of being an obsession. WB/Reprise had a great lineup of rock artists in the early '70s, so lots of them have John Cale, Sparks, Todd Rundgren, the Allman Brothers mingling alongside easy listening like Petula Clark, soul like Allen Toussaint, and odd outtakes from weirdos like Van Dyke Parks. I…

Malcolm McLaren's "Double Dutch"? In which universe was it plausible that "Double Dutch" was a hit? It makes me think much, much more highly of the British Now! series, even though realistically I'm sure it was just as dire as any other. I just love that damn song.

Is this the thread where we defend the Gin Blossoms? "New Miserable Experience" was ranked one of the 200 best power-pop albums ever in a book that was published a couple years back, and I think they're right. "Allison Road", what a great song. That I of course didn't appreciate at the time. I think I was too busy…

We're truly living in a disconnected age. I blame the internet!