Congratulations on the most unnecessary list to appear on the AV Club this year.

I will end up getting this out of obligation, but it's been clear for a while that Smith has reached his expiration date. I do find it interesting that the longest running core of musicians happens to be the blandest set of collaborators he's ever had. The previous band (the one that did Fall Heads Roll) was so good,…

Ron Mael's piano solo on the floating, psychedelic early Sparks song, "Fletcher Honorama": https://www.youtube.com/wat…

The four bands that I've seen at least 10 times:

I love lists — definitely a bunch of things I want to check out from here. My rough Top 20 so far:

A one hit wonder is an artist who had only one hit single. So Wall of Voodoo doesn't qualify, as "Mexican Radio" only hit #58. And the inclusion of artists who had more than one U.S. top 40 hit defeats the premise. Thus, The Knack and Golden Earring, for example, is wrong.

Where to begin…

This is the first Craig Finn solo album where I didn't wish he'd just do a Hold Steady album instead, and I thought his first two solo LPs were alright. This is just at a higher level — I'd give it an A- or B+.

The first time I watched The Magnificent Ambersons, it didn't hit me. Year later, I read the novel upon which it was based (written by Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons won a Pulitzer Prize, and it is a great novel). I revisited the film, and it became immensely more enjoyable, and ridiculously more…

Hope is one of the all-time great sitcom episodes, and would be my pick.

Best Country Album did not go to an independent artist. Sturgill Simpson records for Atlantic Records.

If the writer who chose Steak and Shake lives not too far from Evanston, there is a Steak and Shake on Oakton Ave.

No more so than Marianne Faithfull, I suppose. But in comparison to the others, yeah, that's a good point.

There is a major omission on this list: Sparks' Number One in Heaven LP, from 1979. The Mael brothers' first collaboration with Giorgio Moroder pretty much invented the synth-pop duo, influencing countless bands in England and the continent, and set the template for Hi-NRG dance music that become the standard for so…

I'm looking forward most to Sparks' new LP, Hippopatomus.

The thing about kids' music taste is that things strike their fancy for no discernible reason and once they take hold, you will be listening to whatever that song or album is over and over for the next few weeks. So it's not so much about shaping a kid's taste as trying to reach an audio detente where at least fair…

Make comedies fun again? It seems the writer of the post is missing out on Fresh Off the Boat, Black-ish, and a bunch of other comedies that, even if they taken on issues of some sort or another, are pretty fun shows with very appealing casts. (And event he writer of the entry invokes a few other examples of fun…

Homegoing should be read in every high school. A great way to show the effects of slavery centuries down the road.

Any such list omitting Constance Wu for her fantastic work on Fresh Off the Boat is simply incomplete (acknowledging there is so much quality TV, some folks are going to get left off, but still…).

"Bohemian Rhapsody" only hit #9 during its initial chart run (hitting #2 when it was reissued in conjunction with Wayne's World, many years later), but it was #1 on WLS here in Chicago for a number of weeks to the point that it was played every hour, at the top of the hour.