Genres are useful for commercial purposes, and they're broadly useful as a jumping off point for describing things and drawing connections between things. But when one has to start having arguments about who's in the club and who's not, that's where I step off. Punk rock eventually narrowed its borders down so tightly…

Obviously. Why do you think I mentioned her?

Whenever the argument starts that calling people like Janet Jackson or N.W.A or Madonna "rock" dilutes the purity of rock and roll, I always respond by looking up the most recent Billboard rock songs chart.

I remember reading a pretty amusing expose of the Rock Hall a while back that discussed Chic in detail. Basically, the smaller nominating committee has been pulling their hair out submitting Chic over and over again, while the general votership keeps snubbing them. They're just gonna keep doing it until they finally…

Yeah, I saw that tour, same reaction. Like, "sure, it wasn't the best show, and their hearts weren't all in it, but don't these guys deserve one last victory lap before they start pushing 40?"

That's what I always tried to argue! But years of getting beaten up by good-ol-boys for having long hair left my dad uninterested in such subtleties.

I had an unusual childhood.

When I was a kid, my ex-hippie dad pretty much let me listen to whatever I wanted, with two exceptions: The Dead Kennedys (he still had a lot of emotional issues wrapped up in the Kennedy assassinations) and Merle Haggard (whom he never forgave for "Okie From Muskogee"). Which means teenage me would sit there in my…

If Bank of America decided to give me the option of somehow direct depositing a tax-free portion of my paycheck into offshore accounts for a small fee, I and every other wage slave would do it in a heartbeat. I also imagine if us shlubs were able to do this and started doing so in large numbers, it would be cracked…

When I used to review movies, I started to notice that the amount of time I spent talking about a film's technical or craft elements in the review was inversely proportional to how much I liked it. For a crappy movie, I could tell you in minute detail exactly what was wrong with the editing and the score. For a great…

I'm only half remembering this from a chapter in Carl Wilson's book
"Let's Talk About Love," but there was evidently some study where they
asked a cross-section of people to list the individual things they loved and hated in visual art. They then commissioned artists to create pieces that
incorporated all of the most…

True story: Britney Spears has made substantially more — like, *substantially* more — from her perfume line than she ever made from music.

When I was a kid we had a Methodist minister with bizarrely good taste in classic rock (he loved to point out the Christian themes of various Sabbath songs, After Forever, Into the Void, etc), and once asked me to make him an (illegally dubbed) cassette copy of In Utero. I did — he liked it a lot.

Yeah, making fun of Third Eye Blind is 100% okay, but I honestly can't blame any band for doing sad county fair-style tours years after their time has passed. I mean, I'm sure it's a bit depressing, but so is getting a job at Starbucks and trying to impress your teenage coworker with tales of your years as a rock star…

There was a great interview with Ad-Rock a while back where he was asked if the band was going to do anything to celebrate the 30th anniversary of "Licensed to Ill." He basically said that he hadn't even noticed that the 25th anniversary passed, and refused to do anything for the 30th because it seemed like "a lame…

Has there ever been a nerdier rap lyric than DOOM's "Monkey hustle, man on fire / Later for the date than the Hadron Collider"?

Right. And perfect illustration of how there's never a universal, direct correlation between critical consensus and box office. Did "Ultron's" dip in Tomato rating relative to the first "Avengers" hurt its box office? Of course not — why would it? But did "Fury Road's" nearly universal praise help its box office?…

Thank. You.

Alicia Keys is an extremely talented woman — gorgeous, poised, a natural onstage, and blessed with an angelic singing voice. She's also spent 10 years putting out some of the dullest music ever known to man. In other words, she's perfect for this gig.

Ha. The movie includes everything from that exchange *except* Hank's punchline. Which pretty much sums it up.