I have yet to meet a Japanese English teacher who doesn't absolutely love that song and/or "Last Christmas" by Wham. Every December without fail, at least one of the JTEs I work with tries in vain to get the junior high kids to sing along to one or both of those songs in class.

The quality varies wildly depending on the writer, but I always look forward to Hear This, Permanent Records and We're No. 1. It also seems to depend solely on who is being interviewed, but a well-thought out Hate Song article can be a lot of fun to read too - and even the boring ones still usually have fun comment…

Fun article. In recent years I've been trying to listen to some of the stuff I hated on general principle as a narrow-minded teenage punk/indie rock snob, and a few years ago Steely Dan finally clicked for me. The stories of their nearly-insane perfectionism kept me away for a long time, but that anal-retentive…

Who the fuck is David Cloverdale?

Blackboard Jungle Dub and Super Ape (credited to The Upsetters) are both solid albums. Return Of The Super Ape is darker and a little more erratic but still worth checking out if you like the first two.

Since I was in my early/mid twenties when the show would have first aired, I thought the whole Iraq subplot and a lot of the other references specific to that time were hilarious. I'm definitely going to go back and watch it again though, because although I did catch some of the more subtle gags along the way, I'm…

My favorite Floyd albums are Piper…, Dark Side…, and Wish… in that order, but then again I'm a huge fan of Syd Barrett's solo albums as well. Really liked The Wall when I was 14 but find it tedious now, though it's been over ten years since I last listened to it so I might have to give it another chance sometime.…

Um, er….there's always money in the banana stand?

Thanks to well-written and researched articles about "old music", I've discovered literally hundreds of artists that were "new" to me over the past twenty years or so.

The Wire, Arrested Development, Cabin In The Woods, A Serious Man, Wet Hot American Summer

Just finished watching The Wire for the first time a couple weeks ago. That fourth season was devastating, but hang in there.

I thought it worked on the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction soundtracks as the dialogue was mostly limited to short exchanges and some of the most quotable bits anyway. But the dialogue choices from the Jackie Brown and Kill Bill soundtracks are pretty tedious to listen to out of context.

The combination of dialogue and music on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack is more evocative and tells the story of Mickey and Mallory more effectively than the film. Arguably one of the best things Trent Reznor has ever done.

After my oldest was born, I found myself getting behind on new music to the point where I didn't get around to listening to much of anything until after the "best albums of the year" lists were already out, and making a few Xmas purchases based on whatever albums piqued my interest. Now with more kids, less free time…

I still have that album on cassette - listened to it a few years ago and it holds up fairly well.

GO NINJA GO NINJA GO! I never had that one, but I did have the soundtrack for the first movie on cassette (I had the magenta "Donatello" version). And I will also cop to at one time owning both To The Extreme and Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em.

After leaving this comment last night I fell down a YouTube wormhole of nostalgia, during which I played the videos for this song as well as "Dressed For Success", "The Look" and "Joyride". The production is a bit dated and the videos are definitely of their time, but as pop songs they still hold up.

Still love that song. And the album (Mental Floss For The Globe) sounds very of its time, but my old car had a tape deck and it made for some fun driving music a few summers back.

Had a look through my old tapes when I was home for a visit last year. Off the top of my head (and edited later as I remembered a few more):

Damn good choices, Mr. Wong.