I really hope that he just got right into someone's face when they did that and bellowed "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOU" at the top of his lungs. I just want to know that the people working on that set know that someone despises them.

It's health-adjacent!

Dolly Parton was a pretty prolific writer. I wonder if any men have covered her?

Slenderman. It's a wry comedy about a deli owner. He can't catch a break because he can't seem to put on weight and no one trusts a thin man working at a deli.

Upvoted, but watch it with your kale-bashing, young lady! It's better in forms where it's baked into crispness.

I ended up having to look it up and explain it to an 11-year-old recently, as it came up when she was going on about Slenderman for some reason. It was reassuring, in a way, to see that the crime made absolutely no sense to her.

Well, think about musicals. In those cases, one lyricist will write for a huge number of characters, some of which being basically guaranteed to be of a different gender. Pop singers generally have writers, many of whom are a different gender as well. I don't see it as being particularly uncommon.

Isn't this the kind of shit they did to Shakespeare back in the Victorian era? I know that I heard of them tacking a happier ending onto King Lear (or, technically, using the happier ending from older versions of the story).

I can see that, though it still seems all of a piece to me. Maybe this is due to me never really being a fan. Warning was the only album that I listened to in its entirety. I liked it, but I gather that many see it as something of a nadir.

Thanks. I try not to bang on about it here, but experiences of death are, unfortunately, pretty relevant to other people going through the same thing. Reaffirming that inexplicable deaths happen sometimes can help fight off that weird feeling of someone being cursed (I know it's irrational, but honestly, how could…

How do you deal with real, frustrating, self-hatred-inducing failure?

I have two friends who are in a long-term and, as far as I know, very happy relationship. The main thing that I notice with them are their constant little in-jokes. It's easy to tell that they still talk to each other a lot when they're alone. I always find it a bit strange when couples don't really converse much.

I'm not a fan of this song, but I'd disagree with the idea that it's different in substance from the rest of Green Day's catalogue. Really, the main difference between Green Day's ballads and rockers is mostly tempo. They all have basically the same approaches to chords, melody, and lyrics. Play this one in their…

Could it have to do with how much CD singles sucked? The CD was just not a natural home for the single. So many remixes.

Macho Man! How did you get together with Miss Elizabeth? Did you meet cute, or did someone get the flying elbow in the process?

It sounds a little bit like a weather warning.

It's something that you hold onto. I kept firm on that particular party line with the rest of my family to get them through my brother's death. You use whatever comes to mind in order to create a usable narrative in the face of absurdity (I also focused on how he had told me once about his faith in his place in the…

It was my little brother, about two-and-a-half years ago. 25 years old; he texted his girlfriend and took a nap before work. Then our mom busted down his apartment door because the wasn't answering. After a thorough autopsy (I head something about three passes), they couldn't find anything (my guess is that it was…

Do not even fucking joke about that. I don't even have anything against Disney other than their opposition to public domain, but that would be the straw after the last straw.

That said: Radiohead has always struck me as a "big idea" sort of band. They've had a huge, central theme that they've been working with for their whole career. They've gone from straight guitar rock to full electronic experimentation as they've grappled with it, but there's a central set of harmonic and melodic…