Friday Top 5: Musicians Your Mom Loves

Hey. We need to talk. People are not taking your mom’s musical taste seriously. This is probably because your mom’s taste in music is horrible. But in the interest of science, I have formulated an alternate hypothesis, one that suggests your mom’s musical taste is secretly pretty good and thus worthy of further examination. It’s probably horseshit, but just to be safe you should read the rest of this. Your mom loves all of this crap.

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Friday Top 5: Same Name Songs

Hey, it’s me Jon. Back for some insightful commentary on popular music. JK JK LOL!! I’m actually here with another thinly veiled excuse for rambling nonsense and forced humor. Today’s list is about songs that have the same title (not to be confused with cover songs). For no reason in particular, I have decided to give myself bonus points for selecting songs with maxim musical disparity. Read on if you dare.

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Friday Top 5: Skippable Track Types

You seem like the modern sort. I bet you have 80 bazillion digital music files don’t you? Wow, you have 90 bazillion? That is impressive. How in God’s name do you listen to that many songs? Let me answer that for you: you don’t. You’re a fickle song skipping beast. It’s okay, I do it too. It’s the only way to cope with such an overwhelming amount of music. I’m liable to skip any track on a whim, but there are certain types of songs I find myself skipping all the time. Here are the types of tracks I’m talking about:

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Friday Top 5: Mix Tape Closers

That’s right, I said mix TAPE. The days of sitting in front of a boombox waiting for a song to come on the radio may be over, but I refuse to say “Mix CD” or to refer to a “digital playlist.” Too many syllables. Just doesn’t roll off the tongue like “mix tape.” Yeah, I know a while back ATH ran a “Top 5 Album Closers” list, but this is different. Because I added the whole “mix tape” angle. So it’s totally not the same thing. You’re buying this right? What’s that? You don’t give a flying squirrel’s ass anyway? Oh thank God. Because I forgot I was supposed to write something this week, so I just threw some garbage together at the last minute. These songs really are good mix tape closers though, I swear.

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Friday Top 5: Unusual Collaborations

Artists don’t always make the best decisions. Perhaps they just get bored. Reinventing themselves after every album must get tiresome. I guess that’s why some musicians choose to collaborate with people from other genres. Leaps of faith, even if they are doomed to failure, are more interesting than repeating the same old song and dance. Finding out the hard way that something is a bad idea is more exciting than going through the motions of what has been done before. Oftentimes though, it’s best to stick with what you know. Otherwise you end up with the kind of collaborative catastrophes listed here. Let’s take a look shall we? See the Top 5 Unusual Collaborations below:

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Friday Top 5: Music Technologies

1998. The sweet sounds of Savage Garden on the radio. The warm assurance of knowing the stock market will continue to go up forever. A time of wonder. Those memories seem so faint now. After the Y2K epidemic caused our government to collapse and the America’s secret zombie program was inadvertently unleashed, the situation- I think we can admit now- got a little hairy.

For a while there the walking dead feasted on the brains of the living and wrought havoc on everything in their path. But hey, at least American Idol was good. I loved zombie Paula Abdul! Now that I think about it, that may have just been regular Paula Abdul. Those times were great, but I’m glad our benevolent overlord Stephen Colbert was able to defeat the zombie menace and piece together the somewhat functional government we have today. It’s possible I’m not remembering the past correctly. Savage Garden could never have actually been popular. Right?

Luckily, when I’m feel nostalgic for the turn of the century I can just hop in my 1998 automobile. The interior seems modern enough, but if you look just above the CD player you’ll see something mind blowing. It’s what the ancients referred to as a “tape player.” You see, back before music was just a series of 0’s and 1’s being read by a computer, there were these little tapes that held reels, and on those reels there was music. Crazy right? Crazier still, I continue to use this wacky contraption. Only now, I plug my phone (which is really a pocket camera/mp3 player/super computer, WTF!) into a device which goes directly in the tape deck. Then, I hear the music. Glorious music. The faint hiss of the tape deck and music.

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Friday Top 5: Psychopath Songs

Nothing brings out our core values like the holidays. Halloween, for example, is a day to celebrate the most important American values. Values like fake blood and childhood obesity. Come to think of it, there’s something unsettling about Halloween. Why do people dress their children up like monsters and parade them around the neighborhood to extort candy from strangers? And what about adults who willfully engage in dressing like zombies, or slutty nurses, or slutty nurse zombies? That all sounds a little. . . you know, crazy.

It’s one thing for us to invent Vampires and Werewolves. But the real monsters, the Dahmers and Mansons, that look just like us? That’s a little harder to get a handle on. I guess that’s why people write songs about psychopaths. They want to get up close and personal to get a big whiff of crazy. If you embrace lunatics, you demystify them. The ghosts just become people in bedsheets. With that in mind, here are five songs about psychos for your Halloween weekend:

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Friday Top 5: Petty Crime Songs

I have played Mortal Kombat. Listened to Gangsta Rap music. Seen horrifically violent movies. Been completely inundated with mediated crimes of all sorts. Maybe that’s why I find songs that strive to shock with ultra violence or hardcore drug use such a bore. The most over-the-top crime narratives are often the most mundane. But songs that catalog more bizarre and subtle transgressions? The futile inane rebellions of everyday life? Now that’s the good stuff. Follow the jump and cue the Judas Priest:

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FT5: Songs With Inexplicable Spanish Use

In all likelihood you have encountered the language known as English.  This bizarre Germanic dialect, which supposedly emanated from a small European island, is ubiquitous in the phenomenon know as “Rock and Roll.”  This so-called music inevitably features guitars and talk of “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bop-bop,” which I personally suspect may be coded language for violent revolution, or worse, for drugs!  Though English is still far and away the language of Rock and Roll (but I’ve got my eye on you Rammstein), increasingly artists who have primarily written in the Anglo-Saxon dialect are starting to branch out into the Romance languages.  Through our network of intelligence experts, I was able to obtain the following list which features 5 Songs with Inexplicable Spanish Use.

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