Indifference Has Won, Won, Won: 2011 in Rock & Pop

Also country, dance, and, well, everything that isn’t metal or rap.  There’s a lot of ladies on this list, and a lot of stuff from foreign countries, and two records by Texas-based singer-songwriters on MCA’s phonus-bolognus country subsidiary.  I realize that my picks this year read like those of a …

The Radio Don’t Play the Shit I Used to Love: 2011 in Hip-Hop

People are still making rap music!  Can you imagine?  Maybe it’s not a trend after all.  Foxy grandma even noticed some beats being jacked when she was watching Glee last week.  Thank goodness for the internet, where we can keep on arguing about ‘relevance’ and ‘credibility’ until the return of cows. …

A Thousand Flavors of Heavy: 2011 in Metal (and Beyond)

If you get paid to write about music, you have to make top ten lists at the end of the year.  If you fail to do this Dave Marsh comes to your house and reads you Bruce Springsteen on Tour:  1968-2005 in its entirety.  So, here goes, first with my metal …

Your Hisses Are Wasted On Me

Dear geeks, Congratulations!  It is my understanding that you have taken over mainstream culture recently, and while this has caused consternation in certain quarters, I am the magnanimous sort, and besides, whenever someone says the words “culture war”, my eyes glaze over like a Honey Baked Ham. It has, however, …

The Battle of Bad Ideas, or, Bay of Pig-Heads

It is in Ezekiel, near the beginning of God’s crazy-old-man period, when he admits that he deliberately gave his followers stupid ideas and made them follow intentionally bogus rules just to make them miserable and remind them who was really in charge.  For all their talk of abortion, homosexuality, and …

The World’s Most Aptly Named Website

Ever since Al Gore invented the internet, one question and one question alone has haunted the minds of scholars and charged passionate debates among the world’s great thinkers:  which website has the world’s worst comments sections? Over the years, a number of consensus favorites have arisen.  For sheer number of …