Song of the Day: Vince Staples, "Norf Norf"

There's a video going around the Internet of a woman filming herself getting all riled up about having heard Vince Staples' "Norf Norf" on the radio. It's insane. Over the course of 11 minutes, she spins the tale of how she was dropping off her cadre of daughters at their various schools while listening to the local Top 40 station. (Based on the channels she brings up, this appears to all have gone down in New Mexico.) She explains that she had just finished listening to a Meghan Trainor tune when she was suddenly accosted by Staples' track, one of the highlights of his album-of-the-year-worthy 2015 debut Summertime 06. She notes that it bothered her "as a mom," and also brings up the fact that when she was younger, she listened to pop stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the Backstreet Boys. 

Up to that point, she's merely a white lady whining about scary urban music. But then she just starts reciting the lyrics to "Norf Norf," and that's when it enters into absurdist theater. With a super young child crawling around in the background, she proceeds to run through "Norf Norf," leaving in all the n-words even though she notes that the "cuss words" were taken out of the radio edit of the track. She gets particularly upset at two spots: First, when Staples arrives at the track's understated chorus, wherein he mumbles, "I ain't never ran from nothing but the police." The other time she gets upset—and at this point, she is damn near weeping—is at the very mention of abortions (Staples explains that he needs to sell dope because "Folks need Porches, hoes need abortions"). 

I could fact check this woman, or poke fun at the fact that she for some reason pronounces "Norf" as "Nerf," but I'm mostly fascinated by the idea that this was recorded at all. The source material is a little unclear, though it does seem like this originally arrived online via Periscope (she notes at the beginning that she is waiting to get into the meat of her rant so more people can jump on, suggesting that she was waiting for viewers during a live stream). Periscope is a remarkable source of self-delusion; having just watched a bunch of random feeds on the Apple TV app, I am dumbfounded by the culture surrounding it. Log on at any time, and there are dozens (if not hundreds) of people live streaming events (last night, there were a handful of people broadcasting from concerts by Paul McCartney and Puff Daddy), but there are even more people broadcasting nothing at all. One video I clicked on was just a dude vaping while doing an impression of Gollum. Another was just a girl in a bathroom mumbling stuff about Houston. Still another was a dipshit sitting at a piano defending his use of Kim Kardashian's name in the title of his stream. Yet another was a guy walking around the streets of New York simply saying hello to people who were sending message—an endless information ouroboros lacking both text and subtext. 

All of these people, including the woman who doesn't like "Norf Norf," are obviously intelligent enough to embrace the type of technology necessary to deliver medium-quality video over the Internet airwaves. But they all lack something that seems to constantly come up when discussions of modern tech arrive: They lack the emotional intelligence and the guile to understand what they are doing. Self-aware people recognize broadcasting personal nonsense on Periscope as the narcissistic cry for help that it is. I would never bother knowing that if anybody did decide to drop into my stream, it would mostly be for the sake of trolling. (For women on Periscope, it's an inevitable invitation to remove clothing, which adds an extra creep factor.) But for people like the Norf Norf Lady, it's simply another platform that acts one of two ways: As an echo chamber (where like-minded people can simply congratulate each other for being right all the time) or as a source of victimhood (because feeling wronged by the outside world is an excellent excuse to entrench yourself in whatever nonsense your subconscious needs to justify, be it food, sex, or the subjugation of entire minority groups). 

So while part of me feels bad for the woman whose daughter will be alienated from a normal existence because she can't listen to Top 40 anymore (because she didn't ask to be notorious), but another part of me does not at all (because she kind of did). If somebody is making a scene in a public place (store, restaurant, gym, whatever), I tend to simply stare at that person, granting them the attention they so desperately desire. It's a small, subtle bit of public trolling that will probably get me stabbed one day, but I consider it a tiny little victory. 

Perhaps the most shocking element of this whole tale is that "Norf Norf" was played on Top 40 radio at all. It's a fantastic song, but it's not the stuff that crossovers are made of. Over an eerie, minimalist Clams Casino beat, Staples reps for Sprite, shouts out the various high schools he attended in Long Beach, calls out some Crip markers, and generally nails the detail-obsessed autobiographical tone that makes Summertime 06 such an incredible success. "Norf Norf" has an excellent video (see above), but doesn't appear to be an official single from Summertime 06 and does not appear to have charted. It's a song that simultaneously revels in the gangster lifestyle and pushes against it, and it's emblematic of Staples' unflinching look at his own life and the reality around him. If that is scary to people like the woman who thinks we need to pray for our children because of a rap song, I think that's a good thing. Pop music is supposed to terrify the generation slightly too old to be listening to it, but so much of the junk littering the Top 40 is centered around hedonism or sounds like the soundtrack to a Xanax binge (the former has always been the case, but the latter is a new and odious development). Since we don't have Marilyn Manson to fool parents into thinking their kids are worshipping Satan, we're going to have to stick with the clear-eyed rapper who won't pull punches for the sake of a radio hit. 

Oh, and DMX was also fucking huge when Britney, Christina, and the rest of the teen nymphettes were cranking out hits, so her memories of shiny caucasians singing about their pussies have conveniently left out X growling "Y'all n----s remind me of a strip club, cause every time you come around it's like I just gotta get my dick sucked." 

Song of the Day: Seeded Crown, "Feel No Shame"

It is mildly insane that three years elapsed between the turn-of-the-century rise of Napster and the arrival of the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Those 36 months blew a massive hole in the music world, essentially creating an entire generation of pop enthusiasts who quickly got used to getting all the tunes they wanted for free. At the time, many peer-to-peer users (myself included) claimed that they would be paying for all of the stuff they were downloading if only there was a useful clearinghouse for actually purchasing digital music. I'd like to think that was true, though even if I was ponying up for tracks on iTunes, I still would have used Napster a ton if only to embrace the weirdness it created. 

Remember that the Internet of 2000 was a vastly different enterprise than the one we know today: Many longstanding media institutions still did not have websites, and even the ones that did were criminally lo-fi or merely placeholders for the future. Outside of Pitchfork, web-exclusive content sites were more or less non-existent. Social media was years away from becoming an everyday reality. The bottom line was this: it was exceptionally more difficult to parse out information about music in 2000. Today, most songs can be identified with a simple lyric search or a Shazam, but it was hard to separate fact from fiction in the Internet's wild west. 

Case in point: I have had entire conversations about the bevy of mislabeled songs from the Napster era that became minor urban legends and kept fans confused for a good long while. There was a notorious cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" that was attributed to Phish but was really done by the Gourds. The first version of the Hives' "Hate To Say I Told You So" I ever snagged had the Strokes' name on it. A ton of songs would be labeled "NEW WEEZER" or "UNRELEASED RADIOHEAD," though the songs in question tended to be the uploader's shitty band, some sort of soundalike, or a different band and song entirely. I fell for the Weezer stuff basically every time, as those tracks would surface during the fallow period between Pinkerton and Green wherein it was unclear whether or not Weezer was still actually a band (and without social media, Rivers Cuomo enthusiasts were left to guess). Most of the time these fakeouts enraged me, though I can't entirely be mad at the practice—after all, how else would I have been introduced to Ozma? 

In the latter days of the P2P wave, there was even an entire subset of files that flooded hard drives that were specifically designed to frustrate downloaders. They would often consist of little more than 8 second loops of a song's chorus repeated ad nauseum (I used to think that No Doubt's "Hella Good" was nothing more than four minutes of Gwen Stefani singing "You got me feeling hella good/ So let's just keep on dancing," which I thought was a bold but bullshit way to approach dancehall music) or a PSA about how bad it was to illegally download files. These were brilliantly disguised, typically with a running time that matched the time of the song you were looking for. 

The point is that it was difficult to determine what was legitimate on Napster, which is how I ended up haunted by a mysterious Slipknot song that I thought i might have made up. The band's second album Iowa arrived at the end of August in 2001, though I had snagged a leaked version of it from Napster a few weeks before it dropped. Napster didn't allow for the downloading of zipped files (or maybe it did, I just never saw them), so full albums had to be grabbed one by one. This could be tricky, as because of the aforementioned lack of information about even hot new releases like Iowa, it was often difficult to discern whether or not you had the full album at your disposal. Just to make sure I had everything, I often ended up with way more tracks than were actually on the album. That was how I ended up with a version of Radiohead's Kid A that had 14 tracks on it, even though the actual album only contained 10. (The remaining quartet of tunes were taken from Radiohead's Airbag/How's My Driving? EP, which consisted of outtakes from OK Computer and represented an obvious tonal shift from the rest of Kid A.) Slipknot's Iowa has 14 songs on it, but the version I burned to a recordable CD and listened to as I walked around Manhattan in the weeks after September 11 contained a fifteenth song. The file I downloaded was called "Untitled" and was placed in between "The Heretic Anthem" and "Gently" on the track list. I loved that it contained a sample at the beginning of somebody yelling, "Is anybody alive out there?" particularly because the vocalist seemed to answer the question: "No." It was the exact brand of nihilism that I embraced following 9/11, when it seemed like the world would be on fire forever and it would be impossible to feel anything ever again. Iowa was one of the few connections I had to humanity, as it allowed me to feel something primal and visceral that wasn't connected to anything socially or politically. It was just pure, unadulterated rage and seething hopelessness. Iowa saved me. 

But when I finally did get around to owning a physical copy of the album, it turned out that "Untitled" wasn't an actual track on the album. The song in question was a mystery to me for a long time, and though I have found the song that invaded Iowa 15 years ago, its origins still remain sort of murky. The song is sometimes credited as "Feel No Shame" and the artists listed are Slipknot and Korn, though no record of a collaboration seems to exist. (That version is also often credited as having appeared on the soundtrack to the 2002 Aaliyah-starring vampire flick Queen of the Damned, which is definitely untrue—the song is not on the soundtrack and Queen of the Damned came out a year after Iowa landed.) The artist in question actually appears to be a band called Seeded Crown, though their Internet footprint barely exists. Whatever the origin, this is definitely the song in question, and it undoubtedly changed my experience of Iowa when I was first experiencing it. I often gave it a top-to-bottom listen, and "Giving In" provided a useful buffer between the raucous shout-along of "The Heretic Anthem" and the dirge of "Gently." I still love Iowa, but "Giving In" remains the best song that Slipknot never did. 

Song of the Day: Montell Jordan, "This Is How We Do It"

There was a kid who rode the same school bus as me in the spring of 1995. I was closing out the seventh grade, and I'm fairly certain he was a year ahead of me. At some point I must have known his real name, but I cannot for the life of me conjure it at the moment. It's very possible I never knew it, as he was introduced to me as "Cockroach" and I can't ever remember anybody calling him anything but that. It was unclear how he picked up that nickname, though I'm fairly certain my inference that it was a reference to one of Theo Huxtable's best friends was deeply incorrect.

Anyway, Cockroach and I did not have much in common, and I'm fairly certain that we never spoke to one another outside of the 15 minute window on our way to Timothy Edwards Middle School. Still, we bonded over the fact that we both carried portable CD players to school (at the time, this was on the cutting edge of technology—I had recently invested in a device with new-fangled skip protection), and we would often have casual conversations about music. Our tastes did not overlap very much—I was enamored of grunge titans and was a budding indie elitist, while he was a pop guy who worshipped at the altar of post-New Jack Swing R&B (a genre and era I currently fetishize). However, we did have some stuff that we swapped: He was curious about pre-Dookie Green Day (I had recently discovered the greatness of Kerplunk), and we both agreed that Cypress Hill was pretty dope. 

I had heard Jordan's "This Is How We Do It" before (its video was in heavy rotation on my after-school MTV binges), but Cockroach had purchased Jordan's album of the same name and let me listen to it (though I can only really recall listening to the title track). I vividly remember the day he arrived on the bus with that album in hand—he was so excited, as his parents had taken him to the record store and let him buy three albums, and it had to have been the most new music he had ever come into at one time. In addition to Jordan's debut, he had also snagged Adina Howard's Do You Wanna Ride? (which featured the hit single "Freak Like Me") and the soundtrack to the about-to-be-released blockbuster Batman Forever (which I liked so much I bought my own copy the next day). 

The thing that bothers me about this story is that I have a very specific emotional memory of the songs and the excitement surrounding the music, and yet I cannot remember this kid's real name. I've never been good with names, but it seems like this exchange—which by all accounts was meaningful enough for my brain to file away—should have galvanized this kid's name for me. But no, I simply have the memory of quoting "This Is How We Do It" on the bus in the waning days of the seventh grade. Thanks, Cockroach.  

Song of the Day: Madder Rose, "Hung Up in You"

The danger in writing about trends is that no matter how precise the reporting or accurate the adjudication of the subject, there's always going to be something hilariously wrong following a decade or so of hindsight. This is especially true of any piece that declares the worries about the future of an institution or downright declares it deceased, because the risk is not only in seeing said touchstone continue to exist but also find fresh ways to hit what appears to be bottom (and then still finding ways to plummet after that). Wide-ranging, long-lasting, ever-evolving pop culture monoliths—rock music, independent film, Saturday Night Live—have all survived to simultaneously defy the naysayers and also discover new ways to disappoint devotees. 

MTV has been officially dead no less than a dozen times over the course of its 34 years on Earth, but like a Time Lord, it manages to change its face and direction just in time to thrill newcomers and turn passionate fans into cynical wonks. People were deriding MTV's approach to programming less than a year into its launch, complaining that the video playlist was too narrow, too focused on legacy acts, and not innovative enough. A version of that complaint has surfaced regularly since, often announcing that MTV's newest innovation—the VMAs, The Real World, MTV 2, Jackass, Jersey Shore—represented the downfall of the network and a violation of what they fundamentally represented. 

The age of the protestor tends to dictate the specific nature of the complaint, but they all tend to boil down to a singular idea: MTV used to be better. For the first few waves of watchers, that tended to mean that the network no longer played music that you enjoyed; as time marched on, the issues became more about the quality of the reality programming; nowadays, in its current YA-obsessed identity, it's more about the abandonment of issue-based programming. It's a useful shorthand for aging, though: the second you start complaining about MTV is the second you enter a world in which it is possible you are too old to properly consume youth culture. 

So all essays about the endtimes at MTV are wrong-headed on some level, but this piece from a 1997 issue of Spin is particularly hilarious in its wrong-headedness, both from the perspective of author Katherine Dieckmann (a director responsible for the not-terrible 2006 feature Diggers and the disastrous Uma Thurman vehicle Motherhood, as well as the two worst R.E.M. videos) and the people who were running MTV at the time (longtime MTV matriarch Judy McGrath comes across pretty well, but the rest of the executive class saddle themselves with buffoonish quotes about advertiser synergy that were anathema in '97 but are par for the course today). At the time, MTV was seemingly answering its critics by launching a strategy that re-committed the network to music-based programming that resulted in a handful of new video shows in primetime and shifted non-music programming like The Real World and Road Rules to 10 PM (MTV still uses "The 10 Spot" moniker to identify that block). The article touts a handful of shows that revolve around videos (including the clunkily titled Popular Videos People Prefer) but seems mostly obsessed with Amp, a series dedicated to showing clips from then-ascendent crossover dance acts like Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Moby, and the Prodigy. If you've never heard of Amp, it's because it was pretty short-lived (the last episode aired in 2001, though it frequently disappeared over the course of its five year existence) and also hard to find (as noted in the piece, it tended to air weekends around 1 AM, exactly when the theoretical audience of people looking to watch drugged-out rave videos were at actual raves doing actual drugs). While none of these shows did much for MTV's outlook or bottom line, the shift back to focusing on music was successful in a roundabout way: the dual rises of Swedish teen sugar-pop and mookish nu-metal helped morph a lazy MTV request show into TRL, perhaps the last true musical juggernaut the network produced. 

Of course, TRL was never a bastion for artistic adventure or cultural discovery, and according to Dieckmann, the writing was already on the wall by the time 1997 rolled around. One of her other points is that the music video had run its course as a medium, and that a handful of big name dudes had colonized the entire landscape for video production. MTV's early business model was always pretty brilliant: since record labels footed the bill for videos, the network never had to pay a dime for the bulk of its programming. That same model continues more or less unabated today and was the same in '97. Though MTV's impact on music sales had diminished by then, it was still a key component in making or breaking new artists, particularly in the pop realm. So if a label wanted to give somebody a push, that artist had to make a video, and in order to get the right level of airplay necessary to move the needle, that artist had to make a certain type of video—one that tended to be directed by Samuel Bayer or Mark Pellington or Hype Williams or McG. That narrowing of the field had essentially turned music videos—a format wherein young filmmakers tended to be free to experiment, particularly during the alternative era—into empty tentpole blockbusters that brushed aside the personalities of the artist in favor of visual effects. Dieckmann does call out Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, both of whom were playful and innovative in a way the bulk of their peers were not (and, not coincidentally, ended up making the best feature films when the time came). Dieckmann singles out heavy rotation clips like Bush's "Greedy Fly" and Spice Girls' "Spice Up Your Life" as examples of flatness in music videos (and she essentially predicted the empty high-concept clips that Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys would supply through the end of the decade), but MTV has always operated in between the mainstream schlock and indie innovation. Surely it's worth stomaching well-executed junk like the Wallflowers' "One Headlight" for the sake of underwriting all that awesome shit Bjork was doing, right? 

There's also the issue of people pulling their hair out over the quality of MTV's original programming. The Spin piece seems particularly offended by The Jenny McCarthy Show, an unwatchable low-rent sketch show that was even more terrible than its reputation but mercifully only ran for six episodes, but the rest of MTV's programming was a wonderful cauldron of weirdness that included the cerebrally silly sketch show Apartment 2F (starring Randy & Jason Sklar), the Greg Fitzsimmons-hosted comedy game show Idiot Savants, and the iconic animated series Daria. Though it was beginning to lose its way, The Real World was still essential programming, though the 1997 season was the relatively dull trip to Boston. (Road Rules had a much better year, as '97 saw the airing of both Europe and Islands, two wildly entertaining pieces of reality TV nonsense.)

At the time, MTV was also briefly airing an exceptionally weird talk show called Oddville, which traded on the unusual obsession with carny culture that popped up a couple of times in the '90s (the most famous manifestation of this curiosity was the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, which used to be a key component of many of the Lollapalooza tours of the era). Hosted by a guy named Rich Brown (playing a character named Frank Hope), Oddville began as a public access show, and its early incarnation is not that much different than the version that ended up on MTV, with a rapidly revolving door of celebrity guests, animal acts, stupid human tricks, and a live band. Oddville was a lower-rent show but was still on MTV, so they were able to book a multitude of on-the-rise groups (Blink-182, Hanson) and indie stalwarts (Guided By Voices, the Frogs). Most often, though, they relied on bands that they took chances on but became nothing, like Manbreak, Skeleton Key, and Madder Rose, the latter of which performed on the show to promote their third album Tragic Magic. They were a New York-based act that played a brand of shoegaze-inspired Britpop-tinged alt-rock who I saw open for Bush in 1996 and were inexplicably signed to a major label deal despite the fact that they were not radio-ready even during the modern rock gold rush. But their middle two albums (Panic On and Tragic Magic) are both stellar, and "Hung Up in You" was a peach of a single. The idea that MTV was airing a goofball sideshow clearinghouse and giving a deeply uncommercial drone band a chance to play while a guy in a monkey costume danced along stuck in the collective craw of music critics seems like the kind of problem you want to have. 

Song of the Day: Soul Coughing, "Super Bon Bon"

Most people have a hard time being objective about the bits of culture that they are also nostalgic for, particularly when it comes to music. (In fact, it often seems as though the acknowledgement of a song's poor aging is necessary for proper nostalgia.) But after spending years analyzing and comparing charts, I can say with full and unironic confidence that the best period in radio was 1996. 

The pop chart doesn't necessarily bore that out—this was, of course, the year that the fucking "Macarena" ruined every party you went to—but modern rock radio was peaking, precisely because it didn't know what the hell it was doing. The grunge revolution was in the rearview, and even though founders and pretenders alike were still producing quality records, the sound of down-tuned guitars was starting to curdle. Kurt Cobain's death in 1994 would make for a convenient end point, but I like to think the point when Sasquatch rock becomes endangered is the release of Stone Temple Pilots' Tiny Music...Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop in March of 1996. That album saw STP, who had nakedly arrived as a Pearl Jam clone only four years earlier, almost completely abandon the sound that made them huge in favor of '70s glam homages and jazz-bo explorations like "Adhesive." 

Basically, the band acted as a metaphor for modern rock radio programmers in 1996. The early part of the year saw a handful of unabashed pop-leaning tracks from the likes of Oasis and Alanis Morissette, but the back half of '96 is completely bonkers, with lots of noisy, moody experiments ascending to the top of the heap. That was the period when Butthole Surfers somehow managed to crash the mainstream with "Pepper," when Primitive Radio Gods arrived with the incredibly cumbersome (but no less catchy) one-hit wonder "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand," and when Tracy Bonham's "Mother Mother" signaled the arrival of the post-Alanis crowd. Even Pearl Jam's big single that summer, the moody "Who You Are," was the sound of a band self-consciously abandoning its signature sound in favor of something stranger. 

And then there was Soul Coughing, with its hip-hop samples, stand-up bass, noise beds, and the rap-crooning of frontman Mike Doughty (who kinda sorta sets the table for Drake's whole vocal steez). Their second album Irresistible Bliss arrived in July of '96, and it's a super goddamn odd marriage of twitchy New Wave posturing and post-Beck soul gumbo. The second single "Super Bon Bon" became a heavy rotation modern rock hit, and though Billboard tells me it only went as high as 27 on the modern rock chart, I can tell you it was way more ubiquitous than that. It's the kind of song that either sounds completely irritating or unendingly cool depending on your ears, but whichever side you end up on, you cannot deny that it sounds strange. That strangeness couldn't last, and there are plenty of weirdos out there now, but this was a dynamic bit of oddness that simply doesn't happen any more. 

Song of the Day: Radiohead, "Burn the Witch"

I feel guilty for not liking this because I want to be able to support Radiohead, one of the few rock bands alive with any standing that consistently perform well both critically and commercially. Plenty of bands are left over from the '90s and cashing big checks, but most of them aren't actually trying. Thom Yorke and his mates are one of the few legacy groups that continue to push themselves independent of whatever is happening around them. They innovate from within, rather than subject themselves to of-the-moment pop trends and filtering it through their lenses (which often stands in place of actual inventiveness for most groups). 

I also don't want to be one of those people who used to like Radiohead. As an evolved music fan, I tell myself that I'm always rooting for artists to push boundaries beyond their comfort zones, but more often than not I'm annoyed when anybody has the temerity to swerve into a different lane. (This undoubtedly makes me part of the problem.) Some of my favorite music ever made can be found in Radiohead's first wave, from the snarling thump of "Creep" to the cascading lope of "Black Star" to the jittery crunch of "Electioneering" to the pure haunt of "How To Disappear Completely" to the rhythmic hiccups of "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box." All of those tracks (and the albums that surrounded them) tip-toed an excruciatingly fine line that Radiohead had established for themselves: the gap between the curiosity that arose from their born-in humanity and the irksome suspicion that the technological solutions for modern living generated by that exploration were actually going to destroy us all. Yorke has always been worried about alienation, but his primary concern on OK Computer appears to be about actually turning into a robot (at first metaphorically, then painfully literally). 

The paint started to chip for me around the release of 2003's Hail to the Thief, Radiohead's most outwardly political album. It was initially hailed as an emergence from the electronic wilderness for the band, but while there were more guitar sounds on Thief's first single "There There" than there were on most of Kid A and Amnesiac combined, the band retained a brand of stilted formalism that is necessary when your songs are so painstakingly curated. Yorke's worst fears had come true—the band had started operating like robots. Since then, that has been their standard operating procedure. In Rainbows, the surprise 2007 album that first planted the seeds for the way most every top-tier artist releases music nowadays, saw the band drifting back into bleeps and bloops, and they followed it with 2011's The King of Limbs, their most purely electronic outing since Amnesiac. With each release, I felt Yorke losing more and more of his humanity, sacrificing the visceral quality of the band's earlier work for the sake of sound manipulation. As an intellectual pursuit, it has been fascinating. As music from a band that used to make me feel things, it's fucking garbage. 

"Burn the Witch" is certainly more song-like than anything the band has done in years, but it still leaves me feeling a little hollow. It suffers from the same stuffy formalism that stalls a lot of indie rockers—acts like Tame Impala (a clear spawn of Radiohead) or Bon Iver get so wrapped up in craft and execution that it makes the possibility of feeling anything particularly remote. There's a way to balance intricate construction with non-twee human emotions (Sleater-Kinney did a particularly deft job of just that on their comeback album No Cities To Love), but most bands don't seem to care about that (and, most importantly, audiences don't seem to demand it). 

I hate that Radiohead's early work coincides with my teenage years, because it is impossible for me to extricate my feelings about the band from the time in my life when I felt more passionately about music. But as a guy who once thought Rancid's ...And Out Come The Wolves was one of the greatest albums ever made (I still sort of think that, actually), I could get behind Yorke's version of angst, which was best expressed on tracks like the feistiness of "My Iron Lung" and the existential panic of "Karma Police." 

Look, it's entirely possible that aging in rock music is actually impossible. Of the bands I loved when I was younger, the only acts who are still making music I care about tend to be doing it in relative obscurity and mostly mining familiar territory (for example, Soul Asylum just released a pretty impressive record that sounds like it could have been cut in '95 and will also be heard by about a dozen people). Of the ones who still operate on a more mainstream level, they're all carried by their own internal momentum rather than musical innovation (save for Queens of the Stone Age, who do manage to toss a curveball or two every album while still maintaining their fundamental identity, though they're only a theater-sized band—they generally can't fill arenas). I still like a lot of music, but the stuff that really turns my head tends to be made by actual teenagers or super-intense metalheads. Radiohead are neither. 

Song of the Day: Sara Bareilles, "Eden"

When Sara Bareilles' The Blessed Unrest was nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year back in 2013, there was a collective, "Huh?" from most of my colleagues. I was in the same boat—I had heard and appreciated "Brave" and reported on Bareilles a bit when Katy Perry released the soundalike single "Roar," but I spent almost no time with the album as a whole. 

In the walk-up to the Grammys in 2014, EW sent me to write about Bareilles as the year's big underdog. I spent a lot of time with The Blessed Unrest and was pleasantly surprised by how dynamic it ended up being. About half of it is the sort of singer-songwriter stuff that you'd expect, but the other half is made up of weird sonic experiments and inventive structures and melodies. 

Two songs stood out to me the most. One was a gauzy dream of a ballad called "Satellite Call," and the other was the rhythmic Prince-lite workout "Eden." When I interviewed Bareilles a few weeks before the Grammys in 2014, she told me that "Eden" was a song about Los Angeles, and how she had fallen out of love with the place—Bareilles grew up in Southern California but had recently decamped to New York City for the sake of her personal sanity. (That development made our meeting moderately silly: Though we both lived in New York at the time, I met her at a hotel in Santa Monica because she had booked a ton of pre-Grammys press in the wake of her nomination; she was preparing to go on The Ellen DeGeneres Show when I spoke to her.) There's a single lyric in "Eden" that always gets me, and as always, it's a mildly embarrassing 13-year-old journaling sentiment. When she hits the chorus, Bareilles sings, "No way to make the pain play fair/ It doesn't disappear just because you say it isn't there." Bareilles is specifically singing about how much a place can weigh on you, but it's a broader statement about denial and compartmentalizing. She finally let it all go, and she turned it into the weirdest and most expressive album of her career.

Song of the Day: H.I.M., "Solitary Man"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I was supposed to be an actor. During my teenage years, a great deal of time and money was spent on my behalf in order to prepare me for a future as a stage performer. I attended weekly private voice lessons, received dramatic coaching, and auditioned for a variety of high level productions and concert opportunities. 

The ends ultimately justified the means, as all of that commitment translated into acceptance into NYU's music theater program, my first choice and also the only institute of higher learning that would take me. I went to New York assuming that if I stayed on the path I had laid out for myself and remained focused on my ultimate goal, there was nothing that could stop me. 

In the end, the only thing that could stop me was me. After 18 months of dance classes, newfound performance anxiety and questionable teaching methods adopted by my instructors, I realized that most every person I had met for the previous year and a half had been the worst person I had ever met in my life. It wasn't necessarily a value judgment on my friends and colleagues—it was more the realization that I did not have the necessary constitution for success (or at least the version of success that currently stood before me). 

So I slowly drifted away from the theater and transferred that hunger over to my new favorite thing, which was writing. A chance encounter with an old family friend led to an internship at lad mag FHM (may it rest in intricately airbrushed peace). The initial draw of the gig was primarily financial (it was a paid, and I had drinks to buy), but it also inserted me into a world outside of the cocoon that I had been living in for a while. It was a reasonable reminder that there was life outside of my singularly-minded tunnel vision. 

So I started sorting mail and transcribing interviews, and then I slowly worked my way up: penning fake letters, doing minor interviews, creating lists around new movies and music releases, and eventually writing features and doing experiential stuff. I loved it, and I like to think I got pretty good at it pretty fast. Writing for the magazine became the main focus of my life, to the point that I did everything I could to get out of school early so I could dedicate myself to what I decided was my new career. 

Once school was done and I collected my BFA in theater (an entry on my resume that people still find hilarious), I strung together a healthy number of freelance jobs for about a year until I snagged a staff position at Spin. On my very first day at the magazine, an editor sent me to interview Bam Margera, who was a pretty big celebrity at the time thanks to the success of the Jackass franchise and his own MTV reality show. He was launching a new show on Sirius (this was before the merger), and I had to go to their studio in midtown to watch the first show and chat with Margera (an interview that ended up as my first byline in Spin). The fact that the first day of my new life started there, and that place recently became the origin spot of another reinvention—the job with SiriusXM that brought me out to California. Has the circle come back around fully, or am I still destined to star in a Pippin revival some day? 

That first Bam show had a musical guest in H.I.M., a terrible Finnish alt-goth band who nonetheless have a handful of decent tunes—though their crowning achievement remains the Neil Diamond cover above, which they performed on the very first night of the rest of my life. 

Song of the Day: Kris Kristofferson, "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I'm re-watching Taxi Driver because it celebrates 40 years this week, and I realized two things about it musically this time around. First, I completely forgot that Bernard Herrmann did the score, which is really lush and subtly haunting. Considering more recent Martin Scorsese work is often associated with wall-to-wall Rolling Stones songs, it's a nice change of pace. 

The other thing I forgot was that when Travis goes on his first date with Betsy (played exquisitely and cooly by Cybill Shepherd), she quotes a Kris Kristofferson lyric from "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" to him. It comes from Kristofferson's 1971 album The Silver Tongued Devil and I, which is an exceptionally strange LP that I mostly know for "Epitaph (Black and Blue)," which was Kristofferson's tribute to the late Janis Joplin. "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" has an odd little spoken word bit at the end, wherein he notes that the song was inspired by a handful of celebrities he had met. 

Anyway, a few beats later, Travis gives Betsy that Kristofferson record, just a few moments before he takes her to see Swedish Marriage Manual and kicks off his downward spiral. Even when he's just relying on score, music is exceptionally important to Scorsese. 

Song of the Day: Single Mothers, "Marbles"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Like a lot of kids who watched MTV and dressed like an extra in this Ammonia video, I was in a series of not-very-good garage bands during my middle and high school years. They were all general variations on punk combos, inspired by our incessant obsessing over Green Day's Dookie and the then-hot ska revival. They undoubtedly sucked, and I never contributed to a song that I was actually proud of. But at the time, in my mind, we sounded like this kickass hardcore combo from Canada who play fast and yell really loud and say pithy things about PhD candidates in "Marbles." I've spent years trying to make my rage sound this smart and my brainy cultural observations sound this unhinged. Once again, Canada cracked the code before we even realized there was a problem. Thanks Canada! 

Song of the Day: Tricky, "Christiansands"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

When Tricky released Pre-Millennium Tension in 1996, the alternative music community was at a crossroads: Kurt Cobain had been dead two years, and the national spotlight had darted away from Seattle and its Sasquatch thud. In the wake of grunge's wheezing exit, no singular sound had moved in to replace it. Modern rock radio was littered with esoteric number one's, including blasts of Britpop (Oasis' "Wonderwall"), something I like to call the hard jangle (Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars"), vestiges of rap-rock (311's "Down"), and the occasional Lilith-era angry lady (Tracy Bonham's "Mother Mother"). 

But the top of that chart was primarily littered with bits of strange electronic ephemera like Butthole Surfers' "Pepper," Primitive Radio Gods' "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand," and eels' "Novocaine For the Soul." It's possible that the confluence of alt-rock stylings with computer bleeps was a coincidence, or the next logical step in the evolution of the form, but it probably had more to do with Spin's insistence that guitars were out and samplers were the wave of the future. 

By '96, America's Alternative Bible was beginning to go all-in on "electronica," the mainstreaming of underground dance music that had already gone somewhat stale in the United Kingdom but was still churning out well-regarded music. Bits of digital experimentation had already seeped into certain well-connected heads in American audiences, particularly in the form of Beck (his 1996 release Odelay is a cut-up king's dream), Cibo Matto (the sample-soaked Viva! La Woman), DJ Shadow (the scratch-tacular magnum opus Endtroducing...), and even the crate-digging stew of the Fugees. 

All of those albums ended up on Spin's '96 year-end best albums list, and by '97, Prodigy was on the cover. Also included in that '96 list was Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension, a gurgling bog of slurred beats, skittering drums, and haunting vocals. For computer-curious rock fans like myself, it was the first foray into trip-hop, a mix of spacey samples and druggy breakbeats that could be cinematic (Portishead) or hardcore (Massive Attack). Tricky existed somewhere in between, and the Tension single "Christiansands" acted as a groovy entry point. I never really appreciated trip-hop in the present tense—Pre-Millennium Tension was an album I often sampled at the Tower Records listening station but never actually purchased—but I've really grown to love it now (it's great music to write to, and also makes for a shockingly swell driving soundtrack). There's something special about the way "Christiansands" slinks, like it's stealthily cruising the bottom of the ocean, only occasionally looking up at the light cast by singer Martina Topley-Bird. 

One last thing: It took me years to realize that the album cover to Pre-Millennium Tension is super sexy and sort of dirty. My eye for detail remains terrible. 

Song of the Day: Jann Arden, "Run Like Mad"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

After a brief period of being unavailable on a streaming service (it vanished from Netflix about a year ago), Dawson's Creek is back in circulation, this time on Hulu. I'm trapped in a vicious cycle when it comes to this show, which is one of my five favorite television programs of all time: Whenever it seems like it has gone away, if suddenly the streaming dries up or the home video options suddenly seem scarce, I get unreasonably excited about the prospect of Dawson's Creek re-emerging in its purest, original broadcast form. 

But that's not to be, unfortunately, as the 128 episodes currently available on Hulu are the same bastardized versions I've been putting up with since the show first arrived on DVD over a decade ago, with most of the soundtrack changed for the worse. Music was a huge part of Dawson's Creek, both in the context of the show (Joey singing "On My Own" from Les Miserables is the key turning point of the first season) and in the greater cultural approach of the WB network at the time (it's the first time I can remember seeing bumpers at the end of broadcasts that let you know what songs you just heard in the show). But the bulk of those music cues are now missing. The first season kept the songs in tact, but everything thereafter is pretty bastardized. (Any time Dawson's returns in a new form, I always go to season two's "The All-Nighter" to see if they brought back the Save Ferris song in the third act; I've never been so crestfallen about not hearing a ska song.) 

The most criminal change, however, is in the show's theme song. When Dawson's Creek ran on TV, the opening theme was Paula Cole's "I Don't Want to Wait." It was a placement that became useful for both parties: The song became instantly synonymous with the show, providing it with a signature introduction. The tune also became a huge hit for Cole, who graduated from one-hit wonder (her single "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" had been in the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 in 1997) to a star big enough to headline amphitheaters in the summer of 1998. There's no question "I Don't Want to Wait" is one of Dawson's Creek's greatest cultural legacies, alongside memes of James Van Der Beek crying and the endlessly adorable friendship between Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips. 

But you won't hear "I Don't Want to Wait" when you click play on episodes of Dawson's Creek. Instead, you'll hear Jann Arden's "Run Like Mad," a song that is familiar to Creek devotees by now, as it has been the theme song we've been dealing with since the show went off the air back in 2003. It was originally used as the theme song for international broadcasts, and while it's fine on its own, it doesn't hold the same type of nostalgic weight as Cole's jam. 

It's unclear why the theme song has been changed, though the tangled web involved in music licensing is certainly to blame. Using a song on a TV show used to be easy, because it was seen as mutually beneficial to everybody involved, and it still mostly is. But when it comes to translating soundtracks to home video or streaming, everybody loses their damn mind because nobody makes any money off of music any more. There are a ton of stories out there of classic shows hung up in music licensing hell, which is why it took so long for WKRP in Cincinnati to arrive on DVD (it finally hit in the fall of 2014). Freaks & Geeks also took forever to make it to home video shelves, primarily because of all the music they had to clear (and specifically the Billy Joel songs that dotted one particular episode). Many more producers of TV box sets simply threw their hands up and released seasons without any of the original music. This is especially true of shows that ran on MTV, who used to be able to use most any song in their library—and MTV's impact was so vast that the record companies were pleased their music showed up anywhere on the channel. That's why the home video versions of Daria, The State, and The Real World are so disheartening, and why the DVD versions of Beavis & Butt-Head touted that some of the original music videos were actually preserved for release. 

Part of me thinks it doesn't matter that Dawson's Creek is lacking most of its original broadcast music—after all, there are only a handful of people out there who really remember the late '90s alt-rock music cues compared to the anonymous singer-songwriter stuff that has filled in the gaps for over a decade. But I still hold out hope that somebody takes it upon themselves to clear all the original music and restore Dawson's Creek to its original broadcast glory—or, at the very least, get us Paula Cole back. 

Song of the Day: Filter, "Hey Man Nice Shot (1/4 lb Remix)"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Filter began as an offshoot of Nine Inch Nails—Richard Patrick and Brian Liesegang were both members of Trent Reznor's live band during his band's initial ascent, and Liesegang contributed heavily to the recording of The Downward Spiral. The pair spun off in 1994 and released Short Bus in 1995. (Liesegang bolted soon after the release of Short Bus, and Patrick has kept the Filter mantle going since; the band has a fresh album arriving in April.)

"Hey Man Nice Shot" was the first single from Short Bus, and it was an instant hit on modern rock radio. It told the story of a guy in Pennsylvania who committed suicide during a press conference in 1987, but that didn't stop everybody from assuming "Hey Man Nice Shot" was a dig at the recently deceased Kurt Cobain. For reasons I've never been able to decipher, my local modern rock station (WMRQ Radio 104—still operational!) played this remix, which I loved and never owned a copy of and it haunted me for years. I somehow managed to never hear the original, which is a pretty typical mid '90s industrial tune, and when I bought Short Bus, I was disappointed to find that the remix I had heard so often on the radio was not on it. I still cranked it up, but I missed the remix, and in the pre-YouTube era I had such a hard time finding it that I had convinced myself that it didn't exist. But I found it this morning in about six seconds, which was both immensely satisfying and punishingly boring. Such is the nature of life in the digital age. 

Song of the Day: Marilyn Manson, "The Suck For Your Solution"

I haven't been on a bicycle in years, but for a brief period when I was 14, I was pretty much on it every day. My routine shook out like this: I would arrive home from school, grab a snack, and then immediately hop on my 10-speed and ride the three miles to my local mall. (Though I was using my pedal power and there were copious trails available through the ample woods surrounding my neighborhood, I was definitively an indoor kid.) With available but still-limited disposable income, most of my purchases were CDs—at less than 20 bucks a throw, they always felt like the perfect expenditure for a budding cultural elitist like myself. This was long before digital music blew the bottom out of physical record stores, so there were a shocking number of outlets in which I could buy music: the mall contained both a Sam Goody and a Strawberries, and within easy striking distance I could also visit Coconuts, Media Play, Lechmere, and Borders. Because of the density of the collection of stores, they not only offered music that was priced competitively but also had exceptionally wide selections—I was able to run across most of the indie I read about in Spin and could still get the new Pearl Jam at a reasonable rate. 

One of these after-school mall adventures led me to discover the opening of a new store called Hot Topic, which inexplicably survives today (I have been in two different Hot Topics since moving to Los Angeles). Outside of a handful of cultural touchstones (Doctor Who, Minecraft, and Benedict Cumberbatch), the Hot Topic oeuvre remains the same: Just as you could in the '90s when it first appeared before me, you can still get a wallet chain, hair dye, black light posters, and mass produced t-shirts from your favorite rock bands. 

I avoided Hot Topic initially, because I knew for a fact that I could hang with neither the regulars nor the staff of that particular emporium. Even though I had heard Jesus & Mary Chain records and was no stranger to mosh pits, I still felt like an imposter next to the over-pierced denizens of Hot Topic. But I finally got up the nerve to go in there when I realized I desperately wanted a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. Antichrist Superstar was a relatively new release, and I was fully obsessed. I took buying band T-shirts very seriously—wearing one meant an allegiance to a set of ideas that went beyond the contents of the album itself. I was a huge fan of the music on Antichrist Superstar (the singles were great, and "The Reflecting God" was my go-to mixtape deep cut), but I also was deeply seduced by Manson's control of his own image and his ability to manipulate media. He was hated by pearl-clutching parents' groups and school principals alike, and Manson used his demonization as a tool to try to extract tolerance. Plus, I was a restless Catholic who was just starting to realize a lot of what I had been taught about the world through the church was bullshit. 

So I bought a Manson shirt (in fact, it was this Manson shirt). I thought I was merely pledging my allegiance to a band I liked, but everyone else assumed I was going to inject heroin into my eyeballs and shoot up my high school. The terror that Manson traded in was real, and wearing that shirt provided my first real true counter-cultural thrill. Sure, Manson was a multi-platinum selling artist that millions of kids listened to (indeed, he was mainstream), but the stigma that came along with supporting something others felt was too transgressive was thrilling and rewarding. I don't necessarily miss Manson—dude still makes records and is pretty good at it—but the idea of fear in pop music (which I also complained about four damn years ago) is pretty much gone. Since there's no mono-culture, there are no cultural Boogiemen to condemn and/or rally around. Kanye West is probably the closest we get, and even then, the fear he spreads is more about the dangers of ego and the pitfalls of fame than anything tangible. Here's hoping Miley Cyrus encourages us to take more drugs, then burns a Bible, because fear is where the fun is. 

So listen to this Marilyn Manson song from the Private Parts soundtrack (about another oft-vilified media icon who struck fear in the hearts of PTA moms). It rules, and reminds me that the mainstream used to be deeply weird. I miss it. 

Song of the Day: Nine Inch Nails, "Wish"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I met my wife in the summer of 2006. She was not my wife then, but instead a girl I thought looked cute on an online dating profile. I knew pretty early that I wanted to spend all of my time with her (we still joke about how early I introduced her to my parents), and after moving in together at the end of the year, we took our first vacation together: to celebrate her birthday, we spent a week in February 2007 in Paris. 

It was a great trip. I had been once before but this was her first time, so we bounced around the museums, explored the catacombs, ate some delicious food and drank more than we should have. I have a lot of vivid, intense memories from that trip, but the final night stands out because we saw an incredible show.  

I was working for Spin at the time, and just before we left on our trip, I took a look through some calendars to figure out if there were any bands worth seeing while we'd be in Paris. Nine Inch Nails were in the midst of a tour that saw them play a handful of European clubs and leave sample tracks stored in flash drives from the forthcoming Year Zero album in bathrooms and on bars—a sort of real world viral marketing. I shot off a last-minute e-mail to Trent Reznor's publicist asking if I could get on the list for the band's show at a club called the Olympia, and I got confirmation literally as we were boarding the plane to jet out of JFK. 

The show was intense, essentially functioning as a palette-cleansing greatest hits run in between album releases (at the time, Reznor was bemoaning the fact that tours always seem to be tethered to the support of new albums). It was a killer setlist, opening with "Somewhat Damaged" (the same way they opened many of the shows during the tour for Fragile), with somewhat rare cuts like "Burn," "Eraser," and "Suck" dotting the evening.

But about halfway through, Reznor plowed into the Broken single "Wish." I should note that the show was a little odd, in that we were in a seated section that mostly stayed seated but would give Reznor a standing ovation at the end of each song. So I was in my seat for "Wish," finding myself overcome with the song's savagery, both in its charging speed-metal crunch and in its lyrics. "Put my faith in God and my trust in you/ There's nothing more fucked up I could do," Trent shouted, and I was brought back to my teenage bedroom, feeding my interior churn with repeated listenings of The Downward Spiral and Broken. I was always a fan of Reznor's more obtuse lyrics, but viscerally I responded best to his frank directness. One of those moments cropped up in the song's second verse, when some of the music drops out to allow Reznor to announce, "You know me, I hate everyone!" My young adulthood was dotted with that kind of misanthropy, manifesting itself in rage issues and an inability to commit to friends and lovers. 

When Reznor hit that line, I shouted along, briefly losing myself in the line's remarkable nihilism. In that instant, I lost total control, and I choked back tears and bile that threatened to escape along with the spirit of catharsis. I looked to my right and saw my future wife, also shouting along to Reznor's bellowing and banging her head. I realized in that moment of unbridled emotional lashing out that I could safely emerge from the cocoon of anger I had built for myself because there was finally somebody on the outside who understood who I was, and the safety blanket provided by Reznor's wailing was no longer a necessary part of my life. I still listen to "Wish," but now I do it because I like it and not because I need it. 

Song of the Day: Emmylou Harris, "Heaven Only Knows"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

I'm in the midst of re-watching The Sopranos for probably the fourth or fifth time, and every time I make my way through the series I notice something new. This time around, one thing has snapped into focus: The Sopranos is the best binge show of all time. 

I actually watched the show live throughout the back half of its run, and though pretty much every fan and critic agreed that it was one of the best programs every put on television, that didn't stop them from complaining about it constantly.

I was annoyed by it when it was happening, but now I kind of get it because The Sopranos took its time. There are entire episodes that just kind of wander around, and that's what I liked about it. My defense always was that real life is pretty slow and often aimless, and a great TV show should reflect how things actually are. But in working through it another time, I realize that there are a lot of narrative seeds planted that don't pay off until many episodes (or even seasons) later. Those elements are deceptive, because they are mixed in with bits that don't go anywhere, and many of the bits that look like future developments (most notably, the missing Russian from season three's "Pine Barrens") turn out to be nothing. 

You can only really make the connections once you've seen the clues pay off (or in my case, four or five times), which is why The Sopranos has gotten better with age and both benefits and rewards further close reading. Today's song is from the premiere of season five (aka "The One Where the Bear Shows Up"), providing bookends to the aftermath of Tony and Carmela's marriage. I'm going back to HBO Go. 

Song of the Day: Taylor Swift, "Mean"

So Taylor Swift's 1989 won the Grammy for Album of the Year last night. That in and of itself is not entirely shocking, even considering the 11 nomination haul for Kendrick Lamar's capital-I Important and endlessly inventive To Pimp a Butterfly. Swift is a commercial juggernaut, a hero to tween girls (the only demographic that still invests a healthy amount of money in music), and a reasonably gifted songwriter, although based on the massive crew of old Swedes that accompanied her on stage last night, it's getting harder to tell where her artistic prowess ends and her ability to pay hitmakers to curate for her begins. She's an ideal person for the old-ass Grammys to tether themselves to because it's a symbiotic relationship: The Grammys get the cooperation of one of the few superstar musicians left on the planet, and Swift gets the validation she seems to endlessly crave. 

We kind of knew Kendrick was going to get hosed, right? When they gave away Best Rap Album, a category that has only ever been televised once before, it came across in that moment like a consolation prize for Lamar, who only an hour later would literally burn down the Grammys stage in a flurry of rise-up rhymes. (Alabama Shakes getting the chance to accept an award during the broadcast also signaled that they were not winning the big one at the end of the night.) So despite the fact that Kendrick's shackled rendition of "Alright" was by far the best performance of the evening and the fact that To Pimp A Butterfly was not only an idea-filled album but also a funky one, and despite the fact that Swift's performance of "Out of the Woods" was boring and ill-executed and that 1989 is as gross a celebration of whiteness as there is in the pop world, I had made my peace with the idea that Swift would walk away the big winner. And she is the first woman to win Album of the Year twice, which is nothing to sneeze at. 

But man, what a drag her acceptance speech was. She actually let the following words spill out of her mouth: "I want to say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. But if you just focus on the work, and you don't let those people sidetrack you, some day when you get where you're going, you'll look around and you will know it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world." 

In a word, "UGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH." My problem with fully committing to Taylor Swift over the course of her career has always been the fact that she trades on victimhood. It's one thing to write about lovers who wronged you, but it's entirely another to release a single that whines about what a critic said about your singing or how a famous rapper interrupted a television appearance. Taylor Swift is a young, rich, white, model-thin woman with famous friends—she is literally the least oppressed human on earth. Her tossing shade a Kanye West—a dude who bought her years of media sympathy that she is still cashing in on—is just the most petty, ridiculous complaint in the universe. 

A few years ago, I wrote something for MTV about how much I hated "Mean," a song that clapped back at a critic who said that Swift sounded terrible during a Grammys duet with Stevie Nicks (an adjudication that pretty much everybody agreed with). In the video, she metaphorically murders the dastardly critic and also tries to equate a professional saying something critical of a famous person to middle school kids being taunted for being gay. In her little kitten brain, I'm sure she thought that was empowering bullied kids, but in reality it belittled the genuine trauma those victims were experiencing. Your suffering is not the same as their suffering, Taylor, because nothing you do or experience is like anything anybody else does or experiences. You are no longer one of us. 

And then she has the temerity to release a single like "Shake It Off," which claims to present her as a breezy chick who lets stuff slide right off her back. But in reality she is the opposite of that! She's is actually a vindictive, power-mad lunatic who believes herself to be the target of a constant conspiracy to undermine her very existence. She's not an underdog, she's a sociopath. 

And that's OK! If Taylor Swift leaned into her heel role a little bit more, my respect for her would grow a thousand times. But she doesn't give a shit about what I think (until she does, I guess). 

The Best & Worst Movies of 2015

I've been exchanging year-end movies lists with the same collective since college, usually in the form of incredibly long e-mails. But since this site now exists, I thought I might as well put everything out in the open. For a long time I went through a process of trying to pick 10 movies that I liked, and it usually ended up being three I adored, six pretty good ones, and one I definitely saw. But last year, I had about 18 flicks I genuinely loved, and I had a similar problem whittling down my list this year. Is it because the movies are better? Almost certainly not. Have I become slightly more discerning about what I see, often skipping blockbusters for the sake of making time and space for limited-run indies? That is true. Have I also become more intimate with my own taste, and do I more actively seek out movies I'm more apt to be enamored of? Also the case. Am I becoming less negative in my advanced age? Uh-huh, that too. 

Whatever the combination of criteria, I felt 2015 was a pretty good year at the pictures. Here are my 10 favorites and five that I wish I could scrub from my memory. 

The Bottom 5

5. The Revenant. This just keeps happening: I know for a fact I dislike every Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu I've ever seen. I know I hated Birdman, or Whatever the Pretentious Subtitle Was. I know I saw the trailer for The Revenant and thought, "That looks like shit on toast. Frozen shit on frozen toast." And yet I still bought a ticket and spent over two hours rooting for the bear. The Revenant is a complete storytelling failure, with no characters to speak of. Tarantino photographed the winter better, and Herzog does a far superior job of expressing the brutality of the natural world. Innaritu is a pretender, and I hate that he keeps getting positive reinforcement. 

4. Victor Frankenstein. What a pointless exercise. Harry Potter does a reasonable job but Professor X really dies on the vine. More here. 

3. Chappie. Mostly because I hate Die Antwoord. But it also sucks. More here. 

1. (tie) Sinister 2, Insidious Chapter 3. Hey everybody! We need to stop saying anything even remotely positive about middling mainstream horror movies. You feed them once, and they spawn! More here and here, if you are so inclined. 

The Top 10

10. The Big Short. I could watch movies centered around the financial crisis of 2008 forever, particularly if they are as breathlessly thrilling as Margin Call or as simultaneously funny and angry as The Big Short. Michael Lewis' book did a great job of taking a particularly bewildering set of circumstances surrounding a relatively obscure series of financial products and making readers understand exactly where everything went to shit. Adam McKay's film does an even better job, keeping the characters just slightly ahead of the narrative and putting everybody on almost equal footing. I know a lot of people thought those drop-ins from Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez were too cute, but I thought they really played into the central stylistic idea that the reason why we weren't paying attention to the collapse of capitalism was because celebrity culture was more interesting. Few movies have made me laugh so hard while simultaneously filling me with disgust for humanity. 

9. Ex Machina. I may be overrating Ex Machina because I was so thrilled by the fact that I legitimately didn't know where it was going most of the time. How often does that happen? How many movies have you walked into genuinely not knowing where it was headed? Even my favorite films on this list have a predictability to them, but Ex Machina did a solid job of setting expectations at a strange angle. The first third of the movie is understated and mysterious on purpose, with Oscar Isaac subtly bamboozling Domhnall Gleeson at his odd in-the-woods retreat before revealing Alicia Vikander and her robo-butt. The second act exploration of the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the moral questions it raises dovetail nicely with the increasing paranoia that develops between the two leads. Sure, the third act stand-off is a little rote, but the journey there was top-notch, and the feel of Ex Machina is unlike anything I've experienced recently, particularly in a sci-fi movie. Mildly unrelated: I think the acting awards at the Oscars should be based on a body of work and not a single role, so actors would have to submit every movie they were in during a given year in order to qualify. If that were the case, Gleeson would have a good claim on the prize, as he was excellent in every role he played in 2015, each time playing someone very different. Seriously, did anybody have a better 2015 than the dude who stole scenes in Ex Machina, The Force Awakens, Brooklyn and The Revenant? 

8. The Hateful Eight. AKA The Revenant, Except Actually Good. The complaint about The Hateful Eight seems to revolve around the idea that it's overstuffed, and anybody who says that is boring. Quentin Tarantino gets cut a ton of slack, but that's only because every single choice he makes is both deeply considered and completely off the wall. Of all the movies on this list, The Hateful Eight might be the one I'm still living with the most—I'm still thinking about the way Tarantino shoots the entirety of Minnie's Haberdashery, or the way Samuel L. Jackson negotiates with each of the people he welcomes into his carriage during the opening act. Those small script moments are easily eaten by the sudden blasts of violence or the immersive storytelling that dots the biggest moments of the movie, but they should not be ignored. I just keep thinking about how much everybody is fellating themselves over the beauty of The Revenant, but Tarantino does so much more with the landscape, and then also gives us a series of characters who feel fully lived-in, even if some of them just are a collection of tics. Every day I have a different opinion about who my favorite Hateful Eight performer is (today it's Jennifer Jason Leigh), which is a pretty nifty trick as well.  

7. Diary of a Teenage Girl. As sweet, smart, and thoughtful a movie you'll ever see about statutory rape, Diary presents a vivid portrayal of adolescent hormonal psychology and does a miraculous job of presenting a balanced picture of a relationship that the audience knows is wrong. It never judges teen Minnie (Bel Powley in a performance that would be legend-making if anybody had seen this movie), and only ends up casting a side-eye at middle-aged lover Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard) very late in the film. Even if this movie didn't have any illicit sex in it, there would still be a compelling character piece about Minnie, Monroe, and each of their relationships with Minnie's mom Charlotte (Kristin Wiig). I know the Oscars for Production Design tend to go to historical epics or sci-fi universes, but nailing the strange between-epochs drabness of the mid 1970s should count for something. 

6. Crimson Peak. And speaking of production design: Obviously Crimson Peak looks stunning, with a slouching old haunted house and some genuinely spooky spirit effects. But there's also a deep-seated Gothic romance at its center, which is really the engine that drives this thing—a big step for Guillermo Del Toro, who is still far more interested in the way doorknobs look than in storytelling but does his best job yet in driving home some top-shelf 19th century madness. Also, this is my favorite Jessica Chastain performance yet. 

5. Sicario. One of the reasons I hate those types of horror movies mentioned in the worst-of list is because they trade on tension that is unearned, typically based around lighting tricks, soundtrack shortcuts, or a reliance on the audience's familiarity with the tropes of shitty horror movies rather than anything having to do with narrative. Sicario is the opposite. Outside of one bravura night vision sequence, a lot of Sicario takes place in broad daylight, and from the moment Emily Blunt's Kate gets drafted into an operation she never really understands, I never once unclenched my asshole. A lot of people got into Benicio Del Toro in this movie, but he's playing a character we've seen a bunch (and in the case of Traffic, a character we've seen him play before), but Blunt has to play both confident and bamboozled, and she's one of the best audience surrogates I saw all year. I was with her every step of the way, trying to suss out Josh Brolin's motives and balancing the need to follow orders with the nagging suspicion that those orders are not on the level. I was bummed when the flick abandoned Blunt three quarters of the way through to focus on Del Toro's manhunt, and was double-bummed when the audience I was with ended up rooting for Del Toro's character to murder children in cold blood. I haven't been with a group who watched a movie wrong like that since a bunch of bros booed the arrest of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. 

4. Inside Out. Pixar has been so good at multi-level storytelling for so long that it would be easier for it to become routine, but make no mistake: Inside Out is the best script of 2015. It's smart, it's funny, it's sweet, and most importantly it's real-feeling while still maintaining a clear sense of fantasy and wonder. There's enough for a bunch of different movies here—the trip to the dream studio, the train of thought, and the meta-adventure through Riley's subconscious could all be their own movies—but it never feels too busy. All of the voice acting is strong, and I think there's a true case to be made for Amy Poehler as a Best Actress nominee for her work as Joy. But the best thing about Inside Out is that it hits on a lot of cliched adolescent emotional tropes without seemingly cloying or exploitative. Or rather, they never actually feel like cliches, and in that sense Inside Out has a lot more in common with Diary of a Teenage Girl than you might think. Two other points: That stinger at the end where we got inside the cat brain is probably the best on-screen joke of 2015, and I really really hated the Lava short for reasons that I still can't quite put my finger on.  

3. It Follows. Like Sicario, I never got comfortable at any moment during It Follows, which is exactly how I like my horror movies dating all the way back to the original Halloween. It Follows has enough meta fun with genre conventions to let you know there are smart people behind the camera but doesn't get bogged down in academics or double-turn gags when a good old-fashioned pursuit will do the job. The dream-like quality of the movie has really stuck with me, and its vision of suburbia is incredibly on-point (the way most small midwestern towns feel slightly out of time is a vibe I don't see in a whole lot of films, horror or otherwise). Maika Monroe is an absolute star here, both in playing the larger confrontational set pieces and the smaller character moments with her authentic-feeling group of friends. Also, and this should not be understated, she really runs convincingly, which is not something that can be said of a lot of actors. This scene was the most terrifying goddamn thing I saw in a cinema all last year, and it has stuck with me. Also, shout out to Disasterpeace, who crafted the best John Carpenter score this side of The Fog. 

2. Mad Max: Fury Road. Everything about this movie is perfect. The performances are all uniformly fantastic, and the characters are developed far more with actions than with any words. (Fury Road is almost entirely devoid of exposition, which is refreshing considering the amount of explaining shit that goes on in something like Jurassic World, which is a movie I liked but had some seriously leaden sequences of people talking.) It has a ton of memorable characters, not only Furiosa and Max and Nicolas Hoult's lovestruck War Boy, but also the Pole Boys and Immortan Joe and the Vuvalini and the War Pups and the goddamn Doof Warrior. The stunts were incredible. Lots of shit blew up, and I always knew why it blew up and what that meant for the people around said blow up. (Fury Road is basically the opposite of a Michael Bay or Zach Snyder movie, where everything keeps escalating with no consequences or specific purpose.) Hoult shouting "Witness me!" as he sacrifices himself actually got me choked up, because I was legitimately invested in his character's journey. Bonus points for being an amazing in-theater spectacle but for losing nothing in the translation to watching it at home on HBO Go. 

1. Dope. This is a sentimental pick, because obviously it's not a better movie than Mad Max or even It Follows or Inside Out. But it arrived just at the right time for me, as apropos of nothing I had decided to go back to watch a bunch of the post-Do The Right Thing entries in black cinema, which had a brief but impactful run in the early '90s indie explosion. So Dope works as a brilliant nostalgia trip for anybody who loved Juice or South Central or Menace II Society or Fresh or Boyz N The Hood, but it also functions as a meaningful meditation on how hip-hop permeates all facets of culture, and how that culture manifests in myriad ways. I would usually be upset that there are as many fake endings as there are, but Dope does such a nice job of splitting apart its story threads and weaving them back together that it's hard to get mad at it. Also, I now feel like I not only more fully understand certain aspects of black culture, but also teen culture—after watching Dope, I think I understand Snapchat now. Has there been a more miraculous moment at the cinema in 2015 than that? 

Song of the Day: Primus, "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver"

Because who gives a shit? 

Song of the Day: The National, "Terrible Love"

This is Song of the Day. Explanation here. 

Last night I saw the new Nicholas Sparks movie The Choice, which was undoubtedly one of the worst movies I've ever paid money to see in a theater. I ended up screening it out of morbid curiosity, as while I had never seen a Sparks movie before, I had delighted in the strange twists that many of those stories had—particularly the third act of Safe Haven, where it is revealed that a character had been a ghost all along. 

I was desperately hoping for the same sort of madness in The Choice, which appeared from the commercials to be a movie about deciding whether or not to take somebody off of life support. My imagination ran wild with the possibilities: Would our male hero (in this case a twangy veterinarian named Travis, played by Benjamin Walker) fall in love with another woman while his main squeeze was in a coma, only to have her wake up and force him to pick between the two of them? And how would anybody astral project in this reality? The Choice could have gone in any number of terrible directions, and those possibilities—coupled with its atrocious rating on Rotten Tomatoes—made for an irresistible opportunity. 

However, The Choice isn't bad in an interesting, over-the-top way. It's merely boring. There were a handful of moments that were completely bonkers, including an accidentally hilarious car accident and a sequence where our hero builds a gazebo out of driftwood. But perhaps the strangest bit of nonsense in The Choice comes when Travis and his new girl Gabby (Teresa Palmer) have sex for the first time. They've had dinner and are sipping wine, and Travis goes over to Gabby's vinyl collection to pull out a record. He puts the needle down, and out comes the National's "Terrible Love." They bone, clearing off two separate tabletops in the process. 

As its title implies, "Terrible Love" is an awful song for sex. It's not really a song about love at all—as far as I can tell, "Terrible Love" is about social anxiety and self-medicating with alcohol. But even if we ignore the lyrics (which I do all the time), its quiet storm arrangement isn't particularly erotic. (Plus, if Travis did in fact put on The National's 2010 album High Violet, then he's going to end up climaxing to the song after "Terrible Love," a track called "Sorrow" that is exactly as sexy as the title implies. However, it's unclear whether or not that would actually come up—Travis pulls a record out of a sleeve that is clearly not the cover to High Violet, a detail that drove me completely nuts for about 10 minutes while watching the film.)

High Violet was released in 2010 to rapturous acclaim and did alarmingly big business, debuting at number three on the Billboard album chart and selling over a quarter million copies in the U.S., an astounding figure for a relatively tiny release (albeit one with a lot of high-profile supporters—late night bookers love the National, and the band was able to debut "Terrible Love" on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon well in advance of the album release in order to build buzz). It's a brooding collection of orchestral post-punk that is probably a little too curated for its own good, though it's hard to deny the power of frontman Matt Berninger's hypnotic baritone. In fact, it's such a rich voice that it can bamboozle music supervisors into thinking the National songs are a good idea to put under a passionate sex scene. 

So here are your two lessons: Don't go see The Choice, and don't bone to the National. You're welcome.