Recently in Chuck Eddy's Chuck It All In Category

The music of Chely Wright is yours to rock to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Chely Wright, as even people who never heard of her before know by now, came out as a lesbian to People magazine last week. And the first thing to point out is that, contrary to much clueless reportage since, this is not a case of a "major country artist rolling the dice on her career." Just the opposite. It's the case of a former minor star who had one No. 1 hit 12 years ago — and who hasn't hit the country Top 20 since 1999 or the Top 40 since 2004 — suddenly getting her name and picture in People, The New York Times, and everywhere else the same week she released both a new album and a book. If the announcement shocked some folks who had liked her soul-grooved signature song "Single White Female" in 1998, no big deal; they haven't been buying her last few indie-label records anyway. And country radio hasn't been playing them, either. But now, Wright's in the public spotlight like she never was before, even when she was scoring hits. Many fans — not necessarily country ones — will probably be interested in her for the first time, kind of like k.d. lang in 1992. In other words, there's no way that coming out could possibly hurt. And the timing is perfect.

Cowboys and B-boys both love their wheels and guns, and both like bragging about their chosen outlaw subcultures, so it's no surprise that hip-hoppers and hillbillies increasingly cross boundaries. For instance, 300-pound ex-pro-golfer Colt Ford has charted on both Billboard's country and rap charts. On his new Chicken & Biscuits, ignoring the fact that nobody understands C.B. radio slang anymore, he does a hick-hop version of C.W. McCall's trucker-country "Convoy," which topped the pop chart in 1976. As a service to future rapnecks, here are a few more potential crossover suggestions.

Hair metal, grunge and countless other genres are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Genres don't disappear. They just move underground to smaller record labels, or change their names and haircuts. Or maybe their hair just falls out, and they start wearing a cowboy hat. That's sorta what happened to hair metal itself after grunge supposedly killed it off (a myth, by the way), but the nearly two decades since Nirvana have produced some dangerously contagious hair-metal albums nonetheless. Ratt's Infestation — their best in over 25 years — is merely the latest. Here are nine more.

• Love/Hate, Wasted In America (1992): These L.A. vermin had already twisted GnR's original template in all sorts of unheard-of directions on their 1990 debut — out-weirding grunge before it even broke. Their possibly even more unhinged follow-up proves Seattle did not dampen their teen spirit.

• Guns N' Roses, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993): Their one great collection since 1990 — either their second- or third-most-rocking album ever (see: Lies) — was this unholy stack of cover songs. The best, "Down on the Farm," came from forgotten gutterpunks U.K. Subs.

• Kix, $how Bu$ine$$ (1994): From perennial Maryland under-card goofballs, a hilariously hookful and songful latter-day exploration of crash-bang-boom. Years later, on Funny Money's excellent Stick It!, squealing Steve Whiteman was still at it.

• Cinderella, Still Climbing (1994): Back on gypsy road if no longer growing hair to the sky, Pennsylvania's most rustic glamsters fight the good fight. "They can't take the city from the boys looking pretty."

• Warrant, Ultraphobic (1995): Nobody believes this unless they've actually heard the thing, but Jani Lane and his pretty-boy pals probably made the best actual grunge album ever to come from a former hair band. Only competition: Warrant's own Dog Eat Dog, from three years before.

• Silvertide, Show & Tell (2004): Northeast Philly longhairs carry on Cinderella's cow-glam tradition and actually get three songs onto the Mainstream Rock Top 20. One of the great lost hard-rock albums of the '00s.

• Beautiful Creatures, Deuce (2005): Bang Tango's Joe LeSte, backed by a new bunch of vampires but still sliming Billy Idol-style, shows Buckcherry how it's done.

• Tesla, Real to Reel (2007): Always more tasteful than others of their ilk even back in their hitbound conflicted-about-using-machinery days, Sacramento boys-turned-men master the classic-rock repertory — from Traffic, Trower and Thin Lizzy on up.

• The Last Vegas, Whatever Gets You Off (2009): This Chicago sleaze team started out on a garage-rock indie, grinding half-learned Aerosmith riffs into the soil like pre-grunge Seattle-ites Green River used to. By decade's end, they were slicked up and touring with Mötley Crüe — who know good dirt when they hear it.

The music of every artist mentioned in this piece is yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

What with Slash stepping aside from Velvet Revolver to put out a new solo album that will surely prove at least as unforgettable as those records he made with Snakepit back in the day, now's a perfect time to consider the longtime legacy of side projects by famous guitarists. Here's a whole bunch.

Angry times call for angry measures, so rock 'n' roll's Angriest Old White Man of all — Ted Nugent — is the first candidate to officially declare presidential ambitions for 2012. "The Nuge," as his bow-hunting buddies call him, will run on a hybrid True Republican/Tea Party/Michigan Militia ticket, he announced Thursday morning at O-Dark-Thirty while clad in full camouflage gear and straddling a great white buffalo on his homestead not far from the ATF-seized former Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Tex. Though his more apocalyptic supporters are pegging 2012 as the End Times, the Motor City Madman reassured them by quoting his own "Stranglehold": "Some people think they're gonna die someday. I got news; ya never gotta go."

Ke$ha's music is yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Ke$ha's Animal may well be the most inescapable and game-changing collection of songs to emerge so far in this spanking-new decade. After two and a half months, it's still firmly entrenched in Billboard's Top 15, and recent weeks have seen an extremely entertaining flurry of blogwise chatter about what it all means. Ke$ha's sometimes-co-songwriting ex-punk mom Pebe Sebert is probably most famous for having co-written the country standard "Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You" (done by Dolly Parton, Joe South, Merle Haggard, and others). But Ke$ha herself is more often compared (sometimes by yours truly) to such highly respected non-Nashville artists as Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, L'Trimm, Salt-n-Pepa, Northern State, Megan McCauley, Fan_3, Courtney Love, Scooter, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Dictators, and the Tubes. (Until now, strangely enough, she has not been likened to the Runaways, who quite possibly filled a similar skanky suburban cultural niche circa 1976 but sold fewer records from it; only time will tell whether some enterprising filmmaker will make a Ke$ha biopic in the year 2044.) At any rate, what everybody except total nincompoops acknowledges is that Animal is a really really really funny record. Here's a countdown of its most hilarious moments.

Van Morrison, Horslips and every other artist mentioned here are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher started Ireland rocking with their respective bands, Them and Taste, back in the '60s, and the nation has kept it up through almost 50 St. Patrick's Days since. And while songs by the Cranberries and Snow Patrol that might as well be sung by actual leprechauns are obviously not unheard of, and there are occasional Bonos who'd prefer to be the Pope, the Emerald Isle's specialty is rowdier stuff that tends to go quite well with green beer. A brief primer is below; a longer playlist can be found here.

Usually we think of cover versions as tributes to songs we know already — stars or hopefuls paying homage to a time-proven classic, perhaps. But once in a while, a cover song gets to be a huge hit when almost nobody out there ever heard the original version in the first place. For some reason, this seemed to happen especially often in the '80s. For instance, there's a real good chance you know who had hits with "I Love Rock N Roll" and "Tainted Love," but you might not realize that the artists who recorded those songs first were not Joan Jett or Soft Cell. A rundown of covers you might've thought were originals is below — including a couple where the hit artist cheated by changing the title.

Elvis Presley, Prince and every other artist mentioned here are yours to listen to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

• "Hound Dog," Elvis Presley (1956); "Goin' Up the Country," Canned Heat (1968); "When the Levee Breaks," Led Zeppelin (1971): Only three of the probably scores of well-known rock songs whose initial blues versions aren't as famous. Consult Big Mama Thornton's 1953 "Hound Dog," Henry Thomas' 1928 "Bull Doze Blues" (before Canned Heat changed some words), and Memphis Minnie's 1928 "When the Levee Breaks" for evidence.

Joe Cuba, Tito Puente and every other artist mentioned in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

African American and Latin American musical influences had been commingling at least since Dizzy Gillespie hired Havana conga drummer Chano Pozo in the late '40s, and have continued to do so ever since — through fairly recent genres like reggaeton and urban bachata, for instance. But no other such hybrid has ever sounded as unhinged as the Latin boogaloo music that exploded out of New York City's outer boroughs and Spanish Harlem through the mid- to late '60s — in fact, in a decade of crazed garage rock and cold-sweating funk (both of which boogaloo absorbed), this may well have been America's wildest dance music of all. An excellent new Joe Cuba compilation on Fania, El Alcalde Del Barrio, is only the latest evidence.

Ritchie Valens, the Hold Steady and every other artist mentioned here are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Rock 'n' roll evolved out of blues and country, largely musics of Southern Protestants. But by the late '50s and early '60s, Mexican-Americans like Ritchie Valens and Italian-Americans like Dion DiMucci entered the picture, and eventually even Irish kids like, uh, Gilbert O'Sullivan got into the game. By the '80s, with parochial school heroes Bruce Springsteen and Madonna at the top the charts, all seven sacraments were rocking. To honor Ash Wednesday (or Miercoles De Ceniza, as the great '90s Mexican rock band Caifanes call it), here's a liturgy of canonization-worthy songs, from artists baptized and otherwise. Hope you didn't give up music for Lent!

Strangely, none of the tracks on our playlist come from what official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano just this week named history's Top 10 Pop Albums, in a surprisingly tongue-in-cheek article delivered just in time for Italy's annual San Remo festival. Those 10, for what it's worth, would be the Beatles' Revolver, David Crosby's If I Only Could Remember My Name (!?), Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac's somewhat 6th-Commandment-flaunting Rumours, Donald Fagen's The Nightfly (JFK nostalgia!), Michael Jackson's Thriller, Paul Simon's Graceland, U2's Achtung, Baby (its title perhaps a reference to Pope Benedict XVI's controversial childhood in Germany), Oasis' What's the Story (Morning Glory)? and Santana's Supernatural. None of which seem particularly Catholic themselves, oddly enough. Though it's true that, on earlier records, Simon did sing about a radical priest getting him and Julio released after whatever they were smoking down by the schoolyard, and U2's Bono was known to quote the Great Doxology, "Gloria In Excelsis Deo".

Perhaps it's understandable, not living in Brooklyn and all, that the Holy See's resident music critics never heard Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady's classic catechism-class concept album from five years back; a shame, though, given Craig Finn's status as a regular churchgoer even while on tour. ("Cathedrals make for good sightseeing destinations," he told Mojo once.) And okay, Jim Carroll Band's Catholic Boy never made much radio headway beyond "People Who Died." But why no Goth, the most flagelatingly Latin-mass-like rock genre ever? And what about the guilt-ridden "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys? A huge hit throughout Europe in 1987 (No. 3 in Italy!), and the album it's from, Actually, is often considered their best. As for Billy Joel's The Stranger, featuring both "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and possibly the most canonical Catholic-rock song ever in "Only the Good Die Young" (unless the three men Don McLean admired most in "American Pie" count), what can be said? Dear Vatican newspaper: That stained-glass window you're hiding behind never lets in the sun.

Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye and every other artist mentioned in this article are yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Just like regular people, great musical artists sometimes get married. And just like those of regular people -- maybe even more so, given that we're talking about stressed-out celebrities in the spotlight -- those marriages sometimes fall apart. But unlike everybody else, musicians still have songs to write, which occasionally means listeners get an uncomfortable front-row seat for both the stars' wedded bliss and its potentially messy aftermath. The albums below are historical landmarks of that phenomenon -- and just maybe, object lessons on how (or how not) to get along with your funny (or bloody) valentine.

• George Jones and Tammy Wynette: 16 Biggest HIts (released 1999, recorded 1971-1980)
  Doesn't have his "The Grand Tour" or her "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," both essential texts on the subject matter. But it does chronicle the ill-fated early '70s marriage of country's most classic couple -- a pair of old sneakers, they called themselves. Not the jet set, the old Chevrolet set.

• Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks (1975)
  Separated from his wife, Sara, at the time, Dylan makes the album he's been trying to top ever since (some say he has; they're crazy), loaded with some of rock's angriest, most cracked and devastating breakup songs. He's never admitted they're autobiographical; if you're going through what his protagonists are going through, you won't mind.

• Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1977)
  In which the bassist and keyboardist-vocalist split up after being married eight years, and the guitarist-vocalist and other vocalist can't figure out whether they want to be together or not, and the drummer finds out his wife's running around on him, and lines start criss-crossing, and it all winds up in the lyrics. California soft rock never sounded truer, or sold more.

• Marvin Gaye: Here My Dear (1978)
  The Motown Metal Machine Music, almost: a 70-minute double album of long, droning funk, mainly about how bad it was being married to Berry Gordy's older sister Anna, initiated primarily to cover alimony and child support -- while wondering why attorney fees are part of the deal.

• Ashford and Simpson: The Very Best Of (released 2002, recorded 1973-1984)
  Solid as a rock: they met at a Baptist church in Harlem and started working together as a songwriting team in 1964; composed a few big Motown hits; wed in 1974; and now live on Manhattan's Upper West Side. If you've been together as long as they have, and can answer "Is It Still Good to Ya" affirmatively, kudos.

• X: Wild Gift (1981)
  Bohemians with Catholic confession-booth tendencies, fighting and fondling and watching their love pass out on the couch while choosing to live on next to nothing in L.A.'s seedy early '80s punk underbelly, John Doe and Exene Cervenka were desperate and not quite used to it. Their marriage lasted five years -- from 1980 to 1985. This may have been the high point.

• Richard and Linda Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights (1982)
  Married a decade, schooled in Sufi mysticism, and facing a bitter end, the Fairport Convention alumnus guitar genius and his seemingly passive-aggressive British folksinger spouse slide down back streets, walk on high wires, face the wall of death, and consider pushing each other off. When they toured to support the record, minor physical altercations were not uncommon.

• Womack & Womack: Love Wars (1983)
  Sam Cooke's daughter and Bobby Womack's brother -- the soul couple who wrote "Love T.K.O." for Teddy Pendergrass -- send out all-points bulletins about mutual distrust. The title of the blues-haunted single "Baby I'm Scared of You" says more than you might want to know. Though reportedly, their marriage survived -- long enough to record several years later, in Africa with their kids.

Contra is yours to rock out to whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. Take a free trial and see what we're all about.

Maybe it's just because they're already so far removed from their Ivy League days, but acclaimed Anglophile Afrophiles Vampire Weekend have a bit of writer's block on their inevitably chart-scaling second album, Contra. Oxford commas and New England commutes apparently don't cut it anymore once you're an indie-rock star, so you have to look for random rhymes for "horchata" instead. Which isn't to suggest they're not still obsessed with privilege. There's a very long song called "Diplomat's Son" that incongruously opens with an M.I.A. sample, and "California English" says something about "private schools" -- it's just harder to tell if they have anything clever to say about the topic.

V.W. have been singled out from the start as archetypes of the industry's accelerated hype cycle -- famous on the basis of just a couple of MySpace songs, months before the release of their first album. So it's less shocking that the sophomore slump would hit them than that they managed a fairly enjoyable debut in the first place. And it's not like Contra is a rehash; the title is a politically confused if presumably ironic reference to Sandinista!, the Clash's over-the-top-eclectic coffee-table triple LP from 1981, and the V.W.s do seem to broaden their own rhythmic palate across the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, in their own prim way. "Holiday" sounds like Haircut 100 doing some jaunty ska oompah; there's something vaguely zoukish about "California English"; "Cousins," the single and least twee track, opens with a hard James Brown vamp that Pigbag might've bleated out in the '80s. Evidently they've been listening to Latin music, too. But mostly there's a sort of stiffened punk-funk clank not far from what was coming out of Brooklyn's more bohemian neighborhoods from bands like the Rapture and Radio 4 at the previous decade's outset. Which might be useful on hipster dancefloors if Vampire grooves didn't have a mysterious tendency to clumsily disentregrate almost as soon as they're established.

They get praised for putting "space" in their music, probably because of the plinky-plonky xylophones and fancy-pantsy string orchestrations. Which are cute, sometimes. But the melodies aren't there like before, and inevitably Contra's charming numbers are the ones kept short and speedy; when the band slows down and stretches out -- frequently so Ezra Koenig can pirouette two-syllables words into ten -- they're a snooze. Obviously the hiccuping and yelping, just like all the upper-crust affectations, are part of the concept. But even rich boys need hooks, right?

Strangely enough, one of the most influential songs of the '00s may have come out in 1981. Hank Williams, Jr.'s "A Country Boy Can Survive" is basically a doomsday sermon about how the big city is going to hell in a handbasket, but it doesn't really matter, because out in the sticks, where folks are still taught to run trout lines and say "ma'am," life will go on no matter what. "The preacher man says it's the end of time/ And the Mississippi River she's a goin' dry," Bocephus ominously warns. "The interest is up and the stock market's down/ And you only get mugged/ If you go downtown." Not an entirely new stance for country music, obviously -- it's called "country" for a reason, after all -- but somehow more paranoid and mean-spirited than, say, "Okie from Muskogee" ever was. And even if Hank hadn't recorded an updated version called "America Will Survive" in 2002, in the wake of September 11th, his early '80s anthem would be a foreshadowing of the anti-urban resentment and stubborn local-barricade libertarianism that, a quarter-century down the line, would fuel Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and countless tea parties and right-wing talk-show hosts. Throughout the '00s, similar fightin' words -- often from Nashville's best artists -- came close to defining country music, even as the genre's sound put up its dukes, appropriately turning tougher, louder, more rock. Here, a brief backlash primer.

The most relevant fact about music in the '00s was the sheer volume of it that came out, as digital technology democratized recording and distribution down toward individual-artist level. Most conservative estimates cite a figure somewhere in the 30,000-albums-per-year range in the U.S. alone, which computes to 300,000 over the entire decade. Add in countless bands who never graduated past five songs on MySpace, and the quantity turns astronomical. Given that only a tiny fraction of this music has inspired lasting adulation outside performers' immediate families, that means the overwhelming majority has long since slipped through the cracks of history. That said, here's a representative, genre-spanning sample of 10 great albums unlikely to make many other best-of-decade lists: if you knew about any of them in the first place, chances are you forgot them already. Until now.

10. The Exploding Hearts
Guitar Romantic, 2003
The decade's most tragic rock story: on July 20, 2003, a bus carrying Oregon powerpop-punk foursome the Exploding Hearts overturned on the Interstate while returning home to Portland from San Francisco. Three members -- vocalist and guitarist Adam Cox, bassist Matt Fitzgerald, drummer Jeremy Gage -- died. Only four months earlier, the band had put out its only album: 10 songs -- seven of them less than three minutes long -- about modern kicks and modern chicks and sleeping aides and razorblades. No other album in recent memory has come so close to matching the sweet-and-sour relentlessness of the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady; most likely, no album ever will.

9. Skye Sweetnam
Noise From The Basement, 2004
Where pop-punk -- or at least cool old Pat Benatar chords -- lived on was Radio Disney. But where Avril reached a mass American audience, her fellow Ontario native Skye Sweetnam only crossed over to Canadians, and maybe some Cheap Trick fans in Japan. Underground tween-pop from its title on down, Noise From The Basement -- released when she was just 16 -- peaked at a humble #124 in the U.S. But that didn't make its impudence any less precocious or self-aware, from the single about skipping school to avoid Shakespeare to the subterranean homesick "Hypocrite": "Bubblegum braniac! Baby girl ultra brat! Angst schmangst! No thanks! Hope my record doesn't tank!" Sigh...

8. Wolf
Evil Star, 2004
In a decade wherein heavy metal never stopped mutating, but did so within a tighter and tighter perimeter, in increments indiscernible to most humans unschooled in the art of experimental composition, this Swedish trio stubbornly stuck to the pre-thrash leather-jacket-full-of-zippers basics: Power anthems distinguishable as actual songs, with ice-blue riffs as hooks, and words about ominous objects in the sky and werewolves going bump in the night -- all howled in a high register melodic enough for a layman to actually decipher them. And the Blue Oyster Cult and Ramones covers sure didn't hurt.

7. Collin Raye
Never Going Back, 2009
As metal and rock radio abandoned old-school blues-based hard rock, country picked up the ball -- so much that, by decades end, Bad Company riffs were even sounding stale in Nashville. So nobody much noticed when this longtime journeyman, who hadn't taken a single into the country Top 40 since early 2000, kicked off his last-year-of-the-decade album with some Grand Funk Railroad cowbell, then loaded the thing with butt-rocking couples smuggling contraband across the border and heading west for Vegas dancing jobs only to wind up on a riverboat outside Cincinnati. Plus remakes of Nilsson and Stealers Wheel classics, and Eagles-worthy ballads that frequently mention Jesus.

6. ZZ Top
Mescalero, 2003
Talk about your blues-rock journeymen making runs for the border: These ancient Texas beardos had been stuck in the boogie mud ever since their hightly lucrative mid '80s sellout-to-MTV era, then they suddenly took a sharp left turn on this largely unheard platter full of Spanish words, warped funk, screwy electronic effects, and flatulent jokes about alley-gators and intelligent quotients and punk-ass boyfriends. If a more entertaining hard rock album emerged this decade, it surely wasn't by guys in their 50s (all three born 1949!) who'd been grumbling like old men since they were in their 20s (excellent long-range business plan!) Their weirdest since El Loco in 1981, if you're keeping score.

5. Field Mob
From Tha Roota to Tha Toota, 2002
Not hard to imagine ZZ Top and Field Mob enjoying the same barbecue: This album's title refers to feasting on the entire hog, from snout to tail. And give or take Bubba Sparxxx, it's doubtful that the decade produced more countryfied rappers than these hick-town Georgians, who lyrically trace their Southernness back to the plantation their ancestors were sold and hung on. So while they revel in a comedic trickster spirit their genre mostly abandoned, it's run through with sadness -- soul, in other words, the red-clay variety, yet spiked with melodic beauty from classical Europe and the Far East.

4. Koffee Brown
Mars/Venus, 2001
And here's a path that r&b in the '00s sadly managed not to follow: From a man and woman named Fonz and Vernall, a grown-folks gender battle, in the time-tested tradition of Womack & Womack or Ashford & Simpson, "retro" only in the sense that it's not emotionally stunted by ice-queen restraint or melismatic bombast or strip-club crotch-grab. The fugue-like "Weekend Thing," setting its anticipatory upscale summer scene in beauty parlors and barbershops, gave up as warm a groove as any soul track this decade. But that single only charted #71 r&b; the duo never made another album.

3. Oneida
Steel Rod EP, 2000
Checking it at 31 minutes, this record is misnamed -- while admittedly containing only six songs including an untitled four-second closer, it's more a short album than an EP. And a half-hour is just about perfect for this dirty-twanged, keyboard-tempered breed of Brooklyn science-lab sludge, tossing Link Wray, MX-80 Sound, Pere Ubu, and Devo into the choogle-metal blender while obsessing on loaded weapons and hellbound trains. You'd have a hard time finding any other '00s guitar rock so convoluted and repetitious that also kicks so hard. In 2000, Oneida could've almost passed as Queens of the Stone Age's nuttier cousins; later on, QOTSA got more commercial as Oneida got artier. And they both kicked less.

2. Fannypack
See You Next Tuesday, 2005
"Do it now, turn around, get off like a wedding gown, people on the pitcher's mound, turn it up and lock it down, fast ball, curve ball, workin' on your nerves ya'll " -- Three impossibly sassy and accented Brooklyn girls, two hipster NYC club producers life-affirming enough to opt for freestyle jump-rope chants over electroclash bondage gear, a skit revolving around one svengali's hatred of reggae leading into a dancehall guest-spot by Mr. Vegas, what else do you need? From M.I.A. to "Chicken Noodle Soup" to Kid Sister, the '00s weren't a bad decade when it came to channelling the spirit of "Iko Iko." But nobody gave it more bounce than this oddball outfit from the 718, who seemed like a novelty but were more.

1.Various Artists
Bring It On: Music From The Motion Picture, 2000
If you need documented evidence that the decade kicked off with a great girl-group wave, look no further. Irish fiddle-gum flirts B*Witched revive Toni Basil; Left Eye discoveries Blaque get sarcastic then collaborate with an unknown named 50 Cent; fellow post-TLCs 3LW keep things light; bizarre Jersey expats Daphne And Celeste -- whose own album never even came out in the States -- inform you that you ain't got no alibi for being U-G-L-Y. Mere males like the Jungle Brothers and 95 South stay on the sidelines, leading cheers. R&B in the '00s never got giddier, teen-pop never got funkier, and where such good-natured energy disappeared to is a history that has yet to be written. If you don't miss it, you missed the boat. Or, as Liverpool's Atomic Kitten put it, "See ya. I wouldn't wanna be ya."

Ever since the early days of MTV, Flock of Seagulls haircuts, and Spandau Ballet new romanticism, it's been widely accepted that synthesizer pop is a mostly British (or at its weirdest, continental European) phenomenon: "Glitter-disco-synthesizer night school, all that noble savage drum drum drum," the band X ranted in their 1983 anti-Anglo tirade "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts." Americans were just too gritty and guitar-loving for all that silliness, right? Well, not all of them. Lady Gaga is only the latest -- and potentially the biggest -- artist from U.S. shores to re-imagine Anglo/Euro technopop, fashion sense and all. Here's a rundown of electronically inclined Americans who preceded her.

In his eight years recording, John Mayer has walked a stylistic tightrope, splitting his time between presenting himself as a sensitive heartthrob (mainly on his solo studio albums) and a serious bluesman (on the live 2005 John Mayer Trio album Try!, for instance). By now, he seems to have found a comfortable middle ground between sex appeal and chops. But he's hardly the first musicianly beefcake to balance such seemingly competing sides. Here, some hunky virtuosos who've come before.

Britney Spears' latest contribution to pop music's math textbook, "3," is a celebration of bedroom-floor activities involving more than two people, and I don't mean vacuuming! Though that might happen too, actually. But Britney coos naughty stuff about "Not only you and me/ Got 180 degrees/ And I'm caught between" and "Peter Paul and Mary gettin' down." (Where's Puff the Magic Dragon when you need him?) But believe it or not, Ms. Spears is not the first pop star to deal with said multipartner practice, and others have documented entirely different lovemaking activities at least as nontraditional. Herewith, an inventory of sex-obsessed songs that opt for flavors other than vanilla.

It has been said that every movie worth watching since 1939 contains some reference to The Wizard of Oz. But what about music? This week, Wu-Tanger Ghostface Killah releases his new album, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry, the cover artwork of which features a yellow brick road extended across hottie-bedecked poppy fields toward Emerald City. And on October 3, in honor of the movie's 70th anniversary, Netflix is streaming Oz free, in a new high-definition version. Last week, to commemorate the same landmark, Jennifer Hudson, Julianne Hough, and ?Uestlove of the Roots performed songs from the movie in New York. Rock and pop have been in love with the classic for years, but there's never been a better time to count down the highlights of Oz-rock history.

So what's there to celebrate this Labor Day, anyway? That the unemployment rate is still going up, just not quite as fast as it was going up a few months ago? The songs on the playlist below are split between how hard it can be to find work, and how demoralizing jobs can be once you finally find one. Maybe a few will even make you hope unions aren’t dead. But here's hoping they all help you enjoy your day off.

• The Silhouettes, "Get a Job" (1958): Philly gospel singers turned doo-woppers, with the most topical song of rock 'n' roll's first decade. Their girlfriends nag them and claim they're lying, but no gigs can be found in the want ads.

• Tennessee Ernie Ford, "Sixteen Tons" (1955): Country-boogie dirge about digging your way toward hell for the straw boss, only to die owing your soul to the company store.

• John Rich, "Shuttin' Detroit Down" (2009): A great city approaches the breaking point -- bosses collect bonuses, calloused assembly-liners lose pensions. The singer's confused politics come off as sincere for once.

• Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "Takin' Care of Business" (1974): Canuck buffalo rock about racing to catch the 8:15 into the daily grind again and wondering if self-employment is a way out.

• Martha & the Muffins, "Echo Beach" (1980): "My job is very boring, I'm an office clerk." So Martha takes a New Wave holiday, or at least dreams of one.

• Patti Smith, "Piss Factory" (1974): Another dirge (not to mention the artist's first and best single) about monotony and deadening heat and contemptible toothless co-workers telling you to slow down, when speeding up is the only way you know to escape.

• The Roches, "Mr. Sellack" (1979): The politics of groveling to get your crummy job back -- getting down on your hands and knees, literally, to scrub behind the steam table.

• Dolly Parton, "9 to 5" (1980): Karl Marx's favorite No. 1 single of the rock era. "It's a rich man's game, no matter what they call it, and you spend your life putting money in his wallet."

• Utah Phillips, "Joe Hill" (1984): A legendary labor organizer recites the Wobblies' union anthem, but first tells even better stories about his own life of work.

• Johnny Paycheck, "Take This Job and Shove It" (1977): A longhaired country outlaw walks out of the factory after 15 years, paycheck or no.

Woodstock obviously featured a handful of undeniably great bands, plus the occasional world-shaking performance by B-listers (Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home.") But those were exceptions. Maybe if the lineup had more fully captured the scope of rock and pop music in 1969, the result would have been more exciting, and less a tedious snoozefest. So here's a modest proposal for an alternate roster -- with every artist replaced by somebody comparable but cooler.

In 1978, a British New Waver calling himself Elton Motello had a supremely sleazy punk-disco dance club hit called "Jet Boy Jet Girl." Almost immediately, a Belgian New Wave singer calling himself Plastic Bertrand, using both the same studio musicians and same backing music as "Jet Boy Jet Girl," turned the song into a French song called "Ca Plane Pour Moi," one of punk's greatest and silliest novelty hits. Both songs have been covered countless times over the years, sometimes by far more famous bands. The playlist below provides an overview, and tosses in other rock classics about jets and by people named JET and Jett and Jetboy that somehow, in this context, totally fit.
 

Believe it or not, the year hits the six-months-gone mark this week. And while there's no point in claiming these are the absolute best singles of the first half of 2009 (left "Boom Boom Pow" and "Poker Face" off, for instance, figuring you already know what they sound like), they're still 25 really good ones. Lots of rap, lots of country, lots of soul. Not a ton of "rock", though -- maybe because most of the non-rock rocks just fine.

When constructing this flawlessly gorgeous and heart-wrenching compendium of soft rock, I was once again reminded that much of history's mellow gold is in fact a secret depository of mental imbalance (see playlist selections by Helen Reddy and Gilbert O'Sullivan and Lobo for instance) and downright sleaziness (the ones by Mac Davis and Cher and Gordon Lightfoot, for starters.) Or at least that was the case in the singles-bar-and-suburban-wifeswap-and-pagan-teenage-drug-commune '70s; the '80s tunes below are perhaps more inscrutable -- if no more deniable.

Something nostalgia for the '70s and '80s tends to forget is how nostalgic those decades were in turn for the '50s -- from Sha Na Na to American Graffiti to Happy Days, the era of greasers and poodle skirts was more inescapable throughout the era of quaaludes and smiley faces than youngsters today might guess. And one natural byproduct -- especially when Elvis died in 1977 -- was an often covert seeping of rockabilly sounds into hard rock, glam, new wave, country, even funk. The playlist below delves beyond the Cramps and Stray Cats to explore how, and where, the '70s and '80s lit late great balls of rockabilly fire.

"Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas has now been the most popular song in the country for nine weeks and counting with no end in sight, making it the weirdest and most outlandish song to work up that kind of batting streak since ... what? "Hey Ya!" (nine weeks, 2003-2004)? "Macarena" (14 weeks, 1996)?? "Bette Davis Eyes" (nine weeks, 1981)??? Mighty impressive, either way, and what cannot be denied is that it is also the most shamelessly ridiculous and unabashedly catchy confection to hit the radio this year (only competition: "Poker Face"), and it's inescapable for primarily that reason.

So you know what? If you're not among the millions (if not billions) of human beings who've already surrendered to the song, you might as well. Otherwise, you'll certainly regret it 99 years from now (2108!), when you hear it on the intergalactic oldies station wired into the computer chip in your brain and it reminds you how life felt in the summer of 2009 the way no other song possibly could. And if that's not enough of a reason to embrace "Boom Boom Pow," here are 10 more.

We can argue 'til the heifers come home about whether this is a good or bad thing (correct answer: very very very good), but it can not be denied that the soon-to-over '00s have been the butt-rockingest decade in the entire history of country music since the beginning of time. In fact, it could easily be argued that country music rocked a whole lot harder in the '00s than rock did. Below are 25 magnificently loud and heavy reasons why. If you're a purist who gets nervous when country goes places it isn't supposed to, feel free to sit this one out. Otherwise, turn it up!

With not nearly enough exceptions, loud guitar rock has been a notorious dancefloor wallflower for the past 30 years or so: Pretty much ever since disco scared its syncopations stiff. Kind of weird, for a genre originally steeped in the blues and r&b. But one of hard rock's secrets has long been Latin counterrhythms in its closet. The following playlist -- honoring conga-metal from both sides of several different borders -- is all the proof anyone should require.

How appropriate is it that Eminem's new Relapse arrives midway between Mother's Day and Father's Day? Has the world of music ever seen a songwriter, in any genre, so obsessed with the day-to-day details of parenting -- both as a parent himself, and as somebody who was once parented? And Relapse -- featuring back-to-back numbers called "My Mom," about Marshall Mathers' mom, and "Insane," about Marshall Mathers' dad -- demonstrates that he's not yet ready to bury the theme in the back of his already-cluttered closet. In recognition of his preoccupation, then, here is a rundown of Eminem's more memorable koans on the topic -- many of which can serve as helpful advice for moms and dads everywhere!

Music historians have yet to pinpoint the precise moment when "hair metal" got its name (before that, it was "pop metal," "glam metal," "shag metal," "Nerf metal," whatever.) But the genre was pretty clearly in place as a cultural phenomenon by, say, the mid '80s. For several years before, though, metal and album-oriented rock seemed to be moving in markedly pretty and poofy directions; they weren't just for dudes anymore. The playlist below doesn't go past 1984, but it clearly portends pink guitars on the way -- not to mention fallen angels in the backstage area. (Pictured: Starz)

As if your finances weren't scary enough this year, April 15 is here. And no matter how bad things look, you can at least rest assured that millions of frightened folks are in the same sinking boat. Perhaps the songs below will help you through your final filing fears. Regardless: Under penalties of perjury, I declare that I have examined this playlist, and accompanying tracks about taxes, and to the best of my knowledge they are true, correct, and complete.

What could be more appropriate for April Fool's Day than a playlist of extremely serious songs? Ha ha, fooled you! These are actually totally ridiculous ones instead! Including some of the most awesome funnybone-ticklers in the history of recorded sound, and others that are just plain... well, stupid! Because if there's ever been a time when a wee bit of knee-slapping could do you good, this is it.

So even though there's no February 29 this year, this would-be leap-week seemed a perfect occasion to offer a playlist devoted to songs about jumping -- such a great topic that entire genres of music (jump blues, hip-hop, New Orleans bounce) have been devoted to it. Of course, it would be really embarrassing to write a song about jumping where the music itself did not, in fact, jump. You'd never be able to live it down (and up and down again)!

So after 11 years, I'm leaving New York City for Austin next week -- purging my shelves (though not as much as I should: where did all this stuff come from anyway?), begging for empty boxes at neighborhood liquor stores, learning that a roll of brown packing tape only goes so far. We've all been there, and so have the songs on the playlist below. One of rock 'n' roll's (and America's) great themes has always been the idea that where you aren't is better than where you are, that there's a better life somewhere around the corner: Usually to the west -- unless you've been there already, and now that midnight train's taking you back to Georgia.

Finnish folk metal band Turisas.

So here's a question: do you think, if genuine Vikings still existed (assuming they don't, of course), that they would actually choose metal as the music they'd listen to through their helmet earbuds? Ponder that, while you consider these:

Trivium, Shogun (Roadrunner Records): In theory I like the idea of Teeny-'tallica, really I do. But man, for kids trying to act tough, Trivium sure do whine a lot. Not sure whether "Torn Between Scylla and Charybdis" is a Sting reference or not.

Latin freestylers, back-alley punks, boogaloo trailblazers, techno precursors, hard-rock gals, nu-metal boys, squishy electronic animals that leap from lily pad to lily pad: the trapdoors that keep fine artists out of the Hall of Fame (or even its public bathrooms) may not be fair, but they touch all bases. A few are below.

 

 The album below that placed in lots of year-end critics' polls, as far as I can tell, isn't a whole lot better than the one that a major metal magazine just awarded with a perfect goose-egg (as baseball scorers would say.) In fact, I might just prefer the "bad" one! Which just goes to show that in heavy metal, as David St. Hubbins once famously declared, it's still a fine line between stupid and clever.

 

Anybody who thinks "all metal sounds the same" hereby has the homework assignment of listening to all six of the recent albums considered below. Together, they demonstrate that metal can suck lots of different ways, of which these are only a few! And better yet, sometimes metal can even not suck at all!

 

Plenty of these feisty bands below you may not have thought about for a long time, assuming you ever did. They are so feisty, in fact, that if they got in a fight, it's hard to guess who would win. Feel free to place bets, but if I were you, I definitely wouldn't rule out the ladies.

The selection of metal releases below proves, more or less conclusively, that old homely guys rock much harder than young pretty boys. As more the former than the latter myself, I have to admit that I am totally relieved by this news.

Psychotic 4, Lightning (Indica) These glam/sleaze wish-we-were-there-thens from Canada look a bit too much like some troupe o' timid girly-men (like for instance Panic At the Disco), but the roots of their sound are clearly Hanoi Rocks/Faster Pussycat/D Generation instead, which they pull off well enough despite thin vocals standing in their way. The power ballads usually come closer to the target than the rockers, but non-ballad "Breaking Out" still stands out for its gang shouts. "Petal of Metal" -- not really all that metal but so what? -- is fun as well. Also cute how they get a little synthy sometimes.

Been a good while since I've done one of these columns -- but hey, the holidays are over now. And the recession's in full force, too, which means more cracks to fall through! I don't think there was so much Latin freestyle and tragic country music last time, but you can check for yourself if you don't trust me.

 

 

The albums below ask the eternal question -- which is more metal: country music, jazz, or adult contemporary? You'll be surprised by the answer, I'm sure.

 

A new year and heavy metal is still around! 2009... Let's see, that makes the venerable genre 40 years old now, at least, right? When will it give up?

Necrodemon, Ice Fields Of Hyperion (Open Grave) Super catchy guitars! And I love the abominable snowman concept so much that I don't mind the wrestler grunting. I'm especially fond of "The Deep Freeze"'s bigfoot-printed "Children of the Grave" groove and "Funeral In The Snow"'s Chopin-dirge appropriation. Also numerous nifty time changes in numbers like "Benumbed Suffering." These days it's very rare to come across blackdeaththrashwhatevertheheckmetal that's so throbberifically chunky, and so melodic. Especially from Indiana! Yukon Cornelius wasn't kidding when he said bumbles bounce!

   

George Jones once called 1970 "a good year for the roses," and though the fellow who made my very favorite album this year accurately suggested that his records be alphabetically filed "somewhere between Jennings and Jones," he apparently thought 2008 was a good year for mowin' down his ex-wife's roses with a tractor instead. Another hint is that, though legend has it he created his highly introspective current album in quiet seclusion after a life-changing breakup while letting his beard grow, he is amazingly not Bon Iver! Also, he and the fellow who made my second-favorite album of the year both have the same last name! Which last name somehow appears nowhere among my 51st-to-100th or 101st-to-150th favorite albums of 2008! Guess I've just got a thing for Johnsons. Not to mention grumpy old white guys who mess up their lives a lot. Psychoanalyze that how you will. And Happy New Year!

 

So, all I want to say is the same thing I've said every year this decade: If you think hardly any good albums came out this year, you weren't looking very hard. Period. Otherwise, the main thing I realized while compiling the list below is what a really good year 2008 was for rock from Australia (which is where numbers 51 and 52 come from, plus at least four others -- five if New Zealand counts.) Otherwise otherwise, see numbers 101 to 150. And for numbers 1 to 50, wait a couple days. Those'll be even better, I promise!

     

Ground rules: (1) Only albums I actually listened to were eligible. Which means I didn't include albums that I didn't hear. Pretty obvious, right? But worth noting, even if nobody making lists like this ever does, given the thousands upon thousands of albums I didn't hear (the overwhelming majority of which I have no interest in, and wouldn't have liked even if I did hear them, but what the heck.) (2) I included reissues, but not ones that merely repackaged old albums that've always existed. (3) I also included a few albums that came out in late 2007, but nobody noticed until 2008. That said, on with the show!

 

The Road Hammers are four guys from Alberta and Ontario -- led by Jason McCoy, a great white north star in his own right -- who pretty much only sing about driving trucks and all that entails, often with a chugging road rhythm underneath and compact guitar solos and sundry ignition noises on top.

So, if you've been paying attention, I've spent lots of time in the past two months listening to singles from other people's and publications' Best Singles of 2008 lists, in order to determine whether such accolades were deserved. This time out, I'm tackling lists published in Slate by Jody Rosen (a Top 25) and Robert Christgau (a Top 10) as part of an often intriguing and just as often infuriating now-apparently-annual three-way discussion on the year in music (also featuring Ann Powers, whose list has yet to be included). I've got thoughts about what they wrote, too. But I'll procrastinate on those.

My tastes and Pitchfork's generally tend to reside on opposite polar extremes (never did forgive that stupid 0.8 those humorless twits gave Northern State's debut six years ago, or the equally dumb 4.0 they gave Electric Six's first album, but the bigger problem is that a good lifetime has passed since their beloved indie college rock was anywhere near the most happening musical milieu out there.) Still thought it'd be fair to find out whether a few tracks on the site's 100 Best Tracks of 2008 list don't actually stink, though. (Same basic task I attempted here, and here, and so on.) Cross your fingers!

More possible stinky-stocking-stuffers for headbangers on your holiday list (though a couple of these, admittedly, might not necessarily be preferable to a lump of a coal):

 

The Swear are Atlanta young people (three boys, one girl) who have every intention of making it big. Their press bio looks like a frigging resumé – long boring lists of TV shows they’ve landed their songs on ( Rescue Me, Roswell, Smallville); movies they’ve ditto (Surreal, Cross Country, By Chance); endorsements (Gretsch, Gibson, Marshall); contest successes (“Rolling Stone/Ray-Ban ‘Never Hide Your Music’ finalist”); web stuff (“#1 track In All Genres and a Featured Artist on NumberOneMusic.com”); radio stuff (“Arizona Jeans Radio Free Arizona featured artist”); “Noteworthy Performances and Conferences” (who the heck cares); you name it. Ambitious little strivers trying to impress the gatekeepers of a dying biz – that’s pretty much what rock music has come to these days, right? Maybe it’s the economy’s fault; it’s not like bohemian messing-around is all that viable an option anymore, at least not for provincial tykes not born with silver trust funds in their mouths.  Still -- do bands like this actually have fun, or is it just a job? The Swear’s music is not especially joyful, to my ears. Odd thing is, I kind of like it anyway.

Once upon a time -- like, two decades ago -- jolly old England's New Musical Express used to come up with incredibly diverse, educational and intriguing best-of-the-year lists as a matter of course. But for years now, the venerable paper has tried to pass off the silly lie that the best music comes from pasty and undernourished white lads who can neither sing nor rock. Though their best-of-'08 lists seem to fall firmly in the latter tradition, that's not going to stop me from bravely trolling through a few mysterious titles from this year's Top 50 Singles to see if any might be worthy, just as I've previously done with several Best-Singles-of-08 lists from other places. To wit:

Pundits who anticipate that a Democratic administration in Washington will somehow necessitate an upheaval in commercial country music are showing their hand, if not their ignorance, about all sorts of things. Genres have never particularly changed face that way in the past, as far as I can tell, and country was never anywhere near as intrinsically symbiotic with the Bushies as liberals who don't listen to it much seem to think. For every John Rich or Hank Jr., there’s a Tim McGraw (who’s reportedly said in the past that he’d like to run for Congress sometime as a Democrat) or Dixie Chicks. And it’s been several years since Nashville even seemed particularly triumphalist about, say, Iraq. These days, when manly bohunks like Toby Keith or Trace Adkins sing about the war – as they both do, at least obliquely, on their new albums – there’s nothing rah-rah about it; the message is no more concretely right-wing than, say, Army Wives. And though it’s ridiculous I even have to point this out, that’s hardly the main thing they do. By now, both Toby and Trace are at least as interested in presenting themselves as grown-up love men.

Time to sample more of the singles I've never sampled before from Blender magazine's "Top 144 Songs of 2008" list! Just like I did with other ones last week! Will I like them or not?

At least one band discussed here -- maybe even a couple -- once took a longer hiatus between albums than Guns N' Roses ever have. And if that means I can wait a few more years before having an opinion about Chinese Democracy, that's just fine with me.

The suntanned late ‘70s man-of-leisure music that hepsters have been calling “yacht-rock” since a well-hyped online series of that name debuted three years ago was actually some studio-musician-masterminded mash-up of soft-rock, pop country, lightly funky pre-disco soul, and I’m-okay-you’re-okay singer-songwriter folk – as fleeting on the charts as a one-night stand, and frequently just as bittersweet in retrospect. Pure pleasure music, really. What I’ve been wondering, though, is what the ‘00s equivalent might be. Rob Thomas’ “Smooth” with Santana, though seemingly in the neighborhood, just doesn’t go down nice or easy enough; strangely, it sounds a little too thuggish. Maroon 5 and Jack Johnson probably come close on paper, too, but as far as I can tell, they’re not actually any good. As with lots of kinds of pre-‘00s commercial rock, where you really might need to go to find viable remnants is Nashville. Yacht-rockingest artist of the decade may well be Phil Vassar (who I blogged about here); dude’s got about as much to do with “real” country music as I do, and he’s even had hits about hot tubs, for Crissakes. A couple other yacht-country albums I’d like to nominate from 2008 are James Otto’s Sunset Man and Billy Currington’s Little Bit of Everything.

        
Joy of Cooking – two rootsy singing-and-songwriting feminist musicians from Berkeley, California, plus a few male fellow travelers providing rhythmic accompaniment, all of whom apparently took their band name from Irma Rombauer’s eternal Depression-era cookbook classic – might have the distinction of being the most critically acclaimed ‘70s rock band that almost no rock critic who graduated high school in the past 35 years has an opinion about. Their self-titled Capitol debut album finished in sixth place in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics poll in 1971; Robert Christgau called it “exciting and amazingly durable” and gave it an “A” grade, praising its rolling piano-and-percussion grooves and lyrics about wives victimized at both ends of the economic spectrum. 

     

The new January 2009 issue of Blender includes, among many other things, a list of "the top 144 songs of 2008," as presumably selected by the editors. (Though I write for the magazine some, my own input was not requested.) Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the list at blender.com, so maybe you'll just have to turn to page 66 at your neighborhood newsstand. Regardless, I still wanted to check the trustworthiness of some of their song choices that I'd somehow survived almost 11 months of the year without hearing (not unlike what I did with other '08 best-singles lists here, etc.). So, that's what I'm gonna do.

All I'm gonna say is that the band from Germany pictured above definitely has a sexier singer than the band from Rhode Island. Though both bands do have bald guys. And who said metal was a fashion show, anyway? Not anybody in Iron Maiden, you can be darn sure of that!

More 2008 singles that other people of wealth and taste think are great, and maybe I'll agree or maybe or I won't  (see also these two previous posts). This time, from the running best-of-the-year list on New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones' blog. Here goes:

I’m a pretty open-minded guy when it comes to music – sometimes probably too open-minded. But there’s a certain alt-rock sensibility that I feel like I’m largely immune to. I’m not sure what you’d call it; “middle alternative” (as in “middle of the road”) might work. Basically, I’m talking music that’s removed enough from pop pleasure or rock propulsion or metal vulgarity to seem extremely avant-garde to casual fans who’ve never delved deeper than commercial radio (a demographic that continues to shrink), but not so weird that you’d expect people who actually listen to music for a living to be all that impressed by it – confounding thing is, they regularly are anyway. It’s not too hooky, but not too crazy, in other words, and preferably vague and unformed and tentatively artsy enough that professional tastemakers can project any zeitgeist they pull out of their hat at it. At the moment, the two mildly interesting but widely acclaimed bands that seem to be benefiting most from this tendency – both from hipster central in Brooklyn, both touting their second-or-third-or-fourth album depending which demos and EPs you count, and both allegedly now incorporating all sorts of dance-music influences that somehow manage not to translate as tangible rhythm – are Gang Gang Dance and TV on the Radio.

Not all four of the fine bands below come from Europe, but the one that doesn't still comes from a place where people talk French a lot -- and you can tell. I'm not gonna say metal is only any fun these days outside the United States. But it sure does seem that way sometimes.

The noisiest artists below are the ones that may well make for the best background music, at least if you've been taking lots of antihistamines due to flu season. The most comical artists below make Latin music, not that Latin radio will ever be brave enough to admit it. Plus: Two one-hit-wonder rock bands who had very long careers! What'll they think of next?

So maybe this is what Blue Öyster Cult meant by the red and the black. Mississippi Mudsharks’ Train Rolls On and Black Diamond Heavies' A Touch of Someone Else’s Class are both beat-your-face-in albums of the belligerent he-man blues-rock persuasion, and they also both sort of look alike! Red lettering on a black background -- especially on the album back covers, each of which is a top-to-bottom list of 11 songs. The Mudsharks’ front has a locomotive and the Heavies’ a drum set, but hey, let’s not quibble, folks.

Mississippi Mudsharks are three hefty dudes from, well, San Diego, actually; their frontman Scottie Blinn calls himself “Mad Dog.” Guests help out on pedal steel (two songs) and “chain” (one). Their album-opening title track ain’t quite the “Train Kept a Rollin’” it wishes it was, and neither is the bleh ballad called “Slow Rollin’” they close with. But in between, they’ve got shuffles evolving into badass boogie (“30 Weight Shuffle”), bike-leather rockabilly (“Crimson Sky” and “Devil’s Road”), and some gratifying Black Oak Arkansas and ZZ Top tendencies, the latter most notably in “Throw It in the Hole.” Best song titles: “Lakeside Redneck Shindig,” “Zombie Whip,” “Can’t Put Down the Drink.”

Oh well, guess we don't get a metalhead for a Vice President after all. But hey, you can only break so many barriers at once, right?  And it's not like Caribou Barbie named her kid after Voivod. So stop whining (unless you're dancing in the streets like me), and check these:

One encouraging musical development in this often depressing decade, which I wouldn’t have much expected 10 or 15 years ago, is that it’s no longer so easy to pinpoint where exactly “pop” lets off and “rock” begins. Partly, this is probably just a byproduct of Radio Disney-boosted pop stars from Avril Lavigne to Kelly Clarkson to Miley Cyrus to Jonas Brothers incorporating guitar-rock elements, but outside of the U.S., distinctions seem even more murky. In fact, the two finest examples of the principle I’ve come across lately – new albums by the Veronicas, from Australia, and Dragonette, from Canada by way of the U.K. – both finally got their U.S. release this fall, a year after they’d appeared overseas. Which might just mean the industry here is still confused by them.

What does it mean that, of the five ear-bleeding albums accounted for below, the two I get long-winded about are both by bands of manly men from Tampa, Florida -- neither playing especially sun-shiney music? Yes, it's a major swing state. No, I won't get superstitious.

Time for more 2008 singles that it's my professional responsibility to have an opinion about, seeing how Frank Kogan listed them among his 42 favorites of the year so far -- a list I'd started to pick through in a previous post, though "We Break the Dawn" by Michelle Williams and "Energy" by Keri Hilson have grown on me since then. In this far less cynical round, I actually already like a bunch of the tracks I wrote about! Here they are:

It’s been well-documented, most notably in a couple books I wrote a few years back, that perennial Hagerstown, Maryland Nerf-metal also-rans Kix were my favorite (which is a polite way of saying “the best”) rock band of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I believed that then, I believe it now, and I’m still waiting for somebody to prove me wrong. (Explanation? Let’s just say crossing AC/DC with the Cars and shouting dirty jokes about explosions on top was an awesome idea. Plus, their tunes rocked.) Anyway, Steve Whiteman, who used to sing like the most snot-nosed clown in your 8th grade class for Kix, has for the past several years been fronting a somewhat less visible act called Funny Money. (Not that Kix were super visible in the first place, but they did put out six albums on Atlantic Records rather than Fizz Donkey, after all.) Funny Money’s third, best, and most recent album, it turns out, is available on Rhapsody. So you wouldn’t expect me to ignore it, would you?

Submitted for your approval: three slow bands, two fast bands and one band that can't make up its damn mind. At least two albums below are better than the one that the notoriously unreliable site metacritic.com ranks among the best-reviewed albums of 2008. And at least two have song titles that pay tribute to soul music, even if they don't necessarily get their groove on.

All of the artists in this post -- late '60s acid-boogie outfits, biz-boosted '80s cheeseballs, early '00s garage-rock dresser-uppers -- have names that start with "Ch." Strangely, so do I. Savor the moment now, for it may never happen again.

Maybe it just means I’m turning into an old grump, but 2008 will go down in history as the first year in memory that I actually wound up liking two albums by bands of white people that hit Billboard’s blues chart. First there was Too Slim and the Tail Draggers, from Seattle. Then there was The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, from Indiana. Both are trios, both spend a lot of time on the road, both play guitar better than they sing, both record for small labels, both I never heard of before this year, and both like to eat.

You know what would be really horrible? If all the happy metal bands started touring with all the sad metal bands and cheering them up, so they weren't sad anymore. Fortunately, a number of the albums analyzed below suggest that, so far, that has yet to happen.

Last week, my friend Frank Kogan, whose pop-music tastes I have often seen eye-to-eye with, posted a list of his 42 favorite 2008 singles so far on his livejournal blog. He included many songs I was entirely oblivious to -- several of them apparently actual hits. So, I decided to do some investigating. Here are a few results, with more likely to come:

A number of the artists unearthed below remind me that, long before I lived here, New York City was apparently a really exciting place to hear music. And some of the other artists unearthed below remind me that other places could be pretty cool too sometimes.

Lately I’ve noticed a certain legendary kind of semi-solitary chamber-pop studio auteur who indie-rock fans wind up adopting as their own in historical retrospect, which probably says more about indie nerds’ own solipsistic and anal-compulsive proclivities than about said aging geniuses – I’m talking about your Brian Wilsons, your Paul McCartneys, your Todd Rundgrens; heck, toss in 10cc and Steely Dan, too; they’re more than one person each, but they definitely fit the mold. So does Lindsey Buckingham, at least starting with Tusk, which to my ears (beyond its earth-mover of a title track) has always clearly been when Fleetwood Mac started getting boring, though I doubt Guided By Voices or Of Montreal fans would agree. Anyway, Lindsey has a new album out, and it’s okay. But as new albums by guitar-playing pop-rockers who’ve been in the spotlight for three-and-a-half decades go, Rick Springfield’s is a whole lot better, and I can't imagine many indie types care.

Metal in 2008 is a lot of different things to different people. Personally, I'll take the druids-in-the-woods thing over the dorks-playing-Guitar Hero thing. But feel free to differ, of course!

Maybe it’s about time people stopped underestimating Kid Rock. Just a year ago, you might have been forgiven for thinking he was a has-been – and if so, it wouldn’t have been the first time the charts later proved you wrong. I mean, how many Kid Rock albums has this happened with? Months after it seemed a lost cause, last fall’s Rock N Roll Jesus wound up in resurrection mode this summer, just like his long-tailed 1998 breakthrough and career album Devil Without a Cause, and 2001’s “Picture”-spurred Cocky before it. Buoyed first by a late spring tour with Reverend Run, Peter Wolf and whatever street survivors own the Lynyrd Skynyrd logo these days, then by a late-breaking single that crossed from country -- Kid’s fallback format -- to pop and rock radio, Jesus wound up re-lodging itself in the top 10 around Independence Day. The seasonal bent of “All Summer Long” -- an appropriately lazy, unabashedly manipulative and eventually inescapable late-'70s-Seger-style reminiscence of pre-Internet-era teenaged deflowering and marijuana consumption in northern Michigan that makes no attempt to disguise its “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Werewolves of London” steals – proved such perfect timing that two knock-off cover versions wound up charting to fill the digital-sales gap. And this week, Kid’s own Atlantic-era catalog finally makes its digital debut – exclusively on Rhapsody.

News flash: metal bands are obsessed with death! And destruction! Or at least they often have names that pretend that they are! See below if you think I'm wrong!

These days, I almost always just toss the sports section in the recycling without reading it, even on days when Bengie Molina hits a home run without scoring or former pitcher Sen. Jim Bunning (R –KY) calls Henry Paulson's bailout plan un-American. But once upon a time, baseball was my life. In fact, you could even say that the books that turned me into a rock critic in the first place were Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and Bendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris’s The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubblegum Book – I just had to take a little detour as a suburban weekly sportswriter to get here, is all. So I can still appreciate a good baseball song (ever hear Alabama’s minor-league homage “The Cheap Seats”?), and as the World Series approaches (seeing how it’s October and all), I feel I should mention that 2008 was a pretty good season for them. There was “I’m Watchin’ the Game” by the Boxmasters (which I discussed here) and “Little League” by Home Blitz (here) and Gashouse Gangsta rap “Caroline” by Old Crow Medicine Show (here), for starters. And it’s about time I also plugged The Baseball Project, an ad-hoc adult-alt-rock foursome who this year put out a whole album of such hymns.

Even in the grits-and-gravy world of chitlin circuit Southern soul, the Legendary Moody Scott may not genuinely qualify as a bona fide legend. And likewise, I don’t doubt that there are more glamorous singers out there somewhere than the Glamorous Bertha Payne. But that they bill themselves thus only makes their homemade records more endearing.

The elephant in the heavy metal room, obviously, is that this band released a new album this month. For the record, it has a couple good guitar solos on it, and not a whole lot else. (Best summation I've read, from somebody posting here: "commendable, like a deadbeat dad finally paying half his child support.") So maybe check out these discs instead?

Two house music acts, two '70s sludge-metal bands, three captains, some people who wish they were the Spice Girls and Springsteen, and more. When you're asking for musical artists whose 15 minutes of fame ran out a long time ago, isn't that enough?

The genre known as "Young Folks Trying to Imitate Old Soul Music" (or "neo soul" or "retro nuevo" or "old school" or what have you) has by now been around almost as long as old-soul music was around in the first place. And as with alt-country pretending to be Merle Haggard, I can probably count on one hand the times its shtick has actually worked -- less than that if R. Kelly's "When a Woman's Fed Up" doesn't qualify. If D'Angelo is Marvin Gaye, Uncle Kracker is Dobie Gray, feel me? And don't even get me started on Amy Winehouse. But in the interest of fairness, I decided to spend some time with the new Kenny Lattimore and Raphael Saadiq albums anyway. My conclusion: they're pretty darn corny, but far from awful. Middle-aged white guy that I am, I'll take them over most of the melismatic mush and self-parodying sex schlock that fills the R&B chart these days (though not because they have "real songs played on real instruments," honest). And Ryan Shaw's album last year was even better.

Punk rock counts as metal by now, right? At least the old kind? Well, if not, it should. And anyway, only one of the four ferocious albums ketched up with below is punk per se, though some people are sure to disagree (some people always do). I guarantee that the rest are metal for sure.

In an age ruled by Miley Cyrus and Jonas Brothers, it's easy to forget that so much tween-pop thrives, as it always has in the Radio Disney era, well below the radar. A lot never even crosses over into Top 40 mass culture: Just ask Hope Partlow or Skye Sweetnam or Brie Larson or Jordan Pruitt or Meg & Dia or Sara Paxton or Sofia Loell or Rose Falcon (all of whom have released very-good-to-great music this decade) if you doubt me. So listening to the new soundtracks to the Nickelodeon TV series iCarly and the Warner Premiere direct-to-DVD release Another Cinderella Story, I'm tempted to tell you to remember the names Miranda Cosgrove and Selena Gomez. Then again, maybe you'll never hear them again.

For some reason, I thought 2008 might be the year that country music helped articulate the Democrats’ Southern strategy. Guess I was wrong – for one thing, the Dems turned out not to have a Southern strategy. (Thanks, John Edwards!) Then John Rich, who not too long ago was explicitly circumventing the two-party system in “Love Train,” turned out to be music’s most sycophantic mouthpiece for certain corrupt and dangerous serial liars. Toby Keith’s embrace of Obama was admittedly unexpected good news, and it was stirring to hear Brooks & Dunn’s great “Only in America” after Obama’s convention speech (even if the duo’s not necessarily on his side). But none of this has really translated as new songs; my favorite politics moment of the country year is still Alan Jackson fondly remembering “Georgia boy just like me” Jimmy Carter in “1976.” Which doesn’t quite make up for "If Jesus Walked the World Today,” where Alan asserts that a modern-day Son of God would be a Chevy-driving hillbilly, and "preach in some little country church, outside the city." Wait, let me guess – he wouldn’t be a community organizer either, right? What bigoted bull. But at least it gives me a peg with which to deal with Jackson’s six-months-old Good Time album. (Neat how I did that, huh?)

The four albums below -- released in August, August, September and August, respectively -- suggest that the past month has actually been a fairly intriguing one for loud rock bands associated with the second letter of the alphabet. A mere optical illusion? You decide.

This latest attempt at memory jogging and grave digging concentrates more than usual on mad scientists and entomologists, and the bugged-out music they make. Enjoy!

Never having raved much, I hardly mourned when the hype that the U.S.biz labeled electronica fizzled away a few years back. But there was a time, oddly enough, that I was listening to scads of the stuff. And especially in the wake of the Prodigy’s 1997 chart success, the idea of rocking synth music seemed real smart: entities like Lo-Fidelity All-Stars and Hardknox and Uberzone and even (in his pre-Elvis-remix guise) Junkie XL put out techno albums I could totally sink my teeth into. Since then, I don’t doubt my crankiness has deafened me to plenty of worthy beeps and blips; I’ll gladly defer to specialists like Philip Sherburne on such issues. But from my particular vantage point, it sure seemed like techno snobs decided all that so-called “big beat” was too cheesy for its own good (apparently because it had actual hooks, for shame). So, before you knew it, it was gone. And unless I’ve been looking in all the wrong places, it still is – though at least albums I heard this summer from Londoners Dub Pistols and the Chap gave me a little hope.

I have a confession to make. As may or may not be common knowledge, I wrote a book (ostensibly) about heavy metal once. But I have been shamefully neglectful, so far, in keeping up with recent metallic releases on this blog. Part of the problem is just that I'm constantly bombarded with the damn things and they keep piling up and all sound the same, or at least seem to at first. Another part of the problem is that maybe I haven't been depressed enough this year to listen to much metal. But enough excuses! It's time to rectify the situation! Hence, this new concept known as "Heavy Metal Ketchup." This entry is just the beginning (unless you count this other one I did a few months ago, but never mind) ...

by Chuck Eddy

Hoboken, New Jersey - The early ‘80s. I was not there. I was in Michigan, then Missouri, then West Germany instead. But I was subscribing to New York Rocker at the time, which means I saw the names of local new wave art-poppers the Bongos and Individuals in print a lot. And strangely, nothing I read gave me much indication how much I’d like them, over a quarter-century later. By some weird coincidence, the best-regarded material by both bands has only recently become available on CD. For that, we are quite fortunate.

by Chuck Eddy

Nine more acts you've managed to successfully erase from your memory banks until now: four from the post-disco dancefloor, then four from the C&W chicken coop, then some big British pop stars that Americans never heard of. Most common last name: Brown.

by Chuck Eddy

Has it really been more than two decades since the sunniest and most fragile amateur indie-pop melodies ever first swept up on American shores from the distant isle of New Zealand -- soon changing the world forever, or well-documented portions of it anyway, if you count back when Pavement originally came out and were being hyped as “America’s first Flying Nun Records-style band”? Yeah, it has. It’s been so long, in fact, that I don’t even know if that kind of music exists down there anymore. Except for Pumice, who totally keeps Flying Nun’s tipsy and off-kilter post-Velvet-Underground sheep-farmer shortwave-static kiwi-folk prettiness alive. And who I shall hereby pay tribute to.

by Chuck Eddy

Southern rock, as properly defined in pre-3 Doors Down days, still exists on the country charts (Montgomery Gentry, Kid Rock) and occasionally even rock charts (Kid Rock again), and sometimes, people now even vastly overrate it (Drive-by Truckers, My Morning Jacket, Mudcrutch). But where it mostly survives is where it always has - local roadhouses, where working men drink too much, and perhaps throw a punch or whiskey bottle or two when the mood suits them. Listening to Lucas McCain’s New Horizon and Hank Davison Band’s Hard Way, one suspects the artists in question to be familiar with such habitats.

by Chuck Eddy

I’m not the first person to point out that Jonas Brothers and New Kids on the Block have stuff in common. I was going to be the first, but then Dave DiMartino went and revealed on his Yahoo blog last week that both ensembles are “male, human, English-speaking, preferred largely by a young female audience, fantastic entertainers, and equally enjoyable in their upbeat video romps! Similarly, were they both to be mysteriously teleported into deep space, they would -- as air-breathers -- instantly suffocate!” He left out something, though - namely, that both groups have halfway decent melodic rock ballads called “Tonight”! And that therefore, even as we speak, moms and daughters across the nation are fighting over which one is better!

by Chuck Eddy

"Manny Farber, a painter whose spiky, impassioned film criticism waged war against sacred cows like Orson Welles and elevated American genre-movie directors like Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller to the Hollywood pantheon, died on Monday at his home in Leucadia, Calif. He was 91...In a famous essay for Film Culture magazine in 1962, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” he lambasted the portentous, meaning-laden cinema of Welles and his progeny and praised the freewheeling, instinctive work of underrated directors of crime, western and horror films." -- William Grimes, New York Times, August 20, 2008.

by Chuck Eddy

Soul and blues always come in and out of country music fashion (just ask Jimmie Rodgers and Charlie Rich or Barbara Mandrell or K.T. Oslin), and over the past few years - from Brooks & Dunn to LeAnn Rimes, Jon Nicholson to Chely Wright, Kentucky Headhunters to Rissi Palmer -- they’ve been back on the upswing. “American Radio,” the not especially soulful current hit by Nashville softies Carolina Rain, even cites “Purple Rain” and Barry White as possible inspirations. But new releases by onetime teen-country hopeful Rebecca Lynn Howard and new sister trio Carter’s Chord sound like they mean it.

by Chuck Eddy

In this very special "Bands Starting With 'Br'" edition of "Fallen Through the Cracks," new wave rules! As do hippie folksters, ethnomusicological jazzsters, lesbian disco ladies, and guys from Maryland who rap and rock like The Wire never happened.

by Chuck Eddy

Earlier this year here, I included David Banner on my definitive list of 50 musical artists who’d gotten worse with every subsequent album they made, for their entire careers. The post clearly had some oversights on it - how I neglected to include the Replacements is beyond me, and it’s a total crime that the Flaming Lips were left off the “25 bands who peaked with their debut EP” roster. And now I have to eat my words about Banner, too, seeing how I'm pretty sure his new The Greatest Story Ever Told is a whole lot better than 2005’s Certified.

by Chuck Eddy

Isaac Hayes never could say goodbye. And if few of us anticipated that the Black Moses would finally cross over to the other side -- on Sunday, as has been widely reported, his wife discovered his body next to a still-running treadmill in their suburban Memphis home, and he was pronounced dead an hour later -- maybe it's because he always gave the impression that he could last forever. In fact, that was the main point of some of his best music.