
Next week kicks off my annual year-end countdowns. Top 20 Albums and Top 50 Singles, here we come! But first, I've got a week-long countdown to my countdown, starting with this requested feature on Christmas music! While Christmas is definitely one of my most favorite times of the year, when it comes to music I'm more of a Halloween songs kind of guy. Still, there are quite a few of lesser known tracks that I love to listen to around the holidays. Here, in no particular order, are a few of them: [...]
Normally I don't like covers, especially when they're pretty darn similar to the original. However, I do tend to like covers when an artist takes a song in a completely different direction. Like this cover of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Outta My Head," by UK duo Patrick and Eugene. Though this cover is from their old album, which I haven't heard in its entirety, in listening to their album

Trey Songz' ode to sexy Twitpics "LOL :)" is the latest in a long line of songs to marvel over modern technology as it talks about love and romance; with the emoticon-addled track, Songz (and assistants Soulja Boy and Gucci Mane) joins a long line of Internet-referencing pop superstars that includes Prince, Britney Spears, Todd Rundgren, and Nick Carter's little brother. There are so many of these songs, in fact, that it would be a crime to not count at least a few of them down-after all, the only thing denizens of the Internet like more than lists [...]

It's Canada Day! As people celebrate our neighbors to the north with ice-cold Molsons and even chillier responses to having bankrupted NHL teams relocate there , I thought I'd look back on the brief period 10 year ago when my cable system received the Canadian music-video channel MuchMusic , which later turned into MuchMusic USA, which then became Fuse. But I remember those early, heady days of non-Viacom-sponsored music television quite fondly, because the Toronto-based MuchMusic had something going for it that boring old American channels didn't: CanCon regulations , which stipulated that a certain amount of [...]

Alt bilinçten beynimize zerk eden melodileri zaman zaman berbat bir kafede, bakkaldan ekmek alırken veya kolpa radyo yayınlarında kulaklarımıza ulaştığında; heyecanla adını hatırlamaya çalıştığımız, lakin hayat akıp geçerkene kendilerinden bi haber yaşamaya devam ettiğimiz saman alevi gibi yanıp sönen "one hit wonders" - Türkçe meali tek şarkılık mucize olsa gerek- her zaman ilgimizi çekmiş bir mevzuattır. Bir parçayla meşhur olup sonradan bir daha göremediğimiz şahsiyetlerin hayatları, birden yıldız olup etraftan kaybolmaları ve bir bakıma müzikal bakımdan üretimsizlikleri ve unutulmuşlukları ilgimi çekiyor ve üşenmeden hepsini hatırlamayı kendime görev biliyorum. Cefakâr bir müzik dinleyicisi olarak çoğunluğu gençlik yıllarımın özeti olan [...]
I thought, "oh, surely there are not many songs I have that fit this theme, because I usually don't care for songs that say a specific person's name a whole bunch!" but man, I was SO WRONG. I had to stop looking at itunes after about two minutes because I had already uploaded like 50000 songs. Uh. So here's what got up before I manually stopped FTP because it was getting truly out of hand. (Most of these are culled from my "5 stars" list, for what that's worth.) Ready? I'm about to BLOW [...]