// TAG

Tag: Music

• Look What You Made Me Do - Taylor Swift — On Taylor Swift, literary resurrection, and the craft of becoming harder to erase.
• Titanium - Sia — On the songs that lend us stronger material for three minutes at a time.
• Killing in the Name Of - Rage Against the Machine — On hearing refusal stripped to its load-bearing words, and recognizing the ProbleMattic presence that asks who built the rule before mistaking it for gravity.
• Paperback Writer - The Beatles — On hearing momentum in Paperback Writer, swapping genres into the title, and becoming a writer by saying the word before the evidence arrived.
• Creep - Radiohead — On the strange mercy of a song that names the feeling of being fully present and still feeling like an accidental guest in your own life.
• My Way - Frank Sinatra — On a song that looks backward instead of forward, and the quieter kind of hype that comes from recognizing the person who took the road.
• Flagpole Sitta - Harvey Danger — On Harvey Danger's overlit opening rush, the boredom line as parenting philosophy, and the day a family phrase came back from the next generation.
• Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na) - My Chemical Romance — Somewhere in that beautiful collision, My Chemical Romance puts jazz hands and Batman in the same breath.
• Welcome to the Black Parade - My Chemical Romance — The Black Parade, and the refusal to sand ourselves down into something easier to explain.
• Can't Stop - Red Hot Chili Peppers — That is the ballpark experience in one diagnosis.
• White Stripes - 7 Nation Army — Writing can interrupt that. Not solve it, because that would be too neat and clean. Just interrupt it.
• Careless Whisper - George Michael — Pain is not proof that truth was the wrong choice. It is often proof that the truth finally reached the part of you that had been protected from it.
• Coming in Hot - Andy Mineo — Good writing should not feel like someone assembled it from spare parts in a clean office. It should have some heat on it.
• Lane Boy - Twenty One Pilots — The song is not arguing for sloppiness. It is arguing for evidence of life.
• Push - Matchbox Twenty — It does not present insecurity as delicate or poetic. It presents it as mechanical failure.
• Closer to Fine - Indigo Girls — The brutal thing about fear is that it can feel protective while it is quietly shrinking the room.
• Separate Artist from Song — A defense of the song's life beyond the artist, and the listener's right to their own memories.
• In Defense Of A Cappella — A defense of music without armor: harmony, earnestness, mouth drums, and the oldest instrument we have.
• In Defense Of One-Hit Wonders — A defense of the flare in the sky, the one perfect cake, and the song that fed the village.
• In Defense Of Weird Al Yankovic — A defense of parody as composition, of silliness as discipline, and of the craftsman who turned the lowest-status form in the room into a durable institution.
• In Defense Of Nickelback — A defense of mainstream rock's designated punchline, and of the difference between criticism and embarrassment enforcement.
• In Defense Of The Bee Gees — A defense of disco as release and craft, and of the Bee Gees as architects of an era’s emotional texture.
• In Defense Of The Monkees — A defense of a TV-built pop act that started as product engineering and became something emotionally real.