Joe Jackson - "Steppin' Out"

This is exactly what my New Year's Eve was like.

John McClane's Most Famous Line

This week, MEL is featuring stories about cowboys: the archetype, the myth, the symbol of a certain kind of rugged masculinity. My contribution was to write about how Die Hard made John McClane into a modern cowboy. (You know his catchphrase.) My piece is here.

Michael Jackson - "Just Good Friends"

So, I had reason to revisit Bad this week. This is such a fascinatingly half-great album, pointing to the dark, twisted, tortured music that Michael Jackson would make the rest of his career. "Bad" is still embarrassingly bad. "The Way You Make Me Feel" still smokes. And then there's "Just Good Friends," a duet with Stevie Wonder that was never a single. Of the non-hits, it's easily the strongest. (Dear god, have you listened to "Liberian Girl" or "Speed Demon" lately?) Definitely perked me up during some hellacious traffic. I'm sorry that Quincy Jones doesn't like it.

Squeeze - "Black Coffee in Bed"

If you're gonna write a sad song, it seems essential that somewhere in it you include the line "Now she's gone." Squeeze's "Black Coffee in Bed" does that very well.

Kate Bush - "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)"

Recently, as part of KEXP's fall pledge drive, the independent Seattle station asked its listeners to vote for their 10 favorite albums of all time. (My ballot is here.) I was very curious to see how things would shake out, mostly because it seemed a very obvious indicator of who, exactly, listens to KEXP -- or, at least, who goes to the trouble of voting in polls.

This is all very unscientific, of course, but among the things that surprised me about the results was the fact that the highest-ranked album from a female artist was ... Kate Bush's Hounds of Love at No. 50. (I'm not counting the Pixies, which had Kim Deal back during the Doolittle days.) Bush charted higher than Joni Mitchell, Liz Phair, Aretha Franklin, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, Sinead O'Connor, you name it. (And I'm going to take this opportunity to say that I was stunned that the KEXP listeners think so little of I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got that it didn't even show up in the Top 666 albums that the station counted down. What's wrong with all you people?)

What accounts for Bush's strong showing? In general, the KEXP audience tends to enjoy artists who fall into the New Wave/art-pop/slightly goth-y sound of the 1980s. (The Cure's Disintegration is all the way up at No. 8.) So I've been trying to give Hounds of Love a chance of late; my wife has the album and is a fan. We'll see if I become a convert.