Aught Lang Syne: Tim’s Video Hitlist

I want to make one thing clear from the start: This is my hitlist. John, Josh, and Pierre had nothing to do with it, and I don’t want to sully their reputations or that of the blog as a whole in presenting it. You know what I think about music.

But the following is a list of eight music videos from the Aughts, loosely defined as “my favorites.” I was late to the music video party, not getting MTV until it stopped playing music videos.*

*I mean “getting” there in the sense that I did not have it as a channel on my television. I did understand what MTV was.

If you want to make the case that I don’t “get” music videos, go ahead.

Letter to the Letterwriter

I’ve long thought that people who write letters to the editor aren’t held accountable for much of what they write. This is an attempt to change that.

Dear John James,

Your letter to Esquire, which received its own byline online, starts off so promisingly. You come off immediately as more than the standard reader, as one who thinks deeply about music, about art, about music as art. Your case for the cover song is a good one, and one I appreciate and endorse.

However, John James, like Brett Favre, you lose credibility the more you continue. First, you are unable to resist the human urge to write at length about your own experience. You can argue that I care about why you love cover songs: The whole “art as a crossroads of the predictable and unexpected” is a theory that transcends personal tastes. You cannot argue, though, that I care about how you came to love cover songs. The intimate details of your adolescence, your strong sense of personal nostalgia for a bygone era of music, and the editorialization that almost inherently accompanies them are of no interest to me.