Author name: Doy

I remember reading this issue of \”Rolling Stone\” sometime in \’96, and they asked a bunch of artists — everyone from rappers to rockers to weirdos — about their favorite albums from that year.

A lot of people say grunge died when Kurt Cobain killed himself.

I would argue that Kurt\’s death was like a bullet in the gut for grunge, but the death was much, much slower.

I don\’t think we talk enough about how great the early aughts were for music, especially indie rock.

I mean, think about it — The Strokes, The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Thermals, etc. etc. — all put their first albums out there in the early 2000s. It was just an explosion of really good indie rock, despite the fact that boy bands were ruling the charts at the time.

You ever hear an album that just carries you away? Just takes you somewhere else entirely — into a memory or into an emotion you can barely describe?

Jeff Buckley did that to me.

I fell in love with jazz slowly. At first, I was introduced to \”fusion jazz,\” which grabbed from rock, funk and R&B music to create this smooth, sometimes syncopated, progressive sound. I enjoyed listening to musicians who were just insanely talented like Dave Weckl, a drummer who played like he literally had eight arms, or

I don\’t know if this is a hot take, but I think \”It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back\” is hip-hop\’s punk rock record.

Don\’t laugh, because I\’m serious about this one. 311 is as widely reviled as they are revered, and while they\’ve dropped some truly HIDEOUS songs in more than 20 years as a band (there\’s no consensus on the WORST song, but a lot of fans argued about it here), they still make one of the

I think Counting Crows gets a bad rap sometimes, like maybe they’re lumped in as some kind of low-rent Hootie and the Blowfish or something. I don’t know why.

Despite the disrespect, Adam Duritz is one heck of a songwriter and, though I’ve never met him, he seems, too, like a transparent, REAL human being.

In this day and age, when bands and rights holders slap down YouTube videos just for the mere MENTION of their songs (just ask Rick Beato, if you don\’t believe me), De La Soul\’s \”Three Feet High and Rising\” would never have been made.

I still bristle at the term \”grunge.\”

I don\’t know why. I know it\’s easier to talk about all these bands in terms of the large genre into which they (like it or not) reside, but I feel like it takes away from their distinctiveness.