Thirdhand News

Bill Holdship
Los Angeles, California

Videotapes revealed the Columbine shooters quoting Shakespeare in planning their melee. In this election year, what candidate will take up the noble cause of removing this insidious dead white male's works from the hands of our impressionable youth? I know a lotta people who've been hoping for an excuse to get Sting's albums stickered.

Sian Kennedy/Retna

Eminem #26 Album, #2 single

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Adam McGovern
Mount Tabor, New Jersey

Album I would have liked to hear: Lou Bega . . . in the Life of Chris Gaines.

John Soeder
Cleveland, Ohio

Someday we'll be able to say we knew him before he became the Artist Formerly Known as Beck.

George Yatchisin
Santa Barbara, California

If this Latin pop explosion was really so major, why didn't we see bigger sales of the Pope's album, Abba Pater? He was the only one who actually sang in Latin.

Rob Tannenbaum
Manhattan

Steve Merritt, Trent Reznor, and that Morrissey kid. "Three Bummers." Quintuple album. Giants Stadium. Let's make this happen.

Chris Norris
Manhattan

Rock is like a fallen tree. Dead and rotting, it will sustain whole microecosystems of bugs, toads, fungi, mosses, for decades to come—teeming populations of minuscule critters living off its moribund tissue, its necrotic myth-flesh of gesture and expression. Sure you can focus on a specific fungus-patch or toad-clutch (e.g. thrash/death/black metal or emocore) and perceive virulent vitality. But the tree, the overarching macro-myth, is still dead.

Simon Reynolds
Manhattan

This past year rock partied like it was 1999. And like it was 1949 and all the years in between. There's no future! There's no past either. If time is erased, rock, the expression of an urgent now, is dead.

Deena Dasein
Chicago, Illinois

I don't know who's here to save rock and roll, or even that it can or should be saved. You'd have to give some heavy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the thing, and I'm not sure I want to taste its beery breath or feel its bloated corpse. But I'd take a fat, washed-up rock star over a shiny, happy pop star any day.

Tricia Romano
Brooklyn, New York

Didn't R.E.M. promise to break up after 1999? It's 2000—we don't have our flying cars or robot maids, but we do have Michael Stipe? This is bullshit!

Jay Ruttenberg
Portland, Ohio

So much for living on the moon or eating steak dinners in pill form. With Santana back on top, the future has been postponed indefinitely.

John Soeder
Cleveland, Ohio

Curtis Mayfield said what was needed before people realized what was needed. He articulated what others only thought privately, brought the debate out of the family room. His guitar eternally set on quiet fire, he did it with such grace and joy and melody you never knew you were getting a talking-to. He urged people to get ready, and sooner or later, swayed by the sound, they got ready.

Tom Moon
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Given the horror of the music business, some substance or at least fun grew in its vast black shadow. Maybe it has to do with why I never go to the movies: I'd rather mainline my emotions from the stereo without storylines or explanations. I don't have true love or a fast car, but I do have a radio, and sometimes it's the same kind of rush.

Lissa Townsend Rodgers
Manhattan

No more rap-metal unless the people involved are truly freaks on a leash. No more songs about bitches and niggaz unless it's straight from the heart. No more taking it back to the old school. No more Iggy Pop records. No more even blonder, even younger, even bigger-breasted children lip-synching their way to rehab. No more jazz in hip-hop and vice versa. No more techno videos where someone is feverishly running away from something down dark city streets, through alleyways and up staircases. More than three Latinos on the radio. More banjos.

Scott Seward
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Fact is, everynew year that goes by lately, I actually hear morealbums I like than the year before. Which isn't a surprise given how the quantity of music keeps climbing overall. There's more awfulstuff every year, too.

Chuck Eddy
Brooklyn, New York

My resolution for '00 is the same one I've made the last five years: SPEND LESS TIME LISTENING TO BAD MUSIC. I wish the music business would help me keep this resolution.

Rob Tannenbaum
Manhattan