'The Voice' has lots of singers who fit the 'Idol' mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.

Like most fans of 'So You Think You Can Dance,' I wouldn't know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.

One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds.

It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.

The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic 'Baker Street' has to be the 'Ulysses' of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft's sax solo, creating one of the Seventies' most enduringly creepy sounds.

In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.