I Had No Voice To Talk With

Seeing Taylor Swift Live In 2013 Is Seeing A Maestro At The Top Of Her Or Anyone's Game. No Other Pop Auteur Can Touch Her Right Now For Emotional Excess Or Musical Reach - Her Punk Is So Punk, Her Disco Is So Disco. The Red Sequins On Her Guitar Match The Ones On Her Microphone, Her Shoes And 80 Percent Of The Crowd.

If The Girls Keep Dancing, Everybody's Happy. If The Girls Don't Dance, Nobody's Happy.

When I Started Out As A Music Journalist, At The End Of The 1980s, It Was Generally Assumed That We Were Living Through The Lamest Music Era The World Would Ever See. But Those Were Also The Years When Hip-hop Exploded, Beatbox Disco Soared, Indie Rock Took Off, And New Wave Invented A Language Of Teen Angst.

'the Sopranos' Gets Praised As Novelistic, But It Follows The Most Banal Of Life Patterns, Showing The Sheer Tedium Of Being A Mobster. It Has Dead Spots, Boring Plotlines, Weak Episodes. Characters Develop Slowly, Or Don't. Like Viewers, A Gangster Might Get Bored, Fade Out Of The Action, Then Come Back To Find None Of His Debts Forgotten.

Like Most Fans Of 'so You Think You Can Dance,' I Wouldn't Know A Pasodoble If It Beat Me With A Rake.