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" Every now and then, Prince decides to try being a normal rock star. You know, the kind who does a professional arena tour where he plays the hits. But part of what makes him such an eternally fascinating star is that he lives in his own private purple world, even when he sets out to make the house quake. "

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" The 2000s were the time when bromance became a kind of love that dared to speak its name. As a high-water mark of bro culture, nothing can ever top the MTV series 'Bromance,' with Brody Jenner and his search for a new BFF. "

Rob Sheffield

Culture

Time

" Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race. "

" Lots of people like Seth MacFarlane. Many other people like watching the Oscars. But nobody likes both, not even Seth MacFarlane, who has no idea what the Oscars are. "

" Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one. "

" It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn't play power chords, they probably couldn't even spell 'spandex.' All they had was songs. "

" On 'Idol,' Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills. "

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

" When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e! "

" Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next. "

Rob Sheffield

Feeling

Whatever

" You'd think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America's sweetheart on the 'Today' show. But her ratings have been dismal - she comes in last place every week. "

" '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. "

" Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing. "

" One of the things that make Liars so fascinating after five albums, each one so completely different from the others, is that even though they play around with all the classic tropes of art-damaged angst-noise perv-rock, they exude a totally cheery and boyish enthusiasm onstage, goofing around with their keyboards and beatboxes. "

" Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so. "

" It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles? "

" Celebrity despicability is a precious thing. "

" God bless America - what other civilization would give Patrick Dempsey another shot to rule as a sex symbol, twenty years after 'Meatballs III: Summer Job?' His reign as Dr. McDreamy on 'Grey's Anatomy' is proof that there's nothing we love more than giving Eighties celebs a heartwarming second stab at life. "

" Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren't watching. "

" Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them. "

" You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude. "

" Ronnie Spector's hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La's combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade. "

" We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio. "

" You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. "

" But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it. "

" 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. "

" Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants of my life, but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I'll never know. I could claim that Duran Duran taught me everything I know about women, but that's not exactly accurate: I learned it from listening to girls talk about Duran Duran. "

" Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something splendid of our most secret desires and agonies. "

" Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship. "

Rob Sheffield

Relationship

Music

" It was in that bubble after Vatican II when it seemed like the best time ever to grow up Catholic. It was a time when the church was so connected to the world. "

" 'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail. "