The problem with having great friends is that you feel the need to tell them everything. Not just the small stuff, either, like what you had for lunch or how your boss is doing, but the Bigger Things we all have to deal with. And here’s where you get yourself into trouble.

You may tell them about your friend’s apartment you are going to move into once you sign all the paperwork; you may tell them that after months of defeating, debilitating rejection, your dad has found a new job, and expects to receive a formal offer on Thursday; and you certainly tell them about the new guy you met at the party, and you don’t want to move too quickly but you really think he might just be what you’re looking for, and you hardly know him but you talked about so much and, oh, he will be all the love you need.

Except it never works out that way, does it? I mean, law of averages, eventually something goes smoothly, but you find yourself spending more time on the correction than on the actual claim. You were going to move into your friend’s place, but her other roommate demanded too much rent money at the last second and you had to pull the plug; your dad was the perfect candidate for that job, but they decided to hire inside the company; you saw that guy a couple more times and you had fun but the chemistry you thought you felt was actually never there in the first place, and you were all finger taps and cautious glances and calculated laughs and once you let your guard down, you realized that he would never do the same, but maybe you don’t really want a boyfriend right now anyway. Maybe it’s time to focus on yourself for a little while and think about why you feel you need a boyfriend, and what you can do to change that feeling. (Simple answer: get one.)

When life gives you lemons, they say, you should make lemonade, but the axiom doesn’t account for any overstock. What do you with all your leftover lemons? When life keeps hurling them at you like a pitching machine gone haywire, at what point do you stop trying to make lemonade and start thinking about moving farther away from the tree?

So you tell all your friends about your grand plans to leave the city after school, about how much you’re going to travel and how there’s so much to see in this great, wide world, and how you’ll just save really carefully over the next few months and maybe do some freelancing work on the side (you say this last part like you could start whenever you wanted) and Lord knows you just need to go away for a while. And your friends either agree with you (”Yeah, time to leave this dirty town”) or they protest: how will you survive outside the city? Didn’t you come here to get away from all that? And “Like a Rolling Stone” starts playing in your head and you can’t even answer your friend’s question because you’re a nomad, see, and you just go with the flow, and if someone has to ask about it then they’ll never understand. Let them have Broadway, you think, and Soho and the yellow night sky and the quiet side of Tompkins Square Park. You never liked the subway anyhow.

Let them have it all, you think, as though you’ve seen it all yourself, as though in your four short years you’ll have come to know New York like you know your own backyard. It’s too expensive here, you think, and too noisy, and too chaotic and grimy and fake and draining—it’s too, well, everything, and you don’t want to be too anything, except for, of course, too quickly out the door, because you just can’t fucking wait. Memory: wandering through Brooklyn after someone’s party, finding the one pizza place still open at five in the morning, lots of laughter and crumby crust and gaping yellow light hanging from the ceiling, and looking out the window to watch lonely cars pass by on the BQE, some of them coming into but most of them leaving the city, headlights shooting past your vision, a million mechanical shooting stars. Imagining how tired and harried they must be, those exiting drivers, racking up all those lonely road miles. Feeling nauseous, feeling happy. Thinking—or doing something like thinking, whatever it is you do with your mind after too many beers and an hour of dancing and a fat spliff—about how glad you are to be somewhere, to not have to wander towards any gray horizon, to be wrapped up in this city’s arms eating the best damn cheese-and-pepperoni you’ve ever tasted.

This memory flashes at you and then flickers away, car horn blaring past as you jump out of the way, and all of a sudden the city stops being the tender mother of your memories and morphs into the insensitive, unfeeling demigod, forcing all your insecurities onto you at once, a hundred worries per square inch. You pass by your freshman year dorm and the realization hits you like the car almost did: you don’t want to get out, you want to go back.

You look inside the lobby windows; when did everyone get so young? You don’t feel old, but those freshmen are so stupidly, enviably young. You want to go back, you think, and there are a thousand memories now: kisses, shots, shouts, fights, unfurnished apartments and sample sales, corn dogs on the boardwalk, cab rides home, pierogi at dawn. Your friend was right: how could you ever leave all this?

You guess that when life gives you lemons, you can’t just turn them into lemonade. But the tree is nice, you have to admit that. You can’t know what will happen next. You’ll see, you think, and you don’t quite like the ambiguity of that answer, but there’s only so far back you can go until you’re a child again, too young to even know to think about these things in the first place, and far too young for all the cigarettes you’re smoking these days.

Rounding third base and sliding into home, after the jump.

3. “Material Girl” — Madonna

Madonna actually hates being called the Material Girl, and has said that if she’d known the song’s title would become her nickname, she never would have recorded it in the first place. But her lack of foresight has proven a musical blessing, and it’s a credit to the song that the nickname has stuck for all these years.

She’d actually just released another iconic song a few months prior; “Like a Virgin,” the lead single from her album of the same name, quickly soared to the top of the charts. But with “Material Girl,” Madonna went from being the sexy virgin to the ironic capitalist, the first of the many identity appropriations that would come to to define her career. Even though it’s not her biggest single, it is a perfect encapsulation of the eighties, capturing both the excitement of a young artist as well as the material exuberance of post-energy-crisis America.

And the song’s core still holds true. Any woman who charges hundreds of dollars to see her concerts is still, on many levels, “living in a material world.” And later, after noting the materialism surrounding her, Madonna points a bejewled finger at herself: “Boys may come and boys may go and thats all right; you see, experience has made me rich and now theyre after me,” she sings, predicting the string of affairs and enormous wealth into which she would later in life enter. If pop music is candy, then “Material Girl” is pure sugar; contagiously sweet, easily enjoyed, not taking itself too seriously but also not without its own virtues.

Because, you know, that baseline. That beginning. You know it, you’ve heard it a thousand times, and even though it’s steeped in the sonic pulses of the eighties, it never really gets old. The intro is instantly recognizable, at this point a standard at karaoke bars and Bat Mitzvah parties. And sung over that bass line is an impressive string of financial puns: boys must “raise my interest,” “save their pennies” to “make my rainy day,” and “give me proper credit.” There’s even a strong undercurrent of independent feminism to the lyrics; “if they don’t give me proper credit,” she sings, “I just walk away,” and while the money-related side to that pun is surely tongue-in-cheek, the demand for respect isn’t. What’s more, by the end of the song, “experience has made me rich”—she’s made her own money, and is now her own source of material pleasure. That Mister Roboto-like male chorus at the end of the song drives home the song’s obsession with consumerism, repeating “Living in a material world” over and over with the assembly-line monotone of a campy Soylent Green, and Madonna sings just one word during the outro: “Material.” Only a singer with her charisma, charm, and panache could get away with that, embarking upon a difficult navigation between youthful naivete and the first inklings of ambition, unsure of the exact destination but comfortably floating in a material world.

2. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” — Michael Jackson

Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa, mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa (clap, clap): try getting that out of your head. You’ll find that you can’t; it’s almost as though Jackson combed the world for the catchiest sound he could find, and ended up importing that line from Cameroon. He knew it was unbelievable on its own, which is why, at the end of this epic pop-funk song (over six minutes long), he only puts hand-claps behind it, cutting out the rest of the music. He doesn’t even try to chant along, instead peppering the repeated lyric with a few of his trademark hoots and screeches.

But, you know, that’s just the outro. The bulk of the song is a surprisingly biting attack on the rumor mill that would later come to torment Jackson. He knew that people, tabloids, commentators—anyone with an opinion and an audience, really—would at some point try to capitalize on Jackson’s mysterious fame in order to increase their own prominence, “talkin’, squealin’, lyin’, sayin’ you just want to be startin’ somethin’.” It’s a little tragic but also shockingly prescient that even back in 1983, he was already taking a firmly defensive position, decrying the “treacherous” people who wished to bring Jackson down.

And for those people who have questioned just how much Jackson was aware of the exploitation he suffered at the hands of his myriad personnel members, well, just listen to the words. “You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable, they eat off of you, you’re a vegetable,” he warns, bizarre metaphors that nonetheless aptly summarize the paralyzing victimization he must have felt since he was a young boy, first at the mercy of his father , and later at the mercy of just about everyone else.

Jackson recognized that the bigger he got, the less control he’d have over himself; since pop music is essentially a commodity (after all, we’re living in a material world), with every hit he released onto the public, Jackson was sacrificing a little more of his personal sense of self, increasingly morphing into an identity in an often ruthless and frighteningly idolizing public domain. “I know I am someone,” he yells just before the song’s mesmerizing outro, a public self-assurance of his personal identity.

Yet despite this realization, and despite the inevitable personal sacrifices he had to make for his career, Jackson never sacrificed his love of and concern with the music he made, and that’s just as obvious on this track as any messages about the pitfalls of celebrity life. We have Quincy Jones to thank for that timeless synth line, and Jackson himself was probably responsible for the various strange background noises we hear throughout the song (my favorite: “Yee-ha!”). For all of the song’s pop- and funk-related charms, it also retains a startlingly confident hip-hop musical structure, relying more on Jackson’s vocal performance than on any particular melody or instrumentation; even the guitar solo during the bridge feels sampled.

And then, you know, it’s like Jones and Jackson decided to fuck it and just threw in the African chant, a wonderful non-sequitur in an otherwise serious pop song. Once they unleashed it, that chorus line of “mama-se”s, they couldn’t think of a way to cut it off, instead letting the chant fade out. It was a risky decision, a burst of in-your-face blackness at a time when black artists were still being denied full entrance into the American pop mainstream. But it’s a risk that paid off, seeing as how the outro remains a timeless, quintessential MJ moment.

1. “Honey, Honey” — ABBA

“Honey, Honey” was not a huge hit, though it was an early indicator of ABBA’s musical genius. It is not one of the group’s most identifiable songs, though it opens the Mamma Mia! show that serves as little more than an ABBA tribute. It contains all the elements of ABBA’s best music, but it was released in 1974—years before the group reached the superstardom with which we assosicate the band today.

But it is the prototypical pop song of the modern era. It contains catchy melodies, simple vocals, and a brief run time. The song gradually builds in Swedish sweetness, from the doo-wop backing vocals of the second verse to the sweeping strings of the bridge. The boy-girl vocals of the bridge, meanwhile, are a wonderful precursor to the mixed-gender vocals so many pop acts would later come to employ. The rhyme scheme of the lyrics is simple and perfect,m rhyming “thrill me” with “kill me” and “let me feel it” with “don’t conceal it,” a testament to the uncomplicated pleasures of basic poetry brilliantly grasped by a group for whom English was surely a second language.

It also succeeds in borrowing some of the best aspects of earlier pop music. The title recalls the Archies’ 1969 hit “Sugar Sugar,” while that spelled-out F-chord bass line is practically ripped (though also transposed) from the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”. That’s not a bad thing, either; some of the best songs ever are quite directly based off previously-released music, especially in the hip-hop community. But ABBA is pure pop, which is what makes the decision so smart.

There’s not much more I can say about “Honey, Honey,” because the music really speaks for itself. And that’s the beauty of it, I think; it is unforgettable but also untroubling, sugary sweet with a center of harmonized, synth-dressed pop, dressed up in glittery jackets and high-heeled boots and pantomimed in front of a live studio audience. Not to sound cheesy but the song makes me smile, makes me feel a little better when I’m having a bad day, and that is the goal of pop music: to make the world a happier place. The members of ABBA understood this better than most artists ever do, and “Honey, Honey” is a perfect realization of their sugar-coated dreams. How you thrill me, indeed.

I have a problem with online dating.

It’s not the societal stigmatization factor. In fact, people’s aversion to the world of online dating seems to have subsided markedly along with their fear of exposing personal information. Terror over internet predators doesn’t have the same resonance it did in the ’90s; besides, no one’s going on an AOL chat room to find a date (do those even still exist?).

My problem with online dating is the fact that it is so mathematical, so formulaic, that it takes away all the excitement and nervousness and disappointment and sheer terror that comes part and parcel with the dating process.

It’s all very black and white, not for the emotionally complex: enter what you like in this box, your turn-offs, your favorite restaurants, your childhood memories. Upload a picture displaying you at a flattering angle: nothing too sexy because that will attract the creeps, but nothing too dowdy since then you’ll be horrified at the lowlife beer-bellied baldies that fancy themselves your type. If your profile is too pretentious someone will ask you to go on a date to an obscure, obnoxious Italian film at the Sunshine. If you’re too run-of-the-mill someone will ask you on a date to see I Love You Beth Cooper. There’s no winning here, in the digital dateplex.

Not to mention one has to entertain a generous helping of narcissism to want to earnestly fill out all of those boxes in the first place. A few weeks ago, fresh from a breakup I’m still reeling from, my roommate encouraged me to sign up for an internet dating site. Disgusted by the freaks on Craigslist, I consulted Hunch to see which site I should use (my only demand was that it had to be free). Hunch told me to join OKcupid.com, which I did, very begrudgingly.

Slowly and tactfully I filled in the little boxes meant to broadcast to the hungry men out there the Real Me. The problem, of course, was that I felt like a complete douche bag doing so. How do you ‘toot your own horn,’ so to speak, without coming off like a conceited asshole? And how do you joke self-deprecatingly without coming off hideously insecure? I couldn’t figure it out, so I went my natural route: I was searingly honest. And so I wrote that, along with some other stuff:

I’m searingly honest and empathetic. I appreciate routine, but even more so I find deviating from it extremely validating. I prefer staying in and reading to going out and standing around in large, crowded places. Above most things I am a writer, and I study journalism at NYU. I speak French, I’m a vegetarian, I love reading the news and in the summer I get freckles. I once drove a stick shift car cross-country. I’m very introverted and self-deprecating, I’m terrified of flying, and I wear dresses every single day.

My profile sparked a mixed reaction. Soon I was garnering “stalkers,” people who looked at your profile. (This was a Facebook stalkers’ combo-dream-and-nightmare; you could see who viewed your profile, but they could also see that you viewed theirs) Messages began to trickle in. Some guidos from New Jersey lamented me saying that no one from New Jersey should message me (an addendum I attached to my profile after days of getting messages from muscleheads from Ocean City). Skinny Asian boys with dark-framed glasses asked me what my favorite bands were. Others wrote to me in French. And there were more: geeky, virginial schoolteachers from New Jersey, plaid aficianados from Brooklyn, gross old guys who’d IM me “hey sexi,” older men asking to read the Sunday Times with me. Suddenly, I was no longer achingly lonely. Instead, I felt suffocated. I winced every time my Blackberry buzzed with a new message. I couldn’t keep track of all these guys! And who were they, anyway?

I took up the offer of one guy, a Jonathan Safran-Foer lookalike studying creative writing and teaching workshops at CUNY, to go grab a drink. We did, and we walked around, and we kissed, and the whole time all I could think about was John. When I told him this, when I revealed I was damaged goods, the whole charade collapsed in on itself. This time, I was only suffocating myself. I wasn’t ready for any form of dating, even if the courtship was virtual.

After the date with the CUNY student, I furtively approached my roommate, drawing out my syllables Jill Abramson-style. “I think I’m going to delete my profile,” I said. The upswing of that last “ile” connoted valley girls, insecurity, 14 year old me. “Why????” he asked quizzically, arching his eyebrows and looking concerned. “I don’t know, I just feel like now my options, they’re… too open.”

I had driven myself crazy trying to attract all this attention, painstakingly filling out those little boxes with OCD grace. And now that my words, my pictures, my ideas were attracting people, I was terrified.

It was the day after I had broken up with John that I made my OKCupid account. And it was three days later that I disabled it. Still, I’m not sure if I’ll ever again garner the courage to dip a toe in the online dating pool. I’ve entertained digital courtships in the past: in fact, with John, our interactions existed primarily online since he lived so far away. I remember that routine fondly but with hesitance: it was a wanton long-distance relationship that required vast chunks of days spent on AIM lamenting the six-hour time difference, on videochat scantily clad attempting to rekindle a physicality the MacBook, with all its bells and whistles, cruelly strikes down, or feverishly tapping letters into my Blackberry with a childlike exuberance. But those pings to the heart when my inbox pinged: I wouldn’t trade anything for that feeling! Waking up in the middle of the night to an e-mail sent before he headed off to work was the most glorious thing, because I fell back to sleep so warmed with the glow, even in the beginning–the inkling, that someone out there loved me and was thinking about me. These things exist in real life, but they are encumbered by trivialities that my digimance did not even consider. I felt more breathlessly shackled to John than I did to anyone else, because between us, above anything else, there were words, and unwise as it may seem, I’ve never trusted anything more than words.

But “words alone will never save us” and I can’t make love to my newspaper. Some time again, hopefully soon, I’ll have to learn to trust someone more than their pretty vocabulary and the way our words join and swoon and hover above our sprawling bed. I just don’t think I’ll be meeting that person on OkCupid.

Plus I want to bone Megan Fox.

but I have writer’s block, so instead enjoy these wonderful photos from Olivia Bee’s Flickr stream.

They remind me of being young and in love. I’m still young and I’m still in love (do we ever really fall out of it?) but one doesn’t hurt at all and one always, always does.

I have writer’s block because I upped my Zoloft dosage to 75mgs and even though it’s probably all in my head I’m having a mechanical blockage. This also happened to me after I originally went on meds at age 18; I’m hoping this time it doesn’t take months to buck this thing.

OMG, you guys, I have been having the most difficult time growing my tomatoes! They always end up on the ground, spoiled, squashed, unripe, peed on, or otherwise unfit for cooking into delicious meals and snacks. I wish there were a product that allowed me to grow tomatoes the easy way…

…and bless my lucky stars, there is! Why, it’s the Topsy Turvy Upside Down Tomato Planter! Yes, there’s finally a way to grow tomatoes upside-down. Because that’s all this product does, hang your tomatoes from the sky and let ‘em dangle on the vine.

Give the fine people at Topsy Turvy Inc. some credit; they don’t pretend that your $19.99 (plus shipping and handling) will be going towards anything more than upside-down tomato-growing. And you have to admire that kind of honesty in this cruel, bitter world, where everyone’s a crook and dusty tomatoes line the streets, like little homeless fruit, like wayfaring crops that couldn’t make it in this crazy town.  Let’s find out more, together.

Man, growing tomatoes is such hard work. Especially if you’re an octogenarian with back problems. I do like the fact that this guy dresses up to dick around in his tomato patch. You can’t buy that kind of class from an informercial.

You can’t buy class, but you can most certainly buy this piece of shit. See what they did with that letter U? How they turned it upside-down? Because that is, sadly, this product’s selling point: it grows your fucking tomatoes upside-down. In case that’s not yet clear to you, the commercial tells you, in HUGE yellow letters, that your tomatoes will be hanging upside down. Yup. Small pleasures, in this life of sin…and dirty tomatoes.

Those yellow lines? Yeah, those are supposed to be rays of the sun. Because the sun warms the planter like a greenhouse! I don’t have a green thumb, but the idea of “warm tomatoes” is pretty fucking disgusting. And you know what else sounds disgusting? Exploding root systems. That sounds more like an act of bioterrorism than an infomercial selling point. The old couple in this commercial have a very nice backyard and in the real world would probably pay Mexicans to grow their tomatoes for them. Just saying, don’t trust everything you see, in these late-night infomercials.

Also: water and nutrients pouring “directly from the roots to the fruit” isn’t how you grow plants. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of what you want to have happen. Whatever. ¡sǝoʇɐɯoʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn

The “Ready 4 weeks earlier!” claim doesn’t even make sense, and such an early harvest is probably unsafe for human consumption. But I’m not going to question the logic of this thing.

Just so you’re aware, I’ve been working on this post for forty minutes now. Yes, this is what I do with my life.

Since there’s only so much you can say about a hanging flowerpot, the second half of the commercial is almost entirely devoted to the notion that tomatoes taste good in stuff. It appears as though the infomercial’s producers have expanded their scope and are now trying to convince you that you need tomatoes in your kitchen throughout the entire “season,” an ambiguous time period illustrated here by this yuppie couple who seem to just hang around the kitchen together, tasting each other’s concoctions and generally being grateful that they’re able to grow tomatoes so wonderfully.

Because here’s the thing: who the hell grows their own tomatoes anymore? No, seriously, I know a few people who garden but they grow, like, herbs and shit. Not tomatoes. Never tomatoes. Want to know how to easily get tomatoes? Buy them in a store, that’s how.

Grow “cukes”! The makers of this commercial apparently need an upside-down dictionary too, since they spelled “zucchini” wrong. Nobody caught that in the editing room? Was there even an editing room?

This commercial also assumes that “your friends will wonder how your tomatoes grew so big,” and since none of us live in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, it therefore assumes that absolutely nobody is watching. So I guess it doesn’t matter how they spell “zucchini”; if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, then nobody gives a shit about your fucking upside-down tomatoes.

I’m just saying, we’re in a recession. Billy Mays would not approve.

I’m going to stop here, because nothing new happens in the rest of the infomercial. (Not very informative, tsk tsk.) It also comes with some strange slicing contraption and a tomato cookbook. You say “tomato,” I say “complete waste of time and money.” Then again, I just wrote up this entire post, so you know. Everybody loses with the Topsy-Turvy Upside Down Tomato Planter.

So I’ve been doing the whole taking-pictures thing for a while now (tomorrow is JOSH’SHOTS’ first birthday, in fact) but I never got around to make a watermark. Well I finally did! It’s really small and unobtrusive.

I still don’t really plan on making money from taking photos, though if someone were to pay me to shoot their party or whatever I obviously would. I’m still an amateur at best, so I don’t expect to like “become a photo guy.” I just feel that adding a small watermark to my photos is a simple yet clear way to claim my “work.” Because you never know. Anyway, yeah.

Oh, another thing: two of my roommates are moving out this Sunday, one of whom is the owner of our wireless router. Which means…I won’t have the Internet in my apartment anymore! I mean there’s still my office as well as the numerous free-wifi cafes in the neighborhood, as well as my friends’ places, but if my posts get a little sparser (like they haven’t been already, I know, I know), that’s the reason. Hopefully, linksys starts working again soon. It used to be lightning-fast in my bedroom, but now it’s not lightning-anything. If you live across the hall and are reading this, can I use your Internet? Thanks.

The beat goes on, after the jump!

6. “Hey Ya!” — Outkast

Nowadays, every rapper sings. Everyone from 50 Cent to Kanye—hell, even Jay-Z—stretches their vocal chords and attempts a tune, either enhanced by Auto-Tune or (especially in Hova’s case) naturally, producing artistically imperfect sounds that leave room for just enough street cred.

Well, maybe it’s a stretch to say that every rapper sings, but it’s certainly true that every rapper can sing without sacrificing his or her artistic integrity. Who do all these artists have to thank for that? Andre 3000! And Polaroid pictures, and generous neighbors, and Lucy Liu.

See, back in 2003, Outkast released a double album. It got very, very good reviews, and was a smash success, and it spawned like a hundred singles. But the first, best, and most lasting single was “Hey Ya!,” a vast departure from the catchy, rapid-fire rap the duo had been known for.

One, two, three, uh! In comes an acoustic guitar, and a bass line ripped out of every blaxploitation film of the 1970s, and—often forgotten after all that dancing and shaking-it-like-a-Polaroid-picture-ing—surprisingly thoughtful lyrics. “Hey Ya!” works not just because it successfully welds funk, rock, and hip-hop, but also because it evolves from a song about romance to a song about getting down, making it appropriate for both dance-floor antics as well as serious listening. “If what they say is ‘Nothing is forever,’ then what makes love the exception?” Andre asks in the second verse. But he’s already answered his own question: love is the exception because “there’s feelings involved” (more like “invooooooolved”). Shortly after posing his answer-and-question, Andre acts upon his own rhythmic feelings, and from the bridge on, “Hey Ya!” becomes delightfully quirky dance-funk. The song is so visceral that not only does it rely on emotions to carry it out (”You know what to do!” Andre says to his female listeners) but its name isn’t even a real word: it is an exclamation, a shout (note the exclamation point), a perfectly timed “Hey Ya!.”

5. “Basket Case” — Green Day

Green Day is, for better or worse, considered to be an iconic rock band of the modern era. Many listeners praise the band for its recent and timely politically-charged jams, but what they forget is that Green Day used to have nothing to do with politics. What has made Billie Joe and the gang such legends, and what I hope will remain their legacy, isn’t their strolls down any boulevard of broken dreams but rather their fun, brief pop-punk that perfectly tapped into early-90s youthful anxiety, providing a playful antidote to the seriousness of grunge.

Armstrong was my age when he wrote “Basket Case” back in 1993, and the lyrics are based off his own struggles with anxiety. If one of the hallmarks of a great pop song is timelessness, then “Basket Case” lyrically hits the mark. “Do you have the time to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once?” Armstrong begins, a prescient allusion to our generation’s narcissism that we now express through our blogs, our Facebook pages, even our mini-whines on Twitter. “Am I just paranoid? Or am I stoned?” he later asks, and even if you don’t smoke weed, that question of whether or not you’re actually, biologically So Fucked Up is universal.

And, of course, the song itself is as catchy as anything released in the nineties. The chord progression almost perfectly mimics Pachelbel’s Canon in D major (though Armstrong transposed his song up a note, to that of E major). Don’t believe me? Read for yourself. But “Basket Case” is no carbon copy; though its chord progression is nothing new, the feeling with which it’s played certainly is (or at least was, in 1993). Whether Armstrong knew it at the time or not, by appropriating a Baroque masterpiece and turning it punk, he ushered in a new era of catchy rock that could speak to serious emotions with an air of levity so central to the best of pop music. I miss Dookie-era Green Day.

4. “I Want It That Way” — Backstreet Boys

Hear me out. Actually, just listen to the song yourself. Strip away the stigma that’s still attached to boy bands, put aside your pretensions, and enjoy the greatest pop song of the 90s (and just in time, too, having been released in 1999).

Because that’s what this song is. Any time someone says “Tell me why,” in any context, for the rest of my life I’ll finish their sentence in my head: ain’t nothing but a heartache. Of course. It fits so well. Catchy call-and-response, beautiful harmonization, that beat-clap-beat-clap rhythm, an acoustic guitar intro that still gets young girls (and, um, me) screaming: man oh fucking man, this song is fantastic.

Even though it doesn’t quite make sense. “I never want to hear you say, ‘I want it that way’” is not a coherent lyric. Nobody quite knows what the Boys are talking about, band included. Trivia: the Boys themselves wrote alternate lyrics to this song, saying that they “love it when I hear you say I want it that way.” But this wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. Why? Because this song is both melancholic and joyous, anthemic and personal , a song to put a bounce in your step and, perhaps, a tear in your eye.

And, you know, they were legitimately good singers (even my sweet, sweet Nick, who was just pouring his little heart out in the studio). They couldn’t have pulled this off without vocal talent. And that cathartic “Tell me whyyyyyyyyyyyy” at the start of the final repetition of the chorus, well—I dare you to not sing along. Nick, baby, I don’t quite know what you want, but I promise you that you’ll never hear me say…well, you know the rest.

Yesterday was dominated by the ladies; today, it’s the guys’ turn.

9. “D.A.N.C.E.” — Justice

The proliferation of file-sharing has, among other things, dragged a revolutionary kind of spotlight onto bands that even ten years ago would have been stuck in dance-floor or record-shop obscurity. More than ever before, “indie” music has crept its way into the mainstream, if not on radio than on the computers of curious listeners the world over.

In 2007, Justice released “D.A.N.C.E.” as the debut single from their first LP. It became an instant club smash, on seemingly endless rotation at the hippest bars and nightlife spots in the city, reaching the zenith of its popularity when its accompanying video was nominated for “Video of the Year” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.

It is infectious. A choir of young kids spells out “D.A.N.C.E.” over a soulful bass line and disco-era string progressions. It goes on to instruct the listener to “do the dance” and “spread the word in stereo at the speed of sound,” perhaps a self-conscious realization on Justice’s part that the song would transcend hipster circles and become a genuine hit. They even performed the song on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The most successful “indie pop” single to date, Justice proved that “under the spotlights,” neither major-label nor indie, “it doesn’t matter”; in the new viral entertainment industry, the cream of the crop can and will rise to the top on its own merits. And have a lot of fun along the way.

8. “God Only Knows” — The Beach Boys

A single from 1966 may not seem all that “modern,” especially to a listener born more than two decades after its release. But “God Only Knows” is the source for so much of the music we enjoy today. The Elephant Six collective—especially the horns on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In An Aeroplane Over the Sea and the sudden mood changes in practically every Of Montreal song—along with bands as varied as Fleet Foxes, Bright Eyes, and the Shins can trace their influences directly to Brian Wilson’s little slice of pop heaven.

Released at the height of Wilson’s creative genius—it was actually the B-side of the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” single, which is a sun-washed classic in itself, and immediately preceded the immortal “Good Vibrations”—”God Only Knows” takes musical chances that astound even the most sophisticated music aficionados, all the while staying grounded in the Beach Boys’ trademark vocal harmonies and lazy summer pop-joy. The melancholic strings that first appear in the second verse, the sudden staccato immediately after that verse, the imperial brass buildup towards the finale, the (relatively) lengthy repetition and overlapping of the final line: all risks that paid off wonderfully, never betraying Brian Wilson’s California soul.

Further complications arise when you realize that the song’s carefree jingles belie the romantic insecurities for which they provide the backdrop. After all, it begins “I may not always love you,” and the crux of the message isn’t one of romance but of the all-too-familiar fear of loss: “God only knows what I’d be without you,” over and over, rising above the swelling marching-band beat and fading past the song’s outro, straight on ’til the horizon, which in the world of the Beach Boys remains permanently engaged in the prettiest sunset you’ll ever see.

7. “This Charming Man” — The Smiths

When disco died, it divided its nightlife kingdom thusly: straight dance clubs (and all the high rollers and bottle service seating that go with it); raves (in which the focus is on the music, beat, lights, and atmosphere); and the gay club scene (an amalgamation of everything that came before it, given a lustful twist and shoved onto the homosexual urban population of coastal America and Europe—and largely men, at that.) But what if you were a young gay man who felt equally awkward in heterosexual circles and mesh-shirts-with-bootie-shorts gay clubs?

Morrissey faced this dilemma in 1983. What happened to classic romance, on “a hillside desolate” with “handsome” and “charming” men? Why can’t a gay man have that? Morrissey must have known how his music spoke to a generation of young men questioning their sexuality and their place in a society that seemed to have forgotten them: would nature make a man of any of them, ever? Or were they already charming men, waiting to escape the life of “a jumped up pantry boy”?

Trust the Smiths to take a dark tale of sexual ambiguity and set it to a jaunty beat and delightful guitar riff (courtesy of the underrated Johnny Marr). In true pop fashion, the song’s music occurs independently of the accompanying lyrics; only the catchiest, most accessible instrumentation would do, even if the lyrics were anything but simple. Yet the two aspects of the song are also intertwined; just as the lyrics provide an ode to halcyon chivalry, the music serves as a sort of love letter to the sparkling pop-rock of Abbey Road and the era of the guitar pop band.

The lyrics do contain one hypocrisy, however: Morrissey never turned down an opportunity to “pamper life’s complexity,” and a generation of confused adolescents are certainly grateful for that.