The Popdose staff was sitting around the other day, doing what we do best — namely, talking about records that most people wish they didn’t remember — when a discussion about the Moody Blues’ “Your Wildest Dreams” somehow led into some heavy-duty reminiscing about the records we all listened to when we were kids — and how those records were more or less culled from the Top 40 hits of the day, hits that our parents, as often as not, listened to along with us.

So, we wondered, who’s making music these days that impressionable preteens and their parents enjoy? Top 40 radio is pretty much dead, and the lines between Radio Disney, MTV, and whatever the hell it is that the over-30 crowd is listening to these days have been drawn depressingly deep. Look, it isn’t just that we think the Jonas Brothers and Lil Wayne aren’t all that great; it’s that some of us can remember enjoying the latest hits from the Spinners, the Bangles, or Cheap Trick right alongside our parents.

Current music is still a multigenerational thing, but not the way it used to be — so here, without further ado, is a list (with downloads, natch) of some of the stuff your faithful Popdosers were listening to in their formative preteen years. Pull up a chair and a set of headphones, and give in to Tweener Mixtape Madness! (more…)

David Medsker: I love Paul Carrack as much as the next guy, but is what I refer to as a non-song. Not a whole lot of meat on these bones.

Jeff Giles: An odd little hit from an odd little record. People remember Paul Carrack and Paul Young (no, the other Paul Young) as Mike +/& the Mechanics’ singers, but this album featured lead vocals from two other guys. I can’t remember either of their names, but I do remember that I like “Taken In” more than “Silent Running” or “All I Need Is a Miracle.”

Jon Cummings: If I remember correctly, M+M albums were packaged with drool cups. Or did I just dream that during the 48-hour nap that was induced by my one and only full hearing of this song? Even 23 years on, it’s extraordinary that a nuclear war/Terminator/whatever prog-rock “epic” could be so abysmally boring. (Compared to this oblique blather, Sting’s contemporaneous “Russians” was a Tolstoy novel.) It’s also extraordinary that Carrack’s voice could be so thoroughly wasted. His M+M work is so pulse-deadening that it calls into question everything he did before. (Was “How Long” really that good? Doesn’t Glenn Tilbrook sing “Tempted” just as well in concert as Carrack did on record?) God, I hated this band.

Dw. Dunphy: Mike + the Mechanics got off to a good start, didn’t they? Big hit, nice synth-y melody, Paul Carrack — but it’s all for naught. I don’t understand a whit of this song. It sounds like the theme to some really bad syndicated sci-fi show. If you don’t pay too much attention to it, perfectly pleasant.

Scott Malchus: I often wonder what songs from the ’80s, with all of the lame electronic drums and synths, would sound like with real instruments. This song holds up okay. I guess I always expected more from Mike Rutherford since he was the lead guitarist from Genesis (and, before that, the bassist). All of the Mike + the Mechanics songs sound very “lite rock” compared to what he did in the ’70s. Then again, look at Phil Collins’s solo output. Worse, look what Genesis had become by the end of the ’80s. How is it that only Peter Gabriel was able to maintain his artistic integrity after he quit the band?

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Bob Dylan - “Like a Rolling Stone”

Robert: Rolling Stone magazine named Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) the greatest song of all time in 2004. It certainly contains the best Rolling Stone product placement of all time — it predates the magazine’s existence, making it a truly impressive example of forward-thinking marketing — but is it really the best song ever? For the purposes of this edition of Song-Off, you bet your ass it is! Some say this immaculate kiss-off to a privileged bohemian girl who wants to be a starving artist (but without all that icky starvation) was blown in the direction of Edie Sedgwick or Joan Baez. But others say it’s Dylan turning his poison pen on himself, that he’s the one “with no direction home” after embracing electric guitars and alienating his folk-music fans. But as he says in the song, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Dylan goes for broke in “Like a Rolling Stone” and comes up with a song for the ages.

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Earlier this month New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo reported that he had sent his staff to 1,000 pharmacies across the state in March, April, and May and found more than 250 that were selling expired milk, eggs, baby formula, and over-the-counter medication. The two biggest culprits were the CVS and Rite Aid chains. So what else have these drugstores not been telling consumers?

1. CVS-brand sparkling water gets its sparkle from Darfurian children’s tears. (White Lion, “When the Children Cry” [download])

2. That lawn chair you bought in the “seasonal” aisle? Someone had sex on it. (The Band, “Rockin’ Chair” [download])

3. Whenever you bought an impulse item at the front counter in 2000 and 2004, your name was added to a GOP database of potential swing voters most likely to vote for George W. Bush. (Everything But the Girl, “Politics Aside” [download])

4. Expired baby formula mixed with expired teeth whitener will totally get you high. (Glen Phillips, “I Want a New Drug” [download])

5. The security camera adds 25 pounds. (Joe Henry, “Fat” [download])

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Happy Monday, faithful readers! Are you ready for a new series? We hope so, because we’ve got one for you. Welcome to the inaugural edition of Lists You Didn’t Ask For!

Here’s the deal: Since we know everyone out in Webland is a sucker for lists — and since we’re unapologetic whores for traffic — every other Monday we’ll be bringing you a new list based on a theme you never knew you cared about. Case in point: this week’s List of Other Things Ben Stein Defends.

As you may know, Mr. Stein has a terrible new movie out titled Exposed: No Intelligence Allowed. In what is being charitably called a documentary, Stein tries to make a case for the “intelligent design” theory by claiming a vast anti-ID conspiracy (and making thinly veiled comparisons between Darwinists and Nazis). Currently, Expelled is sitting at a richly deserved 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, thanks to reviews from critics like the Chicago Reader’s Reece Pendleton, who calls it “ludicrous propaganda,” and the Onion AV Club’s Steven Hyden, who dismisses it as “grossly unfair, contradictory, and ultimately repugnant.”

So we know Ben Stein defends the idea that “intelligent design” should be taught in schools. What else does he defend? We convened a panel consisting of Jason Hare, Robert Cass, yours truly, and our friends at the Hilton Head Island Packet, Jeff Vrabel and Tim Donnelly, to put together a list. Read on to find out what made the cut: (more…)

Actor Jack McBrayer (Kenneth on NBC’s 30 Rock) e-mailed me recently, panic-stricken and possibly sweaty. He was convinced that the recent writers’ strike had made people forget who he was. “But Jack,” I said, “the last new episode of 30 Rock aired in January, and the next new episode airs Thursday, April 10, 8:30 Eastern, 7:30 Central. Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

“The public is fickle, Robert — I have to get my face back out there.”

“But you’re in Mariah Carey’s new video for ‘Touch My Body,’” I reminded him. “I saw it advertised on VH1 at the end of February, and I watched it on YouTube just the other day. Don’t worry. Everything’ll be alright.”

Unfortunately, nothing I said could calm him down. But four hours and a couple hundred e-mails later, Jack and I came up with a solution that would please everyone — a Popdose e-mail interview. Hooray! My work here is done. Well, except for the actual interview.

Jack and I grew up in the same town — Macon, Georgia — but when he was 15, his family moved to Conyers, Georgia, the home of Holly Hunter and a scorching outbreak of syphilis back in the ’90s. After graduating from the University of Evansville in Indiana in 1995, Jack moved to Chicago and studied improv and sketch comedy at the Second City and ImprovOlympic Theater (now known as iO). He was hired for the Second City Touring Company in ‘97, and two years later he was a writer-performer on the Second City e.t.c. stage. In 2002 he moved to New York City and began making regular appearances on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in various roles.

Jack’s next move was to Los Angeles in 2004, where he played a waiter on two episodes of the late, great sitcom Arrested Development, continued improvising at iO West, and in 2006 costarred in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, followed closely by his breakout role as Kenneth the NBC page on the 2007 Emmy winner for best comedy series, 30 Rock. On April 18 he stars in the latest Judd Apatow-produced comedy, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he plays the newlywed husband of Maria Thayer (Strangers With Candy).

Before Jack and his family moved to Conyers, he and I shared good times and youthful lung capacity in the Macon Boys’ Choir during the 1984-’85 school year. Unfortunately, I don’t think we talked to each other that much, seeing as how he was a sixth grader and I was a third grader. Nevertheless, my first question for the southern scene stealer was …

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After I cowrote a Lemonheads record guide for Jefitoblog back in July, Jeff Giles asked me if I’d like to review an album by a band that New Musical Express had compared to Evan Dando’s group. I’d never reviewed an album before, but why not? Take the challenge, me! A week later I was listening to the CoCo B’s self-titled debut. And a few weeks after that, I still couldn’t think of what to say about it.

I admit it — I’m lazy. But I also realized I was in over my head when it came to reviewing a new release. How many times do professional music critics listen to a record before putting fingers to keyboard? Six times? I think I saw that number mentioned in an article once. So should I, a novice critic, listen 12 times before collecting my thoughts? When do I know that I’ve lived with an album long enough to truly understand it? When it starts to get on my nerves because it never refills the ice trays?

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I should start subscribing to the newspaper again on Sundays. Not for the news, of course. Please. No, the only part of the paper I’m interested in is Parade magazine, particularly Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, the regular page-two feature where Scott answers readers’ questions about various celebrities’ careers, love lives, and deeply offensive character flaws.

Judging by his responses, I’m guessing that Scott is somewhere around the age of 117. He’s a curmudgeon who thinks Hollywood doesn’t make them like they used to, whether the “them” in question is movies, movie stars, or the tawdry things those stars do in public to keep Scott’s readers interested and thereby keep his mailbox full. Flash your unmentionables at the paparazzi all you want, Paris and Britney, but Walter Scott remembers a time when unmentionables with true talent were the talk of the town, and they were being violated by real celebrities like Fatty Arbuckle.

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Sequels are fun. They’re not always good, but the movie-loving teenager who continues to take up space inside my soul will always be excited by them, especially the mere concept of sequels, i.e. “more of what you love (if all goes well).” These days, when it does go well, like with last summer’s Live Free or Die Hard, it’s a nice surprise. When it doesn’t, like with 2002’s Men in Black II, you almost forget what you liked so much the first time around.

This summer there will be a new Indiana Jones sequel in theaters: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s a big deal in the world of sequels, seeing as how there hasn’t been a new entry in this series since 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Expectations are high for some fans, who might have preferred that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford had stopped after three films, but the Indiana Jones series was never structured as a trilogy like the two sets of Star Wars movies. Nothing was resolved in Last Crusade that was first brought up in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, except for the deaths of more Nazis.

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I’m a little angry today. I wish I wasn’t.

After all, it’s a new year. A chance to put aside the previous year’s disappointments, setbacks, frustrating failures, endlessly escalating arguments, sunlight-devouring grudges, and temporarily blinding crimes of passion. (Technically, my crime was more like a misdemeanor of passion, but my attorney, Dave-o, has advised me not to talk about it at this time and in this particular forum.) A chance to start over with a clean slate full of hope, joy, and other emotions/feelings that are widely considered to be positive and good and so forth.

Here’s why I’m angry — I have a three-year-old niece. Yes, she’s a bundle of joy, an angel, one of God’s better people, etc. And now she’s talking all the time and expanding her vocabulary every day. But recently, after I returned home from a relaxing game of putt-putt with Dave-o and some of his other clients who are currently awaiting trial, my niece asked me if I had played “futt-futt.”

“You mean putt-putt?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Futt-futt.”

Her parents and grandparents laughed. I contemplated smiling, but that was only because I thought she’d stop confusing the letters P and F on the third (and hopefully final) go-round. After she called my favorite competitive sport “futt-futt” for the 11th consecutive time, I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. Away with you, child, until you can say something truly impressive, like “full scholarship” or “presidential pardon.”

You know what my niece’s first word was? “Dada.” No, she wasn’t referring to the early-20th-century art movement that generated nothing of value except for a fluke hit single by the Police in the 1980s, if I remember my history correctly. She was referring to her father. You know, like “daddy.” But she didn’t say “daddy.” She said “dada.”

This is why I’m angry — “DADA” AIN’T A WORD. And yet we praise our nation’s children for saying gibberish that’s almost like real words and then pretend like it’s actually recognized as proper English by Merriam and Webster, the one-name-only longtime companions who invented the dictionary. No wonder we’re all so screwed up — we’ve been told lies from day one! Or whatever day we started forming actual syllables that sort of combined to make actual words but not really. Day 447, maybe? I can’t remember that far back.

As an American culture — and as a popular culture (although we’re certainly an unpopular culture if you ask certain other cultures these days) — we need to stop perpetuating these postnatal falsehoods immediately. We also need to buy something nice for Dave-o: his birthday is January 12. I was thinking of chipping in for a leather attaché case. Who’s with me?