Tom Breihan

I'm not gen-X. Born in 79, baby! I have no generation! I am a magical unicorn who cannot be reduced!

I love English teachers. (For years, I thought I'd be one, since there was no way this writing thing was going to work out. Still might, when it stops working out!) But you can love English teachers and also acknowledge that they can be terribly embarrassing sometimes.

There's a holiday next week, I'm only doing four.

gonna be a lot of those.

That was his name in '93. He dropped the "Doggy" a couple of years later.

"Imagine" is not a 10.

oh yeah that's the good shit

10. Obviously.

Indie pop in general is a 7.

Discography is one of the all-time great best-of collections. (PopArt, their other best-of comp, is also really good.)

I have no memory of this.

yeah, probably 04

This was in Hampden, or maybe Remington. It was right after a Lungfish show at the Ottobar.

He dressed up like Robert Smith for Halloween one year. We were at the same party, which got violently broken up by the cops, with like 20 people getting arrested. (I didn't get arrested, but a bunch of my friends did. Dunno if Cass got arrested.)

Trap music, as it's understood today, has become an aesthetic catchall for a rap style that's emerged in Atlanta in the past 15 years or so: busy hi-hats, dinky synth melodies, stop-start flows. It's not necessarily music about dealing drugs. But if your personal definition of "trap" is "rap songs about dealing drugs," then Ice-T, Schooly D, NWA, and 8Ball & MJG all made trap music. And so did Biggie, Rae & Ghost, Nas, and Jay-Z.

This is not a trap album. It's Detroit street-rap. It's different.

that's the one. (altho, who knows, maybe there are more.)

He was always nice to me; I'm just assuming here.

I got to work with Christgau (tho never really directly) for the better part of a year. I did a music blog there (Status Ain't Hood) for about 3 years, and for the longest time I just kind of stayed quiet and kept my head down. First time I ever talked to Bob was in the elevator, when he asked me what I thought of the Damian Marley album. (He liked it more than I did.) Before that, I figured he had no idea who I was. Bob had a real messy cubicle The whole Voice situation was SO FUCKED UP, but I got to work with amazing people while I was there: Chuck Eddy, Rob Harvilla, Nick Sylvester, Zach Baron, Pete L'Official, Camille Dodero, David Marchese, Nick Catucci, D. Shawn Bosler, Dennis Lim, Ed Park, a shitload of other people. (Met Greg Tate once but was mostly scared to talk to him.) Got that job when I was like 25, and it's amazing that I got to share space with all these fuckin giants of the field. Also my cubicle was right next to Michael Musto's cubicle, and he for sure hated me because I was loud and because my ringtone was the Shop Boyz' "Party Like A Rockstar." Also I got to be there at the first editorial meeting after Lacey bought the paper, where Lacey and Nat Hentoff were just screaming at each other the whole time and I had no idea what was going on.

People in Baltimore who are younger than 70 don't actually do that, or at least they don't do that in non-ironic/self-conscious ways.