Ingredients and nutritional values are one thing, but has the author actually bothered to compare the quality of these two products? Once prepared, Kraft Mac & Cheese has a life of approximately ten minutes, after which the cheese sauce becomes dry and pasty. It becomes inedible, quite frankly. I've never found this to be the case with Annie's. That alone makes it a more desirable product than Kraft.

Another thing that makes Annie's more desirable is that the company making it isn't owned by Altria, the same parent company that owns Phillip Morris. Therefore, my purchase of Annie's doesn't embolden people who are directly responsible for marketing cigarettes to children.

The author's suggestion that "real" mac & cheese from scratch is a viable alternative to the boxed stuff is just absurd. This is convenience food, remember? "Real" mac & cheese does, in fact, take longer to prepare (duh). It produces a bigger mess. It is more expensive. And if you believe that it's better for you than the boxed stuff, I'm sure that Altria would love to talk to your kids about not smoking.

It would seem that omitting the good albums from this list would be a more efficient task than replacing the bad ones with more deserving titles. Then you could just re-title the list The 150 Least Essential Recordings Ever.

I can't even ponder that question honestly unless I know what you're talking about in the first place. Is there a sonic benchmark for blackness that I'm just not aware of? If there is, who or what is it?

Is it Motown? And wouldn't that be ironic? I can't even count how many times I've heard some clueless record store geek tell me that Motown wasn't really black music, because it was tailored for a white audience.

Is it Robert Cray? Bobby McFerrin? Tracy Chapman? Huey Lewis?

Stupid, STUPID question. Seriously.

* The Beastie Boys
* Jonathan Richman
* Richard Hell

David Lee Roth made more bad solo records by himself than good records with Van Halen, therefore does not belong on any such list.

Yeah, I know. The Beastie Boys are on there. What can I say?

I'm ambivalent about Avril Lavigne. I find her music insipid and unchallenging. For that reason alone, I'm puzzled to find her interviewed in Salon; but whatever. Salon is a news magazine. Am I supposed to read every single article? If I read something and don't enjoy it, does someone owe me something?

Frankly, who cares? Some things move people, and other things move other people. One can spend a lot of time and energy disproving an artist's authenticity. When they do this, they're not really thinking about the process of experiencing music for themselves. They're merely invalidating that experience for someone else. You can't really do that without being an asshole.

Oh, and to Daniel Thomas MacInnes (he said this: "Avril Lavigne is not a musician"): check out a dictionary some time. In it, you will find that a musician is someone who makes music a profession. Like it or not, this is an accurate description of what Avril Lavigne does. You may not have affinity for her work (and I'm with you there), but it's not a matter of aesthetics. You don't get to decide who is and isn't a cab driver. Same deal here.

Let me get this straight: by your assessment, three of the top seven contestants delivered adequate performances. How exactly does this represent a compelling case for Idol being America's most popular show? Even if you factor in the mentoring footage and the judge's insipid commentary on those three performances, you're still dealing with around twelve minutes of entertainment, and 48 minutes of filler and commercials. What is your time worth, Marchese?

If you actually enjoy watching the bad performances, I can see your point. However, I have to take issue with your assessment of the judges. I don't remember anything about their commentary last night that deviated from the standard "Allright, so check it out," "You are such a beautiful, artistic soul," and "Absolutely horrible." In fact, I found Simon's awkward mention of the VA Tech tragedy in the middle of his critique of Blake's performance to be a low point for the show.

When did Jack Harvey take over Audiofile?

In all seriousness, these American Idol posts are turning out to form a very compelling argument against net neutrality.

With all due respect to David Marchese, his weekly critiques of AI--a show that I watch and enjoy--have been trite and uninsightful. I don't take issue with AI being covered in Salon, but with the tone and quality of the coverage itself.

Also, AI is more about celebrity and pop culture than it is about music. As such, Heather Havrilesky is better suited to write about it than Marchese. Her coverage of that sub-AI asshatfest Rockstar: Supernova was priceless.

...is the Yngvie Malmsteen of beat boxing.

...but the RIAA is in the right here.

The idea that songwriters (or more accurately, the people who own the publishing rights to their songs) get compensated for radio airplay while performers get nothing is, and always has been, grossly unfair.

Consider for a minute that when a Chuck Berry song gets played on the radio, Chuck Berry gets nothing. The only party to get compensated is the estate of Morris Levy; a morally deficient business man who never wrote a note of music in his life. Now consider what that means to the hundreds of thousands of performers who haven't formed a livelihood out of coasting on their larger-than-life legend, and didn't write (or, more likely, secure publishing rights to) their most popular songs. Someone is making a lot of money off of music that they played an integral part in creating, and it sure as Hell isn't them.

Whatever the RIAA's impetus for staging this fight may be, the position they're advocating here will result in a system that is infinitely more fair than what is currently in place. It won't be perfect, but it will be more fair.