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One of the reasons we love sports is because it gives us something to argue about. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun growing up a Yankees fan in Queens if I hadn’t been growing up in a family of Mets fans. My brother Jerry and I would argue for hours about whose team was better. And now that the universe’s sick sense of humor has visited upon me a daughter who is a Mets fan, and an assistant who is – even worse – a Red Sox fan, I can continue to have those same arguments now.

As music fans, we naturally fall into the same sorts of behavior. Who was the best rock band, the Beatles or the Stones? Who was the better conductor, Toscanini or Furtwängler? Sinatra or Bennett? Miles Davis or Chet Baker? Callas or Tebaldi? Blur or Oasis? Jay Z or Fifty Cent? We started doing our Tuesday “Soundcheck Smackdown” segments for exactly this reason – because when you’re passionate about something, you argue about it - especially when someone isn’t quite as passionate about it as you are. You become a fan, and part of being a fan is the right and the privilege of defending your choice against all others. Our first Smackdown dealt with the classic Beatles argument – who wrote the best songs, John or Paul? (Soundcheck listeners, always a perverse bunch, seemed to agree that the correct answer was Ringo.)

Sean Mannings’ “Rock N Roll Cage Match” is therefore an entertaining book, because it gives us even more to argue about. I don’t know if Metallica vs Nirvana was ever really a rivalry, or U2 and REM, but hey, we can argue about that too.

What’s your favorite music rivalry? Name a favorite artist and tell us who their archenemy is and maybe we can steal a few of these for future Smackdowns…

Two visual artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, have created a project called Fleshmap as a visual representation of desire – an easily digested way of showing how humans approach one another’s bodies. The site has pages devoted to the sense of sight, or touch, and a page devoted to the sense of hearing and speech. One page on Fleshmap is a mapping of body parts that shows where men and women prefer to be touched. No mammals will be surprised by what they find there. The surprise comes in the webpage devoted to the sense of hearing, which is called Listen.

Viegas and Wattenberg analyzed the lyrics to 10,000 songs in many genres, and found that the body part we most often sing about is… the eyes. The notable exception is hip-hop, where the butt, whether funky or not, reigns supreme. When you think of it, it makes sense that the eyes are the body part we most often sing about. After all, they’re the body part people most often talk about – “the eyes are a window to the soul,” “eyes never lie,” “your lying eyes,” and of course, “hey, my eyes are up here.”

But with hip-hop now the dominant musical style, it just seems that songs about posteriors are everywhere. (Almost a quarter of rap songs are about bottoms.) Now, I happen not to believe that rappers are any more focused on one body part than anyone else. It’s just a reflection of a growing frankness and openness about sex in our culture generally. The eyes are great for songs about romance, where you need to play it cool. But if the point of the song is to generate heat, lyrics now tend to head south. If songwriters could’ve gotten away with it 60 years ago, we might’ve heard Sinatra singing about a body part other than “Angel Eyes.” And you know, he probably could’ve made it work…

Gospel music, by the way, features the hands more than the eyes (and “bottom” in Gospel is just the opposite of “top”). Tell us: What do you think these different body parts say about these different types of music? Leave a comment.

So Van Morrison has banned booze at his UK concerts. The idea of banning alcohol at a concert makes about as much sense as banning beer at the ballpark. Look, no one wants to have to deal with drunken audience members – not the musicians, not the hall owners, and not the people nearby who are worried about hearing the music or cleaning vomit off their shoes. But part of the experience of live music is having a drink and unwinding after a long day – or winding up for a long night. Opera and orchestra concerts offer drinks at intermissions and before the show – though they don’t generally allow drinks in the hall itself. But at many rock clubs, where you end up standing all night, often waiting well past the announced start time before hearing the music, having a beer or two makes the evening move along a bit more smoothly. Of course, the beer is often watered-down swill, and hideously overpriced. So at the other end of the alcohol/concert spectrum is something equally distasteful: places that actually try to force you to drink – “cover charge + two-drink minimum,” or something like that. Fortunately, that problem is easily solved: never go to those places.

It is very hard to legislate moderation – but ballparks have tried, having learned the hard way that allowing customers unrestricted access to beer often results in other customers staying away. And it seems to have helped a bit – many ballparks don’t sell beer after the 7th inning, so fans at a blowout don’t turn to drinking games for entertainment instead. I don’t know if you could take what works at Yankee Stadium and make it work for the Bowery Ballroom, but presumably if you’re at a concert, you’re there because you’re genuinely interested in the music, and don’t want to be completely blotto by the end, which is, after all, supposed to be the best part. And I’m not sure banning alcohol will solve the problem anyway – you can’t control how much drinking the fans do at the bar next door before the concert starts, after all. It strikes me as feeling a bit like middle school, where a couple of troublemakers could get detention for a whole class. (Which reminds me - sorry, class 201A.) If we’re adult enough to earn the money to buy the tickets to attend your show, treat us like adults. Now pour me a damn beer.

What do you think about alcohol at concerts? Does it contribute to the event, or do you prefer a more, um, sober approach? Leave a comment.

The French have this great saying, entre chien et loup. Literally, “between a dog and a wolf,” but of course it’s much more poetic than that – it is used to describe that time of day when the light is fading but it’s not yet dark, and things have a kind of eerie hue to them. (And thus, you can’t tell a dog from a wolf.) More generally it can mean something which is not quite this, not quite that.

I mention this phrase because while Philip Glass has had many things said about him – glowing, reverential tributes and some of the most outrageously outraged reviews you’ll ever read – I wonder if anyone’s ever said that about him. Glass is a unique figure in modern music. When Soundcheck kicked off WNYC’s Leonard Bernstein Festival last week, we wondered on-air whether there could ever be someone like Lenny, who was a major classical music figure but also an iconic figure of popular culture. In a fragmented media landscape, our guests all agreed that it was highly unlikely. But Philip Glass comes close. At this point, he has been an answer on Jeopardy, dragged willy-nilly into the animated world of South Park (the Christmas show from their first season), collaborated with Paul Simon, David Bowie, David Byrne, and many others, and has become one of the most easily identifiable composers of film scores anywhere. This last bit is no mean feat, given that his style is constantly being copied by others. He is very much a figure of American popular culture.

In fact, this is not a new phenomenon. Glass was entre chien et loup from the beginning. With his DIY approach, his amplified band, and his insistent, rhythmic, tonal music (at a time when “classical” music was largely atonal and cerebral) all set him apart. When I first heard his album Dance in the mid-70s, it seemed to me to be akin to some of the so-called Krautrock that was coming from progressive rock circles in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In fact, it was about a year after starting my college radio rock show that someone finally pointed out to me that Philip Glass wasn’t actually rock music. “Why do you play that classical composer on a rock show?” this colleague asked. I believe he was complaining, actually. Which a lot of people have done about Glass’s music over the years - about 40 of them, in fact.

So Glass remains a lightning rod of controversy in the music world. Many who previously loathed his work now love it, and some of his strongest proponents now claim he’s just rehashing old ideas in recent years. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it, that after 40 years in the public eye, he’s still somewhere between a dog and a wolf.

Now, a new 10-cd set offers one view of what his musical legacy will be… what do YOU think? What is his place in the music world, and what is his legacy likely to be? Leave a comment.

So Metallica is atop the Billboard 200 chart. Sort of reminds me of the 70s and 80s, when the Billboard album charts regularly featured rock bands. Now? Not so much. Aside from heavy metal (Metallica at #1, Slipknot at #12), there is almost no rock music atop the Billboard charts. (Darius Rucker’s CD is a country disc, and Kid Rock’s is… well, whatever.) Coldplay clings to #17, but to find any really interesting rock music on the top half of the Top 200, you have to go all the way down to Jack Johnson (#58) and MGMT (#81).

Billboard’s album chart and its singles chart, the Hot 100, used to be very different. Mainstream rock occasionally produced a hit single, but you found those bands largely on the album chart. And in the 80s, hip hop was very much an album-oriented genre too. But rap has successfully crossed over to the Hot 100 singles – without giving up its place on the Top 200 albums. And now, both charts are dominated by rap, R&B, and pop stars from American Idol or the Disney Channel. What we used to refer to as “mainstream rock” is largely absent. Maybe it’s not so mainstream anymore.

Tell us: What has happened to rock music? Has it just fragmented into too many little pieces? Is rock in danger of sliding off the cultural table, the way classical music and jazz did? Leave a comment.

The big thing in gyms now is apparently music. Various production houses, most notably Muzak, have created music services specifically with gyms and health clubs in mind. The idea is to use music to motivate the gym rats to step it up a notch, on the theory that music will turn a dull routine into something exciting and fun. Which sounds plausible enough, but there are a couple of problems. First of course is the fact that the music that excites one person will annoy the hell out of the person on the next machine. But I also wonder if there’s a basic flaw in the assumption. Not that music can affect the body during exercise – that’s backed by some pretty solid evidence. But will music motivate you to go to the gym? Seems to me that if you get up early in the morning or take time in the evening to go the club, you’re already motivated. Will music, as the Muzak providers suggest to the gym owners, get the weightlifters to try to work in one extra set? Sounds like a recipe for injury to me.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just jealous. My workout routine culminates in a swim of about 2 kilometers each morning before work, and they won’t be pumping tunes into the pool anytime soon… But even if you’re just doing sit-ups, how do you keep count if you’re distracted by the music?

So many questions. Would the right music get you to workout if you don’t already? Would you prefer to have music piped in from outside, or would you rather listen on your iPod? Is it more fun to be sharing the communal experience of hearing the same songs at the same time, or do you get a better workout from a playlist you put together yourself? Leave a comment.

While writing his article about Bernstein in today’s Daily News, David Hinckley asked if we could talk a bit about Bernstein’s legacy in general, his connection to WNYC in particular, and even more specifically, about what I thought of him. I repeated, for the twentieth time this week, the strange tale of how I discovered WNYC through a short-lived bus/subway ad for the station back in 1979 or 1980. (I’m afraid you’ll be subjected to a recorded version of this story at some point during the “Our Lenny” festival, especially if you listen to Evening Music.)

And then David asked, “how would you rate him as a composer? Was he one of the greats of the 20th century?” Well, this fairly obvious question caught me quite off guard. I did not want to simply answer “no,” although that was my first inclination. Bernstein’s concert works have never gained the traction of his music/theater works, especially “West Side Story” and “Candide” – or at least, the overture to the latter. The Symphonies are problematic, though full of interesting moments… but then I thought, “West Side Story” is likely to still be around when we’re all not. And the NY Phil thought enough of the Candide Overture to play it in Pyongyang this past February, when they made their historic visit to North Korea. Reputations have been established on far less. So I answered yes: because even without Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics – an amazingly forward-looking commentary on race relations in America – the song “America” is brilliant. The Candide Overture is brilliant. And once you really look at Bernstein’s concert music, there are gems there too. The “Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium),” for one. And especially his 1965 piece “Chichester Psalms,” which offer a musical link between Stravinsky’s 1930 “Symphony of Psalms” and Steve Reich’s 1981 “Tehillim.” All three are 20th century classics.

I think Bernstein’s reputation as an educator will never be duplicated – the media landscape is just too fragmented. Even the President can’t command the type of market share now that Bernstein got back then from being on the 3 main networks when they were basically the only game in town. His reputation as a conductor is probably secure, too, despite detractors. For one thing, it was Bernstein who reminded everyone (or told them for the first time) just how marvelous and important the symphonies of Gustav Mahler were. And his Beethoven recordings weren’t too shabby either. But his reputation as a composer, even during his own life, was often overshadowed by these other parts of his life.

So, 50 years from now, when no one alive remembers Bernstein as a ubiquitous media figure, and his recordings have become “historic” the way Toscanini is for us, what will Bernstein’s legacy be? Do you think he’ll be remembered as a composer? Leave a comment.

While Dave Thompson’s book “I Hate New Music” may be an exercise in hyperbole and provocation, it does make a rather familiar point: many people feel that the music they grew up with is simply the best music ever made. It is almost painfully obvious to anyone who grew up on Elvis in the 50s that 50s music is the best. And it is just as blindingly self-evident to the Pavement fans of the 90s that the best music was made more than 20 years after Elvis left the building. So when Dave Thompson categorically states that the best rock music ever made was made in the 70s, and that everything that came after 1978 sucked, well, how can you argue with him? I mean, just look at the evidence: Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” – an album so great that even my parents like it – will outlive us all. Led Zeppelin is still the pinnacle of rock swagger and mythos on the big stage. Add David Bowie, Talking Heads, The Clash… there’s a reason why every band’s MySpace page seems to list those three names on the “Sounds Like” line.

It would be churlish of me to point out that the 70s was also the decade of the novelty song (who remembers “The Streak”?); and the Rolling Stones’ disastrous move into disco (“Cherry Oh Baby” and “Hey Negrita,” among unfortunate others); and the storytelling song (the strangely upbeat “The Night Chicago Died,” the legendarily bad “Billy Don’t Be A Hero,” and out of respect for those of you eating your lunch right now I won’t even mention the mawkish treacle that was “Wildfire”).

Look, I grew up in the 70s, it was my decade too; and I’m happy to hear some of my old favorites every now and again. But I just can’t listen to the same things over and over – I want music to make me feel surprised or moved or lifted up, and I just can’t do that when I’m hearing a song for the hundredth time. For me, the best decade for music is this one. Always has been.

Tell us: What do you think about the “classic rock” of the 70s? Do they truly not make ‘em like they used to anymore?

Another season at the Met opens this week, and the somewhat traditional opener (Renee Fleming’s voice on display in three acts from three different operas) belies the fact that opera is actually opening up to more contemporary ideas. Peter Gelb at the Met and the incoming Gerard Mortier at the NY City Opera are hellbent on dragging opera into the 21st century, with new works, new productions of old works, and canny use of the media. Looking beyond New York, John Adams’ work “Doctor Atomic” is the latest in a series of operas (along with “Nixon In China” and “The Death Of Klinghoffer”) that some critics are called “Docu-operas,” because they’re taken from real-life characters from recent history. Stewart Wallace has gotten rave reviews for his collaboration with novelist Amy Tan on “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” in part because of the successful fusion of Western orchestral and Chinese classical instruments in his score. And Steve Reich’s operas like “The Cave” and “Three Tales” use the media – film, computer animation, and the like – in place of live characters and traditional sets.

All of this stretches the definition of opera to the point where people are understandably asking “IS it opera?” But we are such a visual and such a globalized culture now that multimedia or multicultural aspects shouldn’t seem so outlandish. I guess, in the end, if the composer says it’s opera, it’s opera. The real question is, who is it for? Can opera move ahead without leaving behind the operaphiles who’ve kept the art form alive? Or is opera transitioning now into some new and exciting form that you’re watching with anticipation? Let us know what you think the state of opera early in the 21st century is … leave a comment.

As I mentioned on Wednesday’s blog, country music wasn’t really my thing, at least while growing up here in the city. But I was aware that some of the better known singers were women – Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and much later on people like Shania Twain. Since I didn’t keep up with country music, it never occurred to me to wonder if women had any more or less opportunity in country music than their male counterparts. But people like writer Holly George Warren wondered, and looked into it, and as she’ll tell us today, the history of country music is one where women could play important but supporting roles, and rarely moved into the limelight. So Loretta and Dolly were the exceptions – the rule was more like Willie Nelson’s sister, Bobbie Lee Nelson, who has toured as his pianist for over 30 years but who never got a chance to do a record of her own, until now, when she’s 77.

Now this did get me wondering, about two things, actually. First – country music fans help me out here – is it true that country music has had limited roles for women to play? (And if so, is it changing?) And second, is it any different in any other genre of music? I mean, we expect to see women in folk music and pop, but hip-hop and heavy metal seem to remain stubbornly male bastions. Women composers have made great inroads in classical music, but women conductors remain a bit of a rarity. There’s a great tradition of women in jazz, but while a lot of our best-known jazz singers are women, most people would be hard-pressed to name a bandleader or even a musician who’s a woman. (Sorry jazz fans, but “most people” wouldn’t know who Carla Bley is, or Maria Schneider or Jane Ira Bloom, or even Mary Lou Williams.)

What do you think? We’re talking today specifically about women’s role in country music, but again, is it much different anywhere else along the music spectrum?