Category Archives: Lists

The Worst SNL Characters of All Time

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Saturday Night Live celebrated its fortieth anniversary over the weekend with a three and a half hour special full of clips, former cast members, special guests, music, and, of course, recurring characters. As much as the show gets credit for its political and celebrity impressions, pioneering fake news, and occasional forays into edgy music, what most people associate with SNL is its four decades’ worth of characters and catchphrases. Most of the ones revived for the special were respectable (Wayne’s World; What Up with That; Stefon); a few were unnecessary (Garth and Kat). But any longtime SNL fans probably maintain a mental list of the recurring bits that they never ever want to see again (and will probably see again, even if the cast members in question are gone, during compilations, anniversary specials, and when those cast members return to host). It’s an inevitable byproduct of (a.) having recurring characters at all and (b.) doing recurring characters often as a clear concession to casual fans. Not everyone watches SNL every week and even fewer people have been watching it every week for decades.

But some of us do and have and this is my list of beloved recurring characters I absolutely despise. To keep it a little positive — it’s the show’s birthday, after all — I’ll suggest alternatives for all of the hacky, overplayed, irritating torture I’ll be discussing. I considered an accompanying list of my favorite recurring characters, but we’re already working on a Best of Will Forte post. That’s basically the same thing.

Feel free to chime in with your own least-favorites, or to defend these terrible sketches, in the comments.
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The 11 Best Sleater-Kinney Songs of All Time

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Sleater-Kinney woke up from a ten-year nap (during which Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss all accomplished more than any of us have in our lives so far) and reformed properly this year, with a recorded-in-secret new album No Cities to Love and a tour that just started this week and will continue into the beautiful spring. To celebrate this and our last month or so spent playing No Cities endlessly, the SportsAlcohol.com Sleater-Kinney core — that is, the editors and writers who have tickets to see Sleater-Kinney at the end of this month — put together our aggregate and completely definitive list of the band’s top eleven songs.
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The Best Movie of 2014: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

I mentioned yesterday that there was a great variety of movies on the five different lists submitted for our Best Movies of 2014 poll. That’s true, but at the same time, one movie ran away with the top spot in a decisive victory: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel didn’t just appear on every list, it ranked first on three of them and within the top five on all five lists. Rather than figure out who should write about this movie, then, we decided to talk about it together. Here’s SportsAlcohol.com on our collective favorite movie of 2014:
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The 15 Best Movies of 2014

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Finishing up our first ever year-in-review coverage for our first ever year in existence, we have for your approval or disdain.first SportsAlcohol.com list of the year’s best movies: The Top 15 Best Movies of 2014.

Fifteen, because ten was too few this year. Fifteen, because some of us were narrowing down our individual ballots from lists of thirty or forty. Fifteen, because it never hurts to offer more reasons to be hopeful about the future. Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, Maggie, and Jesse all sent in ballots, and a lot of great and diverse choices didn’t quite make our final list. But I think we explain pretty well why these movies went the distance. So let’s quit preambling and just get to it:
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BEST OF 2014: SportsAlcohol.com

Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
Rob

2014 was SportsAlcohol.com‘s first year of true existence. After years of us joking about the most perfect domain name, I bought it last December and made our first post this past January. Even though we didn’t have much of a plan, things kind of snowballed from there. Branching out from our core group of founders, we got a lot of our friends to contribute articles, blurbs, lists, comments, and their voices (to our podcast). Without checking with anyone else, I decree the following to be the best SportsAlcohol.com content of 2014!

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Reading in the #YesAllWomen Year and the Best Fiction of 2014

Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
Sara

This was a challenging year for many reasons. But it was also a year where many of us rose to those challenges, shaking off our complacency and examining our biases to become better cultural participants. Or at least more aware ones. Which is partly what made reading so exciting this year. Inspired by the still disappointing VIDA numbers, which track gender representation in print media and review outlets, 2014 became, for many, the year of reading women. At a time when the question of likability is still on everyone’s tongues, I was struck more than ever by the risks so many female authors are taking, which may be why so many of them made my final list. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good year for the men too, particularly those making their debuts with big sweeping books of America, as a place and a concept. But ultimately what made reading in 2014 such a pleasure was the sheer variety of stories begin told. So without further ado, here are my five best fiction books for the year:
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BEST TV OF 2014: OUR TOP TEN

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

There is a lot of stuff on TV; as diverse as our music and movie and book tastes might be here at SportsAlcohol.com, probably no end-of-year voting offered as many different hours as our collective list of the best TV of 2014. Nearly fifty different shows were mentioned across our ballots, which is something like 500 hours of television, give or take. Yet a clear consensus did emerge, and that was that we pretty much all watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine but don’t quite love it the best. Here, below, is what we do love the best (maybe next year, Samberg).

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The SportsAlcohol.com Album of the Year: St. Vincent by St. Vincent

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Our album of the year is St. Vincent by St. Vincent. Five of us put together wildly different album lists, and this was the common ground, appearing on every single one, often near the top. We were all at least somewhat familiar with St. Vincent’s work before this year, but her self-titled record blows her past, merely good albums off whatever planet she’s from. As gratifying as it’s been to see female pop artists completely take over the charts over the past couple of years, it’s hard not to see St. Vincent as the new-millennium female pop star (which is to say: pop star) for the smart set. Below, Marisa, Sara, Rob, and Jesse piece together what we love about this album from its eleven wonderful songs.

The SportsAlcohol.com 2014 Album of the Year: St. Vincent

1. Rattlesnake

From her robotic live show choregoraphy to the growth she shows on St. Vincent, it’s clear that Annie Clark enjoyed her time working with David Byrne. I may have mentioned this before, but I am big into opening tracks. I probably read too much into the chioce of “Rattlesnake” as the leadoff to this record, but who cares when the song is this good. Twilight Zone paranoia fights it way over layers of synths and guitars with a bouncy beat to boot (and, maybe most unnerving of all, apparently based on a true story). It’s like so many tracks on this album: so many great things at once. – Rob

2. Birth in Reverse

St. Vincent is by far my favorite artist prone to adding “in America” at the end of a phrase. I mean, that sounds like a go-to parody move for making your lyrics sound as all-encompassingly pompous as possible. And yet in “Birth in Reverse,” for my money the catchiest song on this record, it functions more as a locator. The song opens with a description of ordinary household activities (of a sort), and the chorus’s description of what she sees “through the blinds,” “a birth in reverse in America,” feels like a zoom-out to a Google Maps view of where-ever the hell you bide your downtime when you’re the lady from St. Vincent. (Bonus points for the phrase “birth in reverse” supposedly coming from Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.) The view from St. Vincent’s window sounds especially jittery because the music moves at a relentless pace that sounds like a workout video going amok. Whether it’s making a sweeping statement about America or, potentially worse, making a sweeping statement about how we all view the world through a digital lens (see track 5), St. Vincent makes opportunities for pomposity sound palatable, and palatable things sound extremely fucking weird. – Jesse

3. Prince Johnny

True fact: I am the last one to turn in my St. Vincent write-up. That’s because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to sort through all my feelings about “Prince Johnny,” apart from the feeling that I love it. She starts off the song by saying, “You’re kind, but you’re not simple.” The same can be said for the song: It’s pleasant, but it’s not simple. That’s why music writers have twisted themselves into knots trying to describe it, layering on these really purple words, like calling it a “a luxuriant, rhythmic ballad with a melancholic, detailed narrative.” I’m not criticizing. It needs this kind of description. I would add these equally flowery words: haunting, longingly, soaring, enigmatic, elegiac,  and heartbreaking. Kind-but-simple words do not do justice.

When I saw St. Vincent at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland this year, we got there late and had a less-than-ideal position in the crowd. Much of my view was obstructed for most of the concert. But, when she played “Prince Johnny,” she climbed atop of a tower of amps and sang it from far above the crowd. I understand that Clark is known for crazy stage antics, but I’m glad she made sure that “Prince Johnny” got a big moment in the show, even though it’s a quiet song. – Marisa

St. Vincent 2

4. Huey Newton

I’ve always thought of politics as incidental to St. Vincent’s music. It’s certainly there, as in the Strange Mercy closer “Year of the Tiger,” but usually it’s subtextual instead of foregrounded. But she must have picked up on something in the air because in a year marked by racial strife and protests against police brutality she fortuitously named a song for one of the founders of the Black Panthers. Newton had no lack of trouble in his short life as an activist: he was jailed (and later acquitted) for the murder of a police officer, and eventually was shot and killed by a member of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison and street gang in Oakland, in a neighborhood he had once helped revitalize. St. Vincent’s music often walks the line between beauty and insanity and nowhere is that more evident than the brilliantly structured song that bears his name. The opening verses, unfolding over a spacey jazz beat as St. Vincent’s voice reaches higher into her register, are ominous and nonsensical, conjuring images of “cardboard cutthroats” and “fuckless porn sharks.” Then it makes a brutal break, a jagged guitar riff crashing in as she shifts into righteous fury, literally shredding everything that’s come before. We’re in “perpetual night” now among motherless creatures and misfits and she’s not afraid to leave us there. Though no explicit political statement is made, it’s pretty clear which lot St. Vincent throws herself in with and it’s not those who are “safe, safe, and safest.” – Sara

5. Digital Witness

If there can be said to be a through line in St. Vincent’s album it may well be a rejection of our current cultural consumption, or at least a pointed critique. Many of the songs sound like observational transmissions from an alien being and that hits its zenith with “Digital Witness.” Is there any mantra that speaks more to the anxieties of the modern age, and damns them more, than “If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The popularity of Facebook, Instagram, and all the other social media sites we congregate on has turned us all into digital witnesses of one another, less living life than performing it, and St. Vincent means to wrench us away. “I want all of your mind,” she commands, and the song is catchy enough that we’ll readily give it to her. The instrumentation bears some of the hallmarks of her recent collaboration with David Byrne with its swaggering guitar and bright stuttering horns. There’s something pleasingly artificial about the sound, which ends up embracing the synthetic texture of modern life as much as it sends it up. Any musician worth her salt is hyper aware of how she presents herself to her audience and for all her otherworldliness St. Vincent is no different. “Won’t somebody sell me back to me?” she asks at the song’s end but if anyone is in control here, it’s her. – Sara

6. I Prefer Your Love

Clark, queen of the slow jam! It’s a shame that mixtape-making isn’t the way that young people court each other anymore. “I Prefer Your Love” would be a good song to have stashed away for a deal-sealing cassette. Even if the intended could resist the “I prefer your love to Jesus” opening lyric on account of silliness, there’s no way the “All the good in me is because of you” wouldn’t work. Sorry, kids. You’ll never find anything as beautiful on Tindr. – Marisa

7. Regret

Annie Clark claims she’s thirty two years old, but it’s more likely that she’s an ageless visitor from another planet. The clues go beyond her increasing comfort in loosening her human façade and dressing more like one of our new otherworldly overlords. Take “Regret” for example. There is a level of reflection and knowing world-weariness to these lyrics that I just don’t see coming from someone my little sister’s age. Musically, she has experimented more with her sound than most rock stars do during their entire career. “Reget” sees her try out a bunch of new guitar tones and play with rhythm by having the bass line in the chorus go against everything. She also shows off her vocal range here as well just for fun. “Regret” is so next-level, there’s no way she hasn’t been secretly working on her music for at least decades. I bow down to our new ruler. – Rob

8. Bring Me Your Loves

DRONE 1: DID YOU LISTEN TO THIS MESSAGE? ST. VINCENT IS ORDERING ALL OF US TO BRING HER OUR LOVES.

DRONE 2: OH, LIKE, WE SHOULD EACH BRING HER ONE OF OUR FAVORITE THINGS?

DRONE 1: SHE SAYS ALL OF THEM.

DRONE 2: ALL OF THEM?

DRONE 1: YEAH. SHE SOUNDS PRETTY SERIOUS.

DRONE 2: DID SHE SAY WHAT SHE WANTS TO DO WITH THEM?

DRONE 1: SHE WANTS TO LOVE THEM TOO.

DRONE 2: WELL THAT SOUNDS PRETTY HARMLESS.

DRONE 1: I THINK YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE.

DRONE 2: OH JESUS. THIS SOUNDS SERIOUS.

DRONE 1: YOU SEE?

DRONE 2: THIS SONG IS NOT THAT LOUD IN THE BROADER SCHEME OF LOUD MUSIC, BUT IT STILL SOUNDS LIKE IT’S HAPPENING IN ALL CAPS.

DRONE 1: STOP WASTING TIME, WE NEED TO BRING OUR LOVES TO HER IMMEDIATELY.

DRONE 2: I’M REALLY GOING TO MISS MY PUPPY. – Jesse

9. Psychopath

I have listened to this album countless times. I have listened to the Lady Gaga song “Edge of Glory” exactly as many times as I’ve heard it in a public place since it was released (I would estimate about ten). Yet every single time I hear St. Vincent sing “…’cause I’m on the edge of a heart attack” in this song, her intonation leads me to expect her to sing “on the edge of glory.” This is embarrassing because St. Vincent is vastly superior to Lady Gaga and annoying because it sometimes actually manages to get “Edge of Glory” into my head, but also, finally, a useful point of comparison, because Annie Clark, as St. Vincent, does all of the weird, inventive, artsy shapeshifting that Stefani Germanotta does as Lady Gaga. Hell, the transition from the stuttering verses of “Psychopath” to the lusher orchestration of its chorus and back again to minimalist beats and angular guitar is more dynamic than most of Gaga’s costumed-up club boilerplate. Of course, 2014 is kind of a silly time to be picking on Lady Gaga; St. Vincent makes it plentifully easy to just listen to something better.

10. Every Tear Disappears

This song is also very good, but instead of writing about it, I wanted to share with you a sampling of some of Annie’s magnificent hairstyles from this year. – Rob
SV1
SV2
SV3

11. Severed Crossed Fingers

A lot of St. Vincent, the album, is hepped-up and robo-dance-y; even the slow jams feel like they’re about to explode into something more menacing (and by virtue of being followed by “Huey Newton” and “Regret,” they do). But the album closer feels like the St. Vincent version of a torch song or a Broadway finale. I know those things sound (a.) contradictory and (b.) not particularly descriptive of a song with so much evisceration imagery. But can’t you just imagine Annie Clark in a semi-robotic pose with a handheld microphone, arm outstretched to the crowd as she warbles matter-of-factly yet emotively about her crossed fingers lying in rubble? (I have to imagine it, because the two times I saw St. Vincent in concert this year, she neglected to play this song.) Lush but unsentimental, glorious and strange: this is St. Vincent closing up a near-perfect record. – Jesse

The Top Five Best Albums of 2014

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

It sounded like a lame joke I might make to myself or on Twitter: Rolling Stone has thought it over, and they’ve decided that the best, most interesting, and/or most inspiring albums of 2014 are: the one that U2 gave away for free, and the one that Bruce Springsteen pulled together from a decade of outtakes. I like U2 and I’ve got love for latter-day Springsteen. But the question remains:

Don’t you think we can do better?

Not every music publication’s best-music list is as lame as Rolling Stone‘s, of course, but there is a certain familiarity and timidity in a whole lot of them. The kind of over-the-top poptimism that gives Taylor Swift a lot of bonus points for making an album that isn’t unlistenable and that a lot of people bought. Or the kind of inclusiveness that insists you need to count down 50 top albums of the year, which is to say mention a lot without really calling anything way better than anything else. I understand that a crap-ton of albums are released every year. But is a list of 50 a best-of, or is it an abridged chronology?

So here’s the SportsAlcohol.com music nerds to tell you what’s what. Rob, Marisa, Sara, Craig and I submitted fairly disparate Best Albums lists and rallied around a few top vote-getters to create our rock-solid top five. We’re pretty sure it’s the best one on the internet. So there’s nothing left to do but enjoy it. And then argue with us like we’re Rolling Stone.
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The Ten Best Weezer Songs of the Past Decade

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Weezer is the Star Wars prequels of rock and roll: objects of loathing born from young love, recipients of vitriol presumed to be deserved and, beyond the affection of a few die hard nutcases, universal. This is hyperbolic, of course: a rock band “no one” likes can no more survive for decades than a movie series “everyone” hates can gross $300 million domestic every time out. But it’s inarguable that Weezer has, like the Star Wars prequels I so enjoy, disappointed a lot of people, and unlike Attack of the Clones, I would not give any of Weezer’s albums of the past decade three and a half stars out of four for the sheer enjoyability of the good stuff.

Also unlike Star Wars, which had three-year gaps (at least in terms of movies) for opinions to percolate (and, I think, sometimes nervously reverse themselves into scorn), Weezer has absorbed these negative reactions via not scarcity, but abundance. The band came back in 2001 after nearly five years of inactivity, and they haven’t been away for so long since. Though their 2005 nadir Make Believe was bookended by three-year breaks, they’ve also had major productivity spurts, most notably in the 2008-2010 period where they released three studio albums and one cast-off collection in less than four years.

Conventional wisdom says these records mostly just upped the ante on how bad Weezer could let down its dwindling fanbase, and true that none of these records or what I’d call “good,” though a few flirt with “pretty good” or “OK.” But as the band prepares to release its umpteenth for-real-this-time return to form, Everything Will Be Alright in the End (out tomorrow), it’s worth noting that the past decade of Weezer has not yielded nonstop dross. In fact, there are some pretty great Weezer songs adrift in the seas of mediocrity, waiting for attentive, non-angry listeners to rescue them. This is what I intend to do here. I’m limiting this to a list of the Ten Best Weezer Songs of the Past Decade and, as such, not including their post-comeback records, 2001’s Green Album or 2002’s Maladroit — because those albums are, as a whole, good. Not great like the first two, but good enough to listen to without much skipping – really, the best halves of Green and Maladroit could combine to form a record nearly as good as Blue or Pinkerton. And the songs that follow, well, they could probably form a record nearly as good as that one. Maybe some of the poptimism afforded derivative Top 40 songs might (in a Weezer-friendly rockist fashion) be applied to your old pals from ’94.
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