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50 Hot Takes for the Philadelphia Sports Fan: Music Edition

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Sep 26th, 2025 · 1:04 PM EDT

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This post is by request. After we wished Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run an unhappy 50th birthday, a few emailers with equally-cultured tastes suggested we do a music version of this column.

That seemed like a great idea, and relevant enough for a sports blog since music always finds a way into sporting culture and vice versa. Look no further than the late, great Eddie Money, for example, who hated the Yankees as much as you and I. Pearl Jam played 17 shows in a row to close out the Spectrum and the traitorous Taylor Swift decided to forsake her familial Eagles fandom for the red and white of the insufferable Kansas City Chiefs, who were losing 40 to 6 in Super Bowl LIX before scoring in garbage time.

Here are 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan, a music edition:

1. There is no “best” or “worst” member of Wu-Tang Clan. There is only the Wu.
2. There’s no reason for Green Day to be played on both 93.3 WMMR and 102.9 WMGK.
3. In fact, there should only be a 10-year overlapping window between the two stations. WMGK should play no songs released after 1990. WMMR should play no songs released before 1980. The only bands that get the dual treatment come from that 1980s Guns N Roses type of category.
4. Beasley has to know that the only reason we listen to WMMR in the first place is because of the DJs, people like Pierre Robert. If you remove the human element, your station is just an iPod.
5. It’s annoying when someone, almost always a young white woman, says “oh I listen to everything!” Yeah? Do you listen to Dying Fetus? No. Then you don’t listen to everything.
6. Circle pits are kind of bullshit if you think about it. Do they look cool? Yeah. Is it easy to participate? Yeah. But no one actually gets hit. What’s the point of a mosh pit if you don’t actually hit anyone? The worst part is when people stand in a ring around the outside, or huddle in the middle. They want to take pot shots at the people in the pit, but don’t actually want to get in the pit.
7. Why do white people like DMX so much? Well, #1, the songs and the lyrics were catchy and they just stuck. #2, even if you didn’t grow up in the hood or face the same struggles, the music told the story. It was raw and honest and easy to connect with. That’s why it lands with people from so many different backgrounds.
8. It should be illegal to perform a cover song without first announcing who wrote the song. Likewise, when a cover song is written out as text, it should have to be identified as a cover, like this: Judas Priest: The Green Manalishi (with the Two-Pronged Crown) – [Fleetwood Mac cover]. This is for giving credit where it’s due, and educating people at the same time. It’s wild that people think GNR wrote Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. Likewise, Sublime had five cover songs on 40oz. to Freedom. Can you name them?
9. Related – the Sublime with Rome albums were good. You can’t look at those discs through the lens of the first two albums. You have to look at them as their own separate thing.
10. It was irksome when Ozzy died and all of these people were saying stuff like, “I loved the Osbournes reality show!” Fuck the reality show! Ozzy should be remembered for Black Sabbath and his solo music career and nothing else.
11. The East Coast needs more large summer music festivals like Europe. Firefly and Made in America are both kaput. Coachella and all of that west coast stuff is mostly inaccessible. Slayer just played a one-off festival show in Hershey and the turnout was incredible. There’s no reason why we can’t do more of that.
12. The North Star Bar was Philly’s most underrated music venue. Please come back.
13. The Trocadero sucked, but wasn’t that the whole point? It was old and grimy, a former burlesque joint with history. It created this crusty Philly vibe that just sort of made sense.
14. The vinyl revival is one of the worst things to happen to music. It’s good to have physical media that gives space to liner notes, lyrics, and artwork, but charging people $50 for a “limited-edition” purple-colored piece of PVC will always be a joke.
15. It’s not that we don’t “get” modern-day hip hop, it’s that modern-day hip hop blows chunks.
16. You can say whatever you want to say about Ted Nugent and his politics, but revisionist musical history is off the table. Those early discs were incredible, especially the underrated Free For All, with vocals handled primarily by Meatloaf and Derek St. Holmes.
17. Nobody goes to a live show to hear a guitar or drum solo. Those just take up a spot in the setlist where an actual song should be. If the vocalist needs a break, play a two-minute backing track to give them a breather.
18. One thing that’s really disappointing is when fans are way too hard on a new singer. Take William Duvall of Alice and Chains. Is he Layne Staley? No. But Layne is dead and William does a good job. He’s been in the band for more than 20 years now. If you don’t like his singing or stage presence, that’s fine, but you can’t hold it against him simply because he’s “not Layne Staley.”
19. If you’re touring for a new album, you can’t play more than two new songs in a row. It can’t be three. You can’t play three songs off the new album in succession. If you need to open with two new songs, that’s fine, but the third song needs to be a classic.
20. The main “rock” instruments, post 1960, are guitar, bass, and drums. Piano and horns and all of that shit can exist, but they need to take a backseat in the mix and/or be used sparingly.
21. RE: Springsteen, the problem is that he’s a poet trapped in a musician’s body. Or maybe a bard, if that makes sense. He’s not a good singer and he’s an unremarkable guitar player. But the guy can tell stories, and seems to really capture the formative years of people who grew up during the 70s and 80s. That’s why his fans are so sycophantic. They listen to his music and they’re transported to a certain place and time, which is great for them but doesn’t register with people who can’t recall those years, because they weren’t alive.
22. There’s a lot of love for Nas, and yet he’s still underrated. He was only 16 years old when he started writing the lyrics for Illmatic, which is incredible if you think about it.
23. I’d put Boyz II Men in the same category. They released four straight Platinum albums in the 1990s but it seems like they don’t always get the appropriate props other than being “from Philly.”
24. The most underrated hip hop duo of all time is UGK. When you look at the dirty south scene through the 90s and into the 2000s, nobody was more real than Pimp C and Bun B. Nothing fake about UGK, especially when that genre started to become more commercial and gain mainstream popularity. Three 6 Mafia is similar in that regard.
25. You have to show Lady Gaga a lot of love since she’s super-creative and writes or co-writes all of her own music. Same with Taylor Swift and any pop star who is actually an artist. There has to be a clear distinction between pop stars who are musicians and pop stars who are just pop stars.
26. Nothing suffers from diminishing returns more than guitar wankery. At some point you gotta put together some hooks and riffs and write an actual song. Shredding without substance doesn’t mean anything.
27. Laugh all you want about Insane Clown Posse, but the music itself isn’t all that bad. ICP was basically Cypress Hill for misfit white kids who were just trying to find their way in the world.
28. The Calvin Harris EDM formula really is brilliant if you think about it. All you do is build a repeatable template of 120 to 130 BPM dance music and pull in guest singers from the pop world for vocals. Adjust slightly from song to song. Very formulaic but very much identifiable at the same time, if that makes sense.
29. The problem with Les Paul design is that the body is so thick that it digs into your arm. They are GREAT guitars but super uncomfortable unless you’re playing one of their SGs or something outside of the standard line.
30. Eminem’s best stuff was his dark stuff, like Cleaning out my Closet and The Way I Am. All of that fluffy Slim Shady MTV bullshit feels lame in hindsight. When he really got heavy with the personal lyrics, those tracks were powerful.
31. Philosophical question – would you rather listen to music, or a podcast about music?
32. There’s no point in writing concert reviews. “Band X went on stage and they were great! They played 12 songs and the crowd loved it.” Wow! Thank you.
33. Obviously the phones gotta go because the show is better when you’re into the band and they’re into you. It’s a reciprocity of vibe. But putting that aside, what’s the point of filming anyway? All you get is some low-quality video that isn’t worth anything. All of those personal concert clips that get uploaded to YouTube should be deleted. There’s nothing of value within, especially when we’re getting 4k stuff from promoters and bands, with audio that’s coming straight from the soundboard.
34. American music crowds are spoiled. Everybody comes through at some point, so we’re generally sated musically, and less excitable. This is why you see South American crowds going nuts, like down in Chile and Colombia and all of that, because while a band will tour the States every other year, they only get those same bands every 5-7 years down there, if that. It means more to them because the opportunities are fewer and further between.
35. Heaviness is not how low the guitars are tuned, or how deep and guttural the vocals are. Heaviness is how a song makes you feel, and how it makes you move. That’s why Black Sabbath will always be the heaviest band of all time. You can’t put on Master of Reality and not have a reaction.
36. Fear Inoculum, if you think about it, <falls asleep from boredom>
37. People said nu-metal was shit, but bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit are still playing in front of massive crowds all over the world. Not only was it not shit, but it has outlasted quite a bit of crap genres, like screamo.
38. Everything about Limp Bizkit should suck in theory. Fred Durst dresses like a wigger and the half of the lyrics on Significant Other are cringe and cheesey. And yet… everything about it works. Why? Why is that? It’s one of the great mysteries of our time.
39. Has anyone ever met a Shinedown fan?
40. You can’t shoehorn Breaking Benjamin into the radio buttrock genre. They’ve got some legitimately heavy elements, like the chuggish breakdown in Diary of Jane and the harsh vocals on some of their tracks. They have some post nu-metal vibes going on, even beyond the first album.
41. Shoegaze is a genre that should have been more popular outside of Gen X. Truly some great bands from that era, like Slowdive and Lush. Maybe they were too British for the mainsteam popularity over here.
42. Welcome to the Jungle isn’t a top-5 track on Appetite for Destruction. You know this.
43. There’s no originality at American sports venues. Same stuff played from here to California. It’s Welcome to the Jungle, Seven Nation Army, and the worst one of all – Sweet Caroline.
44. Olivia Rodrigo is probably the best modern mainstream artist. Sounds like Veruca Salt and Avril Lavigne got together and had a Gen Z baby. I’d like to thank Olivia’s mom for bestowing these tastes unto her daughter.
45. If anyone in the band is wearing a vest, suspenders, fedora, or newsboy cap, that band likely is ass (this is an Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes hate take)
46. Are we sure that grunge killed hair metal? You could make an argument that too many generic bands oversaturated the scene and made the bubble burst, kind of like what’s happening to the craft beer scene in 2025.
47. Jack Johnson has always been infuriating. I’d love to take the acoustic guitar out of his hands and smash it over his head, like Jeff Jarrett.
48. People say music is just a matter of taste, but some music can objectively suck. For instance: Skrilla.
49. You don’t have to be southern to be country. Case in point, look at how many people show up to the Linc when a big act comes through. This is one of the more underrated and unexplored musical topics in Philly, just how big country music is.
50. Is artificial intelligence in music any worse than programmed drums and overly-compressed Pro Tools productions? The answer is no.

Thank you, and have a great day. Play the song!