Guitar solos — whether fast or slow, loud or soft, melodic or dissonant — are one of the identifying characteristics of rock music. In fact, up until hardcore came along, basically every song anybody ever heard had some kind of solo, and usually it was a guitar solo. From the one in "Hound Dog" (a real good one, by Scotty Moore) and all the awesome Chuck Berry moves up to the emergence of Dave Matthews (when rock music died forever), the cramming of notes, grinding of teeth and weird facial expressions of the lead guitarist are time-honored traditions in the rock music of the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s. I've compiled what I consider the best guitar solos available on Rhapsody below. There's no Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. Please try not to freak out — if you want to hear "Crossroads" or "All Along the Watchtower" turn on the goddamn radio for five seconds (or if you must, you can listen to them here). If they don't play back to back, they'll come on in between some awful Bowie song and a Boston two-fer. Puke. People will also probably yell at me for not having Neil Young on here. That's because I used to really love Neil, but I saw him live once a few years ago and 17 minutes into "Cinnamon Girl" I realized a better word for his oft-cited "distinctive" guitar style is "crappy." It sounds that way because he's out of tune and that "wandering" style actually means he's guessing at what's in key. Anyway, have fun hating this list.
Eddie Van Halen"Hot for Teacher"
Eddie Van Halen was so far ahead of everybody in the '80s, it was like watching a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Matthew Broderick. Granted, Van Halen needed David Lee Roth's horny circus-performer persona as much as Eddie's unmatched abilities. Still, the dude was never not on fire. Here, he jams blues, swing, hammer-on-mania and blinding speed together before even getting to the solo, which is in some sideways time signature.
Robert Quine"Love Comes in Spurts"
Speaking of sideways, Robert Quine, a balding law-school graduate and Velvet Underground devotee, comes careening into this pre-punk staple with a chorded karate chop that proves you don't need to shred like Stevie Ray Vaughan to inspire air guitar. "Blank Generation" is another one where Quine's guitar sounds more like someone breaking sheets of glass than playing an instrument.
The last month and a half or so has experienced some serious star wattage, with big bold-faced names dropping albums right and left. And alongside the Kanyes and Nickis and Black Eyed Peas of the pop universe, we've also been blessed with a bevy of records from the critically acclaimed and the up-and-coming. In short, it's been a good time to be a pop fan. In this edition of single-phile, we home in on the Big! Shiny! New! Albums of the last couple months, and take our guesses at what the biggest single will be (or at least should be, if quality always entailed quantity, that is). Listen up!
Aside from some characteristically superlative-drenched praise from NME ("If Tron: Legacy is among the most anticipated sequels in all of history, this score blasts away all previous frontiers of excitement for what a movie soundtrack can be"), early reviews of 
There can be no question about the best rock book of 2010: 
Finding an American equivalent to the Colombian pop star 
The Christmas season is here, so what better time than now to dust off some holiday albums? If you are looking to add a touch of twang to your Yuletide, then look no further; we've got ten classic country Christmas albums to suggest.
With 2010 defined by the emcee and his crossover ambitions, from 
It was as if nobody wanted to admit it was 2010. MGMT released a paean to '60s psyche, Ariel Pink looked back at the '70s and '80s through rose-colored, lo-fi glasses and Broken Bells and Cee-Lo dipped their buckets in the ever-deepening well of '70s soul. LCD Soundsystem plundered '80s avant disco, while Robyn revisited the halcyon days of Swedish pop. On the other end, Janelle Monae peered into the future and saw messianic robots, while Flying Lotus crafted an album that mined the sublime amidst fractured electro future shock. The albums that strained for the zeitgeist -- Kanye West's angry, self-obsessed Fantasy and Arcade Fire's meditation on the mundane crunch of suburban life -- were the most emotionally desperate and revealing. There was more great music, as always, and we've compiled our top 50 albums right here.
Maybe it says something about 2010 that the year's most ubiquitous and demographic-defying song was a chirpy '70s soul retread entitled "F*ck You," or that Kanye West's "Power," the most ambitious pop single of the year, paraphrased a quote from Malcom X in an effort to deify hip-hop's reigning enfant terrible. It was that type of year, people, and the songs that we selected as our top 50 tracks are strange, funky, heartfelt and confrontational slices of magnificent pop music. Whether you agree or not, leave us a comment, and don't forget that you can listen to a playlist of all these tracks right 
Three decades into hip-hop's recorded lifespan, in this time of Auto-Tune and ringtone hooks and hashtag rhymes, R&B is a music addicted to newness — to not sounding "dated." So it's refreshing that, every now and then, an artist from soul music's distant past will still find his or her way onto R&B stations. Quite often, the catapulting factor seems to be a younger star who's always been a fan and who sets out to champion an inspirational legend's comeback, perhaps to pay off a debt for having been influenced in the first place. Below are a whole bunch of old-schoolers — singers born, say, in the mid-'50s or earlier (before 
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