If having liked boy bands is wrong, I don't want to be right. Because let's face it: pop music is great. Pop music gets you through angst and through hormones and through all of those terrible factors that define "turbulent teens," but pop music by boy bands does a little bit more.

Step into any chain store and you can pick up a pre-distressed biker jacket, creepers and your favourite band shirt. Now maybe I'm cynical but I just don't buy it. It seems few people have any perception of what it means to be truly alternative, and instead of standing out, the result of their efforts is that they are simply fitting in. I can only hope that somewhere there is a positive and genuine youth uprising waiting to happen.

The Monks are a band that I have loved for a very long time in a lot of different ways. Bad Habits -- their first record -- has always been a failsafe for van listening on long drives for various tours for various bands: It's a record that has never let me down, that sounds good wherever you listen to it, no matter what you're doing. That's why we're releasing a cover album.

When my friend got over the Spice Girls, I was crushed. Not only did the Spice Girls represent something I wanted desperately to be a part of (a group of friends, to begin with), but our love of the band was something we shared. True, neither of us was popular, and our obsession with the Fab Five seemed completely insane, but we were in it together. And then all of a sudden it wasn't "cool."

It's taken two years for me to produce a documentary called Funk Getting Ready To Roll, chronicling George Clinton and Funkadelic's adventures in Toronto in the early 70s. Clinton and company's three or so years living in Toronto gave them new ideas about music making and how to keep doing it. The Funk Mob never would have turned out as it did without these years of reckoning, and in doing so they developed a unique influence on popular music.

Eavesdropping on a conversation and only catching the odd word is one of life's great frustrations. Asking people to speak up or moving your chair to join their table is not likely to be met with much enthusiasm. So what's to be done? Amplify!

I first heard Maestro Fresh Wes' "Let Your Backbone Slide" on a cassette tape my best friend's brother made for us to breakdance to in 1989. I couldn't stop listening to it. I replayed the song on my Sony Walkman so many times I could stop the tape at the beginning of the song perfectly each rewind.

When he's not touring the world or recording albums that continue to influence generations of younger musicians, Rush singer and bassist Geddy Lee supports a grape cause. A wine-loving philanthropist, Lee, 59, sits on the board of directors of the Grapes For Humanity Global Foundation, a charity organization founded in Canada, and expanded in 2007 with a U.S. arm that has collectively raised over $4 million through numerous wine-related fundraisers.