FRIDAY FLASHBACK: Every Friday we set the Hot Tub Time Machine to one year in rock history and give you the best (and worst) music from that year, all day long beginning at 1:00 AM EST and running for 24 hours on Jivewired Radio powered by Live365.
This week: 2000
Next week: 1989
Article Sources: Previous Friday Flashback Articles, Billboard, Wikipedia Search on 'The Year In Music 2000', All Music Guide, Joel Whitburn, America's Top 40, Rolling Stone Magazine, Spin Magazine, Rob Dimery, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Getty Images, MTV, Music Video Awards, Vevo
To listen to music from the year
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2000 Album I Wish I Owned: Figure 8 by Elliot Smith
2000 Album I'd Give Back If I Could:Double Wide by Uncle Kracker
2000 Nominee For Worst Album Cover Ever: Bloodflowers by The Cure
2000 Most Underrated Song: I Got You by Stone Temple Pilots
2000 Most Overrated Song: Kryptonite by Three Doors Down
2000 Most Memorable Song:Smooth by Santana feat. Rob Thomas
2000 Most Significant Song: Stan by Eminem feat. Dido
2000 Most Forgotten Song:Pure Shores by All Saints
2000 Fan's Choice For Most Popular Song: Music by Madonna
2000 Album Of The Year: Kid A by Radiohead
2000 Most Likely To Start A Party Song: Batter Up by Nelly
2000 Please Don't Play Anymore Song:With Arms Wide Open by Creed
2000 Song That I Like More Than I Actually Should: Hollywood Ending by Mötley Crüe
2000 Album I Liked More Than I Thought I Would: No. 4 by Stone Temple Pilots
2000 Song That I Tend to Leave on Repeat: Learn To Fly by Foo Fighters
Guilty Pleasure of 2000: A.M. Radio by Everclear
Breakout Artists of 2000: Disturbed, Coldplay, Creed, Nelly, 3 Doors Down, Eminem
Overplayed In 2000: Creed
Not Played Enough In 2000: Fiona Apple
Greatest Chart Re-Entry from 2000:Man On The Moon by R.E.M. (1992)
Best Cover Song Of 2000: American Woman by Lenny Kravitz
Worst Cover Song of 2000:Me And Bobby McGee by LeAnn Rimes
An unheralded great album from 2000: Who Is Jill Scott? by Jill Scott
An unheralded great single from 2000: Things Have Changed by Bob Dylan
Best Soundtrack of 2000: The Wonder Boys
Jivewired's Top
01. Learn To Fly by Foo Fighters
02. Down With The Sickness by Disturbed
03. In The End by Linkin Park
04. Picture by Filter
05. Misery by Green Day
06. Drive by Incubus
07. Things Have Changed by Bob Dylan
Jivewired's Top Five Albums Of The Year
01. Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
02. Kid A by Radiohead
03. Warning by Green Day
04. There Is Nothing Left To Lose by Foo Fighters
05. The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem
It's enjoyable to mock the music industry for what we were given in the year 2000. The playing field had changed, and as an industry, music continued merrily along on it's self-destructive path of stepping over dollars to pick up shiny, new nickels. Always a dollar short and a step behind, 2000 put the spotlight on the inherent flaws in the music industry, exposing greed, dishonesty and horrible mismanagement. And those were the success stories of the year.
At the year’s end, Spin Magazine named Your Hard Drive as it's 2000 Album of the Year, and even if you didn't own a big, bulky 2000 version of a desktop and even if you didn't have a collection of the first versions of MP3s that had no digital encoding, you were at least aware that the future of recorded music was entering uncharted waters. I mean, here we were, still struggling with the death of the vinyl album (bad), the subsequent death of the cassette tape (eh) and struggling to upgrade our collections to CD (really, why?) when we suddenly became completely outdated.
My first hard drive? It had about two hundred songs on it that were numerically titled, a very humble beginning in comparison to my iTunes library of today. If I wanted to listen to Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I believe I had to listen to songs titled 60.mp3 through 75.mp3 in my collection, no cover art, no fancy playback software, just hideous, over-compressed technology -- yes we've come a long way. If you want to call it that.
Really, you killed vinyl? You greedy bastards!
Of course on New Year's Eve 1999 we all thought that system networks would crash worldwide anyway as we gripped in panic to a fault over an extremely over-hyped event that never came to fruition. So maybe our MP3 collections weren't quite as initially enormous as we wanted them to be for that reason. Or maybe we realized that quality-wise, we were getting half a song. For many audiophiles, it was more about compression and sound quality than convenience. Let's face it, a streaming song at 128kbps just doesn't have the same rich quality that we had come to love on our vinyl albums. And though we had reluctantly accepted another compressed format (the CD, forced down our throats by the music industry), at least most were only compressed to 256 kbps. Early versions of MP3s sounded like AM radio, but hey, they were free (Shawn Fanning forced the music industry's hand, more on that in a moment). No thank you.
Nevertheless, Prince rang in Y2K with the song 1999, which he had vowed to never play again. But he did, and has.
Money talks, bullshit walks. But it was a nice gesture.
The Smashing Pumpkins ended the year by dissolving the band after a killer December bash at The Metro in their hometown, Chicago, vowing to never play together again. The show featured 35 songs and lasted for more than four hours. Lead vocalist Billy Corgan reformed the Pumpkins in 2005 after a very nondescript effort by his new project, Zwan.
Money talks, bullshit walks. But it was a nice gesture.
Record labels forced a lot of bullshit music down our throats in Y2K as well.
It's the chicken vs. the egg concept. Do listeners make hit records by purchasing and requesting what they believe is good music or do the labels force bad music down our throats in such massive quantities that we get attached to them subconsciously in the same manner that the latest jingle for McDonald's makes us crave Big Macs? And do we then then spend hard-earned money on songs we'd never pay attention to had they not been played beyond tasteful saturation levels?
Do we really like Big Macs?
Do we really like 'N Sync, Nickelback and Creed?
Come on, man.
In between, critically acclaimed music was released by previously established artists Radiohead, Fiona Apple, Eminem and Moby. Coldplay and Dave Matthews were still considered indie darlings. Carlos Santana made an illustrious comeback, winning an incredible EIGHT Grammy Awards with his album Supernatural, which featured a number of duets with some of the decade's biggest stars, including Dave Matthews, Rob Thomas and Everlast. The underground provided some exceptional releases from Folk Implosion, Yo La Tengo and Black Box Recorder. Bono opened his mouth, and All That You Can't Leave Behind sold something like 12 million copies.
Upon the album's release, Bono said in a number of interviews that the band was "reapplying for the job ... [of] the best band in the world." In truth, they simply went back to their signature sound, the sound that had made them one of the most popular bands in the world (you decide if popular and best are synonymous), after embarrassingly failing with their previous effort, Pop (which combined alternative rock, techno, dance, and electronica influences and was a continuation of the band's 1990s reinvention of itself and pursuit of a new musical direction). All That You Can't Leave Behind is a very good album, for the record.
Still, the story of 2000 was Shawn Fanning, and the go-forward course of music collecting was taking place in the courtrooms and in the boardrooms instead of the album charts and the war over upstart file sharing service Napster was being waged with a vengeance.
Fanning was only 18 when he wrote the source code that became Napster.com and his website shook the music world to its very foundation and threatened to destroy the major record labels' 50-year dominance and control over it's cash cow. It was the evil overlord vs. the college kid who didn't want to pay for music. Napster made Fanning a Time magazine cover boy and the darling of MP3philes everywhere. But Napster also came under heavy legal fire in 2000 and was sued to shut down the service, with the labels' citing copyright infringement. I mean, millions were stealing music and album and singles sales virtually bottomed out. Metallica, in a public relations disaster, became Napster's biggest opponent. The band even filed separate suits against two universities. Ouch.
However, a federal judge sided with the labels (of course he did, it's the law!), and after gaining a temporary reprieve in July, Napster shocked the world by joining forces with BMG. In October 2000, Fanning and Napster entered into an agreement with corporate kingpins Bertelsmann Music Group. The reported $50 million deal allowed music lovers to download MP3s through Napster, but for a fee that included artist and publisher royalties. The prospect outraged the freewheeling MP3philes who worshiped Fanning as some sort of a music vigilante and cult hero, and the legal wrangling with the other labels continued well into 2001, with all eventually acquiescing to similar deals. Still, there's little doubt that Fanning revolutionized music, for better or worse, and it's no wonder Your Hard Drive was voted as the 2000 Album of the Year.
Enjoy that awful sound quality. And Napster seems so irrelevant in today's Spotify/Pandora world.
Because one thing holds true when it comes to music - the most popular and technologically advanced delivery and playback formats are always changing.
Gone Too Soon:
- Dave Peverett of Foghat, aged 56 (February 7)
- Screamin' Jay Hawkins, aged 70 (February 12)
- Ofra Haza, aged 43 (February 23)
- Ian Dury, aged 57 (March 27)
- Vickie Sue Robinson, aged 45 (April 27)
- Benjamin Orr of The Cars, aged 53 (October 3)
- Julie London, aged 74 (October 10)
- Kristy McColl, aged 41 (December 18)
- Mick Massi of The Four Seasons, aged 65 (December 24)
Insert malevolent synonym here:
Eminem had been considered vile, violent, decrepit, insensitive, misogynistic, moronic and homophobic, but his ability to throw down musically in lyrical rhyme that outraged almost everybody helped The Marshall Mathers LP rack up massive sales throughout 2000. No one caused more controversy, and no one played on the fear and loathing of the post-Columbine world more effectively. His album sold 1.76 million copies in the first week following it's release.
Do You Think His Driver's License Says Ol' Dirty Bastard?
In October 2000, Russell Tyrone Jones, aka Ol' Dirty Bastard, escaped from his court-mandated drug treatment facility and spent one month as a fugitive. During his time on the run, he met and spent some time in his cousin's recording studio. He also appeared onstage at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York swigging on a bottle at the record release party for The W - the third Wu-Tang Clan album that was released by his record company while he was lamming it. In late November 2000 while still avoiding capture, he was arrested outside a South Philadelphia McDonald's after he drew a large crowd while signing autographs. He spent several days in a Philadelphia jail and was later extradited to New York City. A Manhattan court sentenced him to two to four years incarceration.
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
Maybe Eddie Vedder Had OCD Issues In Y2K:
Pearl Jam released, count 'em, TWENTY-FIVE separate, self-produced live albums in an effort to derail illegal bootlegging at the band's concerts and did the same thing with DVDs documenting their 2000 US tour. Oddly, the album covers were designed to replicate bootlegs, a brown paper bag sleeve with faded printing.
Raise your hand if you actually purchased all the CDs.
Raise two hands if you downloaded them illegally instead.
Thank you for your honesty.
Britney Being Britney:
Britney Spears crafted a public-relations bonanza with a sexy makeover -- witness her skin-baring outfit at the MTV Music Video Awards -- and became the hottest act of 2000. Her 50-date Oops!...I Did It Again Tour was one of the summer's biggest hits and her album of the same title sold 1.3 million copies in its debut week, including an amazing 500,000 on the first day of its release, giving it the highest first-week sales by any solo artist in US history. The album sold over 20 million copies, becoming the best-selling album by a female artist.
Britney recently got a gig on The X-Factor, stifling the careers of a slew of artists who are potentially better musically than she ever was. Good for her. Imagine having your music career derailed by a woman who made a train wreck of hers. Oh the humanity.
We added Oops I Did It Again to today's flashback for historical purposes, but certainly not based upon any professional merit. I just think Britney is much better to look at then she is to listen to.
Thank me for my honesty. See ya next Friday.