2001 Was A Truly God-Awful Year In Music

Twenty years is a long time. It seems recent, sure, but it’s far enough back that we can look at life objectively. The passage of time offers the opportunity to take a long lens and peer into the past, allowing an anthropological study of the human race as it was back then.

After parsing the musical landscape of 2001, I have come to the conclusion that the Australian citizens of 2001 had the worst musical taste in the history of our country.

Not all the onus should be on the consumer, I’ll admit. The options for new music were severely limited in 2001; whether it was post Y2K trauma, the sense of an impending World War III, or that the radio simply wasn’t playing The Strokes enough, we were given shockingly bad options, but we listened and bought music anyway.

This was the peak of nu-metal. Angry young men tuning down their guitars to guttural growl levels and scream-rapping their unspecified anger over the top. In 1999, Fred Durst wanted to break…stuff. In 2001, he wanted to keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’. It was also a time before hip-hop’s mass infiltration and when boy bands were attempting to get edgy and urban with hilarious results.

The Charts Were A Hot Mess

The top selling single in Australia in 2001 was ‘Can’t Fight The Moonlight’ — a completely nonsensical song sung by a country artist to soundtrack a film about dancing on bar-tops in cowboy hats. The song was sung by 18-year-old LeAnne Rimes and written by Dianne Warren, a legendary songwriter whose whole stock and trade is writing songs so general and devoid of personality that they can be sung by absolutely anybody.

Despite Leanne sitting at the peak of our sales charts, 2001 was very much the year of Shaggy (which may very well be all I needed to say in this entire article to prove my point).

Remember Shaggy? The one-hit wonder who kept having that one hit every few years. The second highest selling single in Australia in 2001 was his cheater’s anthem ‘It Wasn’t Me’, a song in which Shaggy carries on an affair with the next door neighbour, and is caught by his partner “butt naked, banging on the bathroom floor”, as well as on the counter, on the sofa, in the shower, and on camera. That’s a lot of evidence mounting up, but Shaggy gives a cheeky shrug and proclaims his innocence. What fun!

The fourth biggest selling single that year was Shaggy’s ‘Angel’, a reggae ballad in which Shaggy (or rather, guest vocalist Rayvon) makes the romantic proclamation that his ‘shorty’ is, in fact, his ‘angel’ – assuring her she is “closer than my peeps.” I bet brides walked down the aisle to this.

Each of these Shaggy singles sold triple platinum, which denotes sales of over 210,000 in Australia. Which means that, in one calendar year, close to half a million Shaggy CD singles were purchased. I can only assume that somewhere in remote WA there is a landfill dedicated solely to Shaggy runoff. Future civilisations will no doubt dig these up and adopt them as ancient scriptures, with all their heady talk of angels and betrayal.

You know who else was popping in 2001? A real rags to riches story, this one: a tradesman who teamed up with a female work-mate to record a single. To their surprise it went to #1 in Australia and Scotland, and was the biggest selling single of the year in the UK. I’m talking, of course, about Bob The Builder.

‘Can We Fix It?’ was the ninth best selling single in Australia of 2001, selling over 140,000 copies to sentient, autonomous beings. The B-side ‘Bob’s Line Dance’ no doubt copped substantial play in these hundreds of thousands of households, too. Bob’s follow up single, a cover of ‘Mambo No. 5’, was also a huge hit, becoming the 26th best seller of the year.

What other singles did we buy in 2001? Please, behold this litany of trash:

#5. Lifehouse — ‘Hanging By A Moment’ 

The reverberations of Pearl Jam’s Ten album were being felt a decade after it dropped, with songs like this tricking people into slow-dancing at country weddings and saying things like “this is our song, babes”.

#8. Alien Ant Farm — ‘Smooth Criminal’ 

The worst thing about this tasteless cover of one of MJ’s most overlooked singles isn’t that over 140,000 Australians bought it. It isn’t even that Australia was the only country where it went to #1. It’s that over 35,000 of these fans decided that they needed to buy the album as well. An album called ANThology.

My favourite review of this song was in Spin magazine, which said this proves “nu-metal could be funny on purpose”, which is as backhanded a compliment that exists. As recently as May last year, these guys were trying to make lightning strike twice, releasing a cover of ‘Everything She Wants’ by Wham! I haven’t listened, and I implore you not to, either.

#12. Butterfly — ‘Crazy Town’

This single is so sleazy it should have come packaged with lube and a copy of The Game. Built on top of a RHCP guitar lick, verse one opens with the immortal couplet: “Such a sexy, sexy pretty little thing/ Fierce nipple pierce, you got me sprung with your tongue ring.”

The clip features the vocalist, stripped to his waist, covered in tatts that look like skateboarding stickers, shock of peroxide blonde hair and matching dyed goatee, telling his ‘lady’ that “the smartest thing you ever did was take a chance with me.”

#13. Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya, and Lil Kim — ‘Lady Marmalade’ 

The awesome foursome teamed up for a single that represented the nadir of all their careers, and was so unsexy it ushered in a wave of abstinence that almost wiped out the human race.

#14. Afroman — ‘Because I Got High’

Afroman was 27 when he released this song about his bedroom-cleaning plans being derailed by smoking weed. Since then, he has released — I kid you not — a further 31 albums, all about the same topic. This is Seth Rogen-levels of stoner productivity, and kinda quashes the premise of his biggest (read:only) hit single.

#15. Scandal’us — ‘Me, Myself, and I’ 

As a nation, we have chosen to hide this moment so deep in the annals of the pop culture shame files that you can’t even find a non-blurry picture of the CD single cover on the internet. Three weeks it spent at #1.

#16. S Club 7 — ‘Don’t Stop Movin’’ 

This song was kept from hitting #1 in Australia four weeks in a row by Lifehouse, which is like Eddie Vedder beating up Zac Hanson.

#18. Nickelback — ‘How You Remind Me’

This is how it began. The first Nickelback single. Instead of us saying, “Look, I appreciate the effort, but..” we instead went, “Brilliant, we’ll have more please”, and Nickelback landed a further 14 singles and eight albums (including a ‘best of’) in our charts. This should serve as a reminder of how we really are. By the way, their own press for this song describes the Nickelback sound as “dark, high-octane rock”.

#19. Jagged Edge — ‘Let’s Get Married’ 

“We ain’t getting no younger, we might as well do it” should be a line in every marriage proposal.

#20.Creed — ‘With Arms Wide Open’ 

Enough! That’s just the top twenty. The best twenty. The twenty singles we liked and bought the most. Need more proof? Let us look at the next three…

#21. Nikki Webster — ‘Strawberry Kisses’

#22. All Rise — ‘Blue’ 

#23.Train — ‘Drops Of Jupiter’

I feel my point has been made. And we haven’t even delved into the lower reaches of the Top 50, which features luminaries such as Wheatus, Three Doors Down, Lil Bow Wow’s comeback single, two selections from Gwyneth Paltrow, Train, Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m A Believer’, Geri Halliwell’s ‘It’s Raining Men’, The Baha Men’s followup single to ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ (called ‘You All Dat’, for those playing at home), Uncle Kracker, Linkin Park, and the aforementioned Limp Bizkit, who demand that you “move in, move out, back up back down” like some middle-aged man in a backwards baseball cap.

Surely there must have been some good, right? There was. ‘Stan’, by Eminem, and ‘Ms Jackson’, by Outkast. That’s it.

My overriding theory is that nobody expected the earth to exist past the year 2000, and when we all woke on January 1, everyone panicked and improvised to keep the billion-dollar musical industry rollin’ rollin’ rollin’.

Look at the evidence above. Cast off your rose-coloured glasses, and shed those fond memories of your younger years. This is the real 2001. You can try to resist. But look deep without your soul. You know that you can’t fight the moonlight.

---

Nathan Jolly was formerly the Editor of The Music Network, and tweets from @NathanJolly